At the end of January, Trump’s Department of Justice released

what it said was the last tranche of Epstein files

millions of emails and texts, FBI documents and court

records.

It’s just huge dump of information.

Journalists, investigators and the public

are sifting through them them as we speak.

What’s amazing, though, is how much we just still don’t know

or at least don’t know yet.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche,

who before he joined the DOJ was Trump’s personal lawyer,

has said that the department’s collection effort resulted

in more than six million pages being identified

as potentially responsive, but they released only about 3.5

million pages to the public.

So what’s in the 2.5 million pages we haven’t seen Mr.

Speaker, yesterday Congressman Massie and I went

to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein

files.

We spent about two hours there,

and we learned that 70 to 80 percent of the files

are still redacted.

In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men

that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason.

So we are still far from the end of this story.

We’re still far from knowing much of what we want to know

inside the story.

But what has come into clear view is the incredible breadth

of Epstein’s network.

The huge range of people who relied on him,

communicated with him, traded with him and the role

he played in this network, the role he played

among the American elite as a broker of information,

connections, wealth and ultimately human beings.

This is what I think the files,

along with a lot of amazing reporting and courageous

testimony, have at least begun to answer where Epstein’s

mysterious power came from.

Why so many famous and powerful people from so many

walks of life orbited around him,

even after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting

a minor for prostitution.

What has come into clear view is the infrastructure

of Epstein’s power, and maybe through that,

the infrastructure modern power and elite networks more

generally.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written

for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and many other

outlets.

He publishes the great newsletter, The Ink,

and is the author of among other books,

"Winners Take All: the Elite Charade

of Changing the World," which he published in 2018,

and the forthcoming "Man in the Mirror: Hopes, Struggle,

and Belonging in an American City."

I often think of Anand’s work as a kind of sociology

of American elites and power, and that’s been

the perspective he’s brought to his coverage of these

files, and I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

As always, my email at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Anand Giridharadas Welcome to the show Thanks for having me.

So there have now been literally millions of pages

of Epstein files released.

There are possibly millions more that we have not

seen, so we don’t know everything.

There are redactions that we don’t yet understand.

But when you try to step back from what we have seen,

what is the picture that emerges?

There’s that proverb, it takes a village to raise a child.

I think we’ve learned that it takes a very powerful network

to abuse so many children.

And so we’re getting a glimpse of an absolutely barbaric

pedophilia scandal at the heart of Jeffrey Epstein’s

life and intimate circles, but also around that,

what I would think about as many concentric circles

of networks, connections, friends,

what Congressman Ro Khanna calls an Epstein class,

one could say that.

Has that made that possible.

That made what he did possible.

And we’re getting a glimpse, I would say, of how our world,

how our country is run and it isn’t pretty.

The most striking thing about the files is the range

of Jeffrey Epstein’s elite network.

I mean, you have so many here who is intimate with not

just at different times, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump,

but Emirati businessmen, Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky

and Peter Thiel.

At the same time, there’s no.

It crosses ideologies.

It crosses industries.

It crosses professions.

It is an extraordinary range of contacts

of Republicans and Democrats, globalists

and anti-globalists.

How is this one guy at the center of so many other kinds

of people?

This is the great mystery.

And I think because we live in such

a partisan and tribal age, when these things started

to come out, you had a lot of us doing what we normally

do in this era, which is looking for revelations

that would help our team and hurt the other team.

And there were a lot of people looking for the Trump

connection who don’t like Trump.

And there was people in the Republican and MAGA side,

trying to find which Democrats were implicated.

But that’s such a facile way of looking at what we ended up

getting and what we ended up getting which is as you say,

a coast to coast, industry to industry, right to left,

far left as you can go as far right as you can go,

different professions, different ways of moving

through the world, some famous, some obscure.

And as I wrote in the New York Times’ piece that I wrote

in November, this diversity masked a deeper solidarity,

because even if these people were on cable,

you’re sitting at home, you’re watching cable at the end

of the day and you’re seeing these two talking heads fight,

but that’s for you.

That’s the spectacle for you at home to keep you

entertained.

What they’re actually doing is revealed in these files,

which is hanging out, breaking bread, colluding,

sharing information, giving each other tips on deals,

giving each other PR advice, making introductions to each

other.

You have these moments in the files

where Jeffrey Epstein is asking Steve Bannon for help

getting.

I think it was Brad Karp into the Augusta National Golf

Club.

And Steve Bannon talks about basically how hard he’s going

to help.

He’s going to maybe see if he can do some looking around.

But he’s kind of explaining to Epstein how hard it might be

to get Brad Karp into this club.

Why would Steve Bannon have access to the Augusta National

Golf Club that Brad Karp I don’t know if at this point

the chairman of the Paul Weiss firm,

but an absolute scion of the establishment.

I mean, as a question just where power is.

In a lot of these emails.

It doesn’t lie where you’d expect.

Well, I think the Augusta National Club is not

a normal part of the establishment.

It’s in the deep South and it is famously,

didn’t allow Black members, didn’t allow Jewish members.

And so when you’re dealing with a club with a white

nationalist history, you go to Steve Bannon for a little help

to get in got to know to who to go to for what.

And this is so striking, Ezra, Steve Bannon

describes the people who run the Augusta club to Jeffrey

Epstein as crackers.

He uses a racist term for white people,

the kind, the specific kind of demo of white people

that Steve Bannon used to get Donald Trump elected.

And so in this moment, Steve Bannon,

who deplores the quote unquote,

globalists and people of high finance and this and that

is talking to financier Jeffrey Epstein,

referring to white people in Georgia as crackers.

None of these people in these networks mean what they say.

When you hear them in public.

They mean what they say when you’re not looking.

And these emails, and some are an extraordinary and rare

chance to see what they really think about you, how they

really move through the world, what

their actual ends and projects are.

Maya Angelou is right.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

You used the word solidarity a moment ago for this network.

But when you look at these communications,

there are moments of solidarity.

And you wrote in some ways actually

movingly about I mean, Epstein has a talent for friendship.

He has a talent for being of use to people.

He becomes an advisor to them.

He can’t be a great con man without understanding human

beings at a very deep level.

But there’s also just endless transactionalism,

an endless trading of information, money,

connections, favor, powers.

Ultimately, women and girls.

And that what feels oftentimes like it is attracting them

to each other is not always what

I would think of as solidarity like a a fellowship.

But what can you do for me.

And if you can be the one who finds it for them,

that’s real power.

And it’s different needs.

So the money people may not need money,

although they always want more of it.

They often want to seem and feel smart.

If you have met people in those kinds of worlds,

finance people, even if you make a lot of money in it,

they’re often very, very, very boring people.

And I can’t and I don’t say this as slander.

They know it.

I had so many conversations with people in this world

where there’s an insecurity about how boring they are.

So they want something else.

Then there’s a bunch of academics, academics, I think,

really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising.

Well, it’s a tough era to be an independent thinker.

And so the academics want money and access and Larry

Summers, former Treasury Secretary,

talks about how’s life among the lucrative and the louche.

He asks Epstein, so he wanted access to a kind of a party

scene that’s not available to him.

So everybody had something that they needed.

But his gift, I think if it can

be called that was understanding and mapping

that so well.

So I want to go into some of the pieces of this and another

word for what you’re talking about is he’s a broker.

And I think it’s important to always remember Epstein where

he comes from is finance.

And what they do in finance is they make markets

and they look for market irregularities

or inconsistencies.

They look for where one side needs

to be matched up to another.

And I think you have to see money fundamentally

at the source of his power.

It is how he pays for and pays off women and girls.

It’s how he impresses contacts,

particularly early on.

And one thing he understands really

well is money as a signal.

He’s got the largest private house in Manhattan.

He’s got an island.

He’s got a jet.

So if he’s got all that, how can he not be a success?

How can he not be brilliant?

My colleagues on the news side,

they did this amazing piece.

I’ll put it in show notes about Epstein’s relationship

with JPMorgan Chase, which was his bank for a long time

when he was coming up.

And it was Jes Staley who was very high up at the bank.

Tell me a bit about the Epstein Staley relationship.

It’s an extraordinary story of all of these kinds

of brokering that he was engaged in occurring in one

relationship of two people.

So Staley and Epstein cultivate

a mutually beneficial relationship

between Epstein, the individual financier,

and JP Morgan.

Now, in its current form, the largest financial institution

in the world, if I’m not mistaken.

And again, for folks listening to this at home,

it may seem a little strange.

Like, what does JPMorgan need in.

This is why this piece... In random finance man.

But it turns out these things are complicated.

So there’s a moment where Jeffrey Epstein has a lot

of money.

And that money needs managing.

And the managing of that money brings in millions

of dollars of fees.

So that’s the base layer.

Then at some point at which JPMorgan becomes

interested in Jes Staley specifically becomes

interested in the idea that JPMorgan is not

doing enough business with regard to hedge funds

and hedge funds were this kind of growing category.

And Jeffrey Epstein seems to have proximity

to this ascendant world of hedge funds

where a lot more money is moving.

And so Jeffrey Epstein can make introductions

in that world that then become very valuable.

And he does.

So Staley invests in a hedge fund that is,

he’s connected to through Epstein,

not Staley personally, but through JP Morgan.

And it becomes and Staley says this later, the investment

that fundamentally makes his career because it opens

that world to JP Morgan.

And it’s considered a brilliant move.

Epstein introduces him to Sergey Brin,

the founder of Google.

I think this is so interesting,

but here’s how I explain it.

The more powerful you are and the more you

rise in these hierarchies.

The more of a bureaucracy around you there becomes.

You, Ezra Klein, have I tried to reach out

to you 20 years ago.

I could have just emailed some Gmail address.

But now you got.

You got a podcast.

I gotta go through this person.

I got to go through this person.

So actually, the more important these

stratospherically powerful people become as publicists

and publicists have publicists,

and there’s this person, there’s that person.

And that’s why actually a TED conference or these kinds

of worlds are valuable because you’re at Sergey Brin is

actually in the bar at night, and some finance guy who wants

to meet him Yeah, he’s not without status.

He could go through the channels,

but it’s work and it’s cumbersome and you’re

overestimating TED.

If you think Sergey Brin is at the bar.

I have been with Sergey Brin at the bar.

Really? Absolutely.

You know these worlds

Absolutely I mean, I was at the bar with him

with my friend Esther Perel.

You’ve always talked to.

I’ve never seen, by the she had just given her talk.

I have never seen so many rich people flock

to one person for personal consultations.

We were just having a drink and a thing.

Everybody was on Esther.

All those guys.

All these guys were on Esther.

Help me with this situation.

Help me with.

It was an incredible, incredible thing because what

they really need, what they don’t have are people they can

trust.

With personal problems.

And they probably have a lot of personal problems

at that level.

It was really that was actually

a really revealing moment to me.

I mean, they can contact anyone they want,

they can fill out, they have people.

But actually, I think this notion that it’s lonely

at the top, there’s truth in it.

And this is really worth understanding

as a cultural figure that the Epstein was.

He exploited certain gaps in our culture.

Now, he was part, he

He was not only grooming teenage girls,

he was grooming all of these people.

This was all grooming.

And it was a continuum of grooming

from light, consensual grooming of bankers

all the way to the most depraved and criminal grooming

of teenage girls.

But the behaviors of pulling people in, understanding,

even care and feeding.

Virginia Giuffre writes about how he did that to her in her

incredible book, "Nobody’s Girl"

But he does it with very powerful people who tell him

when he’s landing.

And he unlike many people in American culture today,

will say, have you had have you had food.

I can get this made for you.

Do you like that kind of food?

What kind of food have you.

Sure what time will you get here?

A lot of people at that level are not

worried about people on that kind of individual level.

And so there’s this strange thing where he’s running this

giant criminal ring and he’s exploiting and abusing people,

and he’s also attending to human beings at the kind

of micro level that I think a lot of those powerful people,

weirdly, are not being attended to.

The connections are doing two things at once for Epstein.

One is he’s able to use him transactionally they make

being in relationship with him profitable for other people,

but they also cross-subsidize him in credibility Yeah,

Epstein is taking out cash at a rhythm and in amounts that

should flag investigations.

And so there ultimately are a series of internal fights

at JPMorgan about whether or not to keep him.

JPMorgan flagged over $1 billion

in suspicious transactions.

And then he is eventually convicted

for paying for sex with a minor,

and there are more fights about whether

or not to keep him.

And they.

JPMorgan keeps working with him

and keeps working with him.

And there’s this amazing quote from Justin Nelson,

Epstein’s personal banker.

He prepares a memo I’m quoting here from the Times piece.

He prepared a memo trumpeting Epstein’s large volume

of business with JPMorgan and noting that despite his status

as a sex offender, he was, quote,

still clearly well respected and trusted by some

of the richest people in the world Yeah,

his network is the proof that he is worth dealing with

and not beyond the pale.

Because if he was, well, then how would

he still have this network.

He is revealing how these elites

make decisions about trust.

And that I think are really different from the way

folks at home go through the world

and make decisions about this.

I think you make decisions about you

make character judgments about people.

You make judgments about how honest they have been

and therefore will be.

These billionaires, these super elites,

these super lawyers are working

on a whole different kind of system.

And their system has to do, as you say,

with how loaded with connections

you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given

day in this network.

And what Epstein figured out was how to game this.

He figured out the vulnerability

of this entire network, which is

that these people are actually not

that serious about character.

In fact, character might be a liability for some of them,

maybe kind of an unnecessary source of friction.

These people are actually not that grounded in the evidence

of how someone has lived.

These people are making very thin slice judgments

about how much you are in, how central you

are in the same networks they are, and therefore

something as simple.

And this is true.

Something as simple as dining at Michael’s restaurant here

in Midtown can do extraordinary wonders

for people in the super elite.

Now that many most people listening to this will not

have heard of the restaurant, Michael’s in Midtown,

but Michael’s is an example of a perfectly nice restaurant,

but is an example of a place where if you can arrange

to have lunch there, you will create an impression among

certain people in publishing in New York,

among certain people who are in network television,

in New York, in certain people in finance in New York,

that you are in a certain place and on your way

in and out, someone might introduce you to this person.

And I’ve seen this kind of organism flourish.

And then these people will just

assume you must be fine, right.

And they’ll maybe ask you to come in for a meeting

to promote your children’s book or whatever it is.

And he exploited the facile nature of many of these

elites who have the mental skills to be serious people

who evaluate character, who look up people’s history,

who might for example, find a conviction for soliciting sex

with a minor problematic.

But who, in fact, if you dined at Michael’s,

were at that party, if you were at Davos,

if you were at TED must be all right.

There’s this quote from Staley the JP then JP Morgan later

leads Barclays bank.

Epstein relied on his network for his legitimacy.

And as running the largest investment bank in the world

was part of that network for him.

And what is unsaid in that quote is he was part of that

network for Staley, because it’s not just what they’re

doing for him, it’s what he’s doing for them.

And so to cut Epstein out when he has proven repeatedly

so able to introduce you to people you would want to know

is also to cut yourself off from what

he might be able to do for you in the future.

And we haven’t said yet in this portion

of the conversation, but Epstein was also helping

to occasion sexual activity.

We’re going to get to that, Yeah, for Staley

So all aspects of this brokering were at work.

And the kind of leverage that provides

is obviously even more potentially for someone

with so much to lose deals come and go.

But Epstein had the power to destroy potentially

a lot of people.

And here we’re talking about him and other unfathomably

rich people.

But also the wealth itself was very impressive to people

who offered him different kinds of credibility.

So Peter Attia, the podcaster and doctor and longevity

specialist, he’s in a bunch of these emails.

And Attia, in explaining why he

was in such communication with Epstein in these years,

he writes, at that point in my career,

I had little exposure to prominent people,

and that level of access was novel to me.

Everything about him seemed excessive and exclusive,

including the fact that he lived in the largest home

in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727,

and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent

leaders in business and politics.

And there’s just such currency.

We’ve been talking about the wealthy,

but for the academics, for a lot of the other kinds

of people that Epstein cultivated.

And one thing that is distinctive about him is he

cultivated very different kinds of people.

The access to his wealth was very impressive.

He has a very close relationship with Kathy

Ruemmler, who’s former White House counsel for president.

Barack Obama, is now at Goldman Sachs.

And he’s constantly buying her just fancy gifts fancy

designer bags.

And she calls him Uncle Jeffrey.

And she’s somebody who, having done a lot of work

in government at that point, is in richer circles than she

is rich.

And so somebody who can give you a lot of things

is valuable.

And so the connections are power to the wealthy,

but the wealth is power to the connections.

First of all, the Peter Attia thing is so striking.

I don’t mean to sound old fashioned, but.

There’s a lot of longevity experts now.

He’s one of everybody’s so interested in longevity.

What about living well and honorably in the existing

time?

Whatever that is, right.

It’s so interesting to me that this is someone whose mind was

focused on elongating the period of time, you get,

who clearly had no judgement for the quality of the time,

for the quality of your decisions,

for the quality of your relationships

I don’t think that’s fair, actually.

Or I’ll say it in a different way,

because whatever ideas work.

But to Attia

It’s like you only get this one life.

And here you’ve met somebody who has these parties with

the most powerful and prominent leaders in business

and politics.

How could you pass that up?

That’s his explanation for what he was doing,

A lot of people passed it up.

I mean, there’s this incredible meme about all

the people who didn’t meet Epstein,

right? Yeah, there’s not a lot of people of color in these

revelations. Three million documents.

For obvious reasons, there’s not a lot of women,

although there are some Kathy Ruemmler.

A lot of people went into that house or met him at a party

and were like, no thanks.

We forget that.

We forget it because they didn’t end up in the files.

But that guy was out and about Yeah,

a lot of people whose names you and I don’t know.

Well, then had the judgment, saw photos

of underage girls lining his walls as Virginia

Giuffre describes it.

And we’re like, this ain’t right.

Different levels of things were known to different

people, but none of it was a deal breaker to many of these

people we’re talking about.

Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary,

because as you’re saying look at these files and there are

a lot of people named in them, the number of people actually

close to him who you can get a lot about them by reading

the files we’re talking in the low dozens, maybe.

It’s not.

We’re talking about the elite, the power networks.

But actually, most people didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein.

Most elites didn’t have much to do with him.

Plenty of people saw him for what he was.

Tina Brown has this great line.

She’s invited to a dinner with Epstein,

Prince Andrew and Woody Allen.

And she responded, what the fuck is this?

The pedo’s ball.

Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly,

sees him perfectly clearly.

And so is Epstein a way, you see, quote unquote, the elite

or is this a subcategory?

It’s not telling us that much about power.

It’s telling us something about some set of powerful

people, which, as in any other culture or network,

there are going to be people of better and worse judgment,

higher and lower character, more and less

transactionalism.

I mean, even in this JPMorgan Chase example I’ve been using,

there are people in the bank who are fighting hard to cut

ties with him.

They lose until it becomes completely

untenable for the bank to keep going.

But they are there.

I think that’s right.

And it’s an important point to dwell on for a second.

Because I think you could take a narrow view

that only the people who are actively involved

in crimes of pedophilia.

Here are really this group of people we should focus on

and everything else is a distraction.

You could take the opposite view

that this is an indictment of every person

with more than $10 million in the bank, right.

I think both of those are incorrect.

I believe in this notion, and I’ve seen it in so many forms

in the course of my years of reporting,

of what I think about as concentric circles

of enablement.

There is no doubt that there is

a core group of people who were knowledgeable about,

engaged in, and shared participation in crimes

of pedophilia at the burning heart of this story.

That is obviously its own circle of hell.

We know from testimony of survivors

that it was more people than just him,

that he was

He was trafficking them to other people.

We have some of the names.

We don’t have all the names, but that was happening.

And that’s the burning heart of this story that can’t be

forgotten. And then there’s what made that possible.

Who were the very practically that means who were the other

people who didn’t do that, but who are aware of it.

Who facilitated it, for whom it was not

a problem, who were not later discouraged by it

when deciding whether to let him into something.

Then what was the circle around that,

universities that maybe knew a Larry Summers was pally with

him or were accepting money and just didn’t stop

the thing.

And then you can keep going out from there.

And here’s it’s sometimes helpful to shift the metaphor,

right.

I think about when I was in India

as a reporter for The Times and you

would have a problem of so-called honor killings

in rural villages in North India, right.

A young woman dares to have a boyfriend or some kind

of dalliance before marriage, and her own father

might kill her or men in her family might kill her,

or people in her village might kill her.

It happens a lot. If you take every instance where

that happens.

There’s often like one guy who committed murder.

So one guy.

But I think it would be foolish.

And I think anybody looking at it

would say it took a lot of other things going on

to make it possible for that guy to commit the murder.

You’d have to.

And a lot of other people who didn’t commit murder,

who would never commit murder, who were not O.K with murder,

who maybe oppose the murder.

But a lot of people and systems and institutions

and values are conspiring to make that murder possible.

And so if you shift back to this example,

I think if you just had a pedophile in Jeffrey Epstein

who wanted to procure 15-year-old girls and rape

them, and that was all you had.

I think it would have been very hard.

I think it would have been very difficult for him.

This is not an easy thing to pull off.

And so it’s not just a Kathy Ruemmler who presumably had

nothing to do with that burning heart of the story.

It’s the fact that today, Kathy Ruemmler,

as you and I speak, is still the chief lawyer at Goldman

Sachs.

It’s the fact that association is not something that

institutionally, Goldman Sachs forget one individual Goldman

Sachs does not think today.

It’s a problematic association.

The fact that not just some professor at Harvard or some

professor at MIT was involved, but that those institutions,

two of the world’s most august learning institutions,

essentially had this guy able to swim through their networks

and be central to them.

I remember talking to women at the MIT Media

Lab who are forced to give tours to Jeffrey

Epstein at the Media Lab.

It’s these law firms that before they were capitulating

to Donald Trump, were able, again, to be gamed by, again,

not just individuals, but entire organizations that were

let’s put it this way, not able to have an appropriate

kind of histamine reaction to one of their lawyers being too

close to such a depraved person,

even when there was so many reasons to know he was

a problem.

Even when Tina Brown had read enough press coverage

to call him a pedophile.

Even when Donald Trump was giving quotes

to New York Magazine saying Jeffrey Epstein likes him

on the younger side, it was, as you say,

a quite small number of people who presumably were

involved in the worst crimes.

It was a larger number who maybe knew about them

and looked the other way.

It was larger a number still, who maybe were just at parties

where things happened.

But eventually, you’re talking about all or many of the most

prestigious institutions in this country universities,

corporations, law firms, conferences down the line.

I want to get at something about this,

though, because I do think as you talk

about these concentric circles and all

these different institutions, how much

each one of them knew is different,

the way they were all leveraged

against each other into one mass network of legitimacy,

though, is all connected.

So Larry Summers has talked about the way

he got to know Epstein, and they clearly

developed a very intimate and friendly relationship.

But he said, I was president of Harvard,

and people told me, and I’m paraphrasing him here,

if you don’t talk to this guy, my job was fundraising.

Like, if you don’t talk to this guy, you’re crazy.

And this is why I do want to keep sight

of before I move on from it.

The money at the heart of the story.

But where is his money from initially.

And here you get into pretty weird territory.

So tell me a bit about Epstein and Les Wexner.

I mean, it’s a remarkable story,

and the Times has done extraordinary reporting

on this.

Let’s start at the beginning.

He is Jeffrey Epstein is from Coney Island, New York,

comes of age with a burning desire

to have money to be in the elite.

By the way, I think this is such an interesting thing,

this is not being in Alabama and wanting

to make it in New York.

This outer borough thing.

I think this emotion of the outer borough

right near Manhattan, desire to make it in Manhattan,

has become one of the defining political forces of our age.

Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and he gets a job teaching

at Dalton, an elite private school in the Upper East

side of Manhattan.

And there’s been a bunch of different reporting on how he

was the kind of guy who a lot of the dads somehow seemed

to want to help he was a popular teacher.

And so, have you thought about working in this?

Can I give you a job here?

And he gets somehow this opportunity

to interview at Bear Stearns on Wall Street,

gets this job at Bear Stearns.

At some point, Bear Stearns finds out that he’s lied about

his education, being a college graduate.

And he in this again, we’re talking about his grasp

of human acupressure points.

He’s perfectly frames it to this boss who himself had

a kind of attitude of being an outsider.

And I proved my way here and had a sense

of school of hard knocks.

He convinces them that I lied because I knew I’d never get

a chance if I told the truth of my biography.

And this resonates with this school of hard knocks boss.

And he’s also, by the way, dating the daughter of one

of the key figures at Bear Stearns at this exact moment.

So the connections are operating in his favor, too.

And you’re starting to see this understanding,

which I think of him as having once been a foreign

correspondent myself in India.

I think of Epstein as operating in New York

a foreign correspondent from Coney Island.

And I think this is really, really important because he’s

socially mapping, anthropologically mapping what

is happening here in New York but is not named out loud.

The way that charity galas function in New York.

I mean, if you’re rich and eighth generation rich in New

York, you don’t think about what they are.

You just go to them.

But if you’re an outsider, you understand the gala is doing

a very specific thing on the surface is seeming to give

back money to people who don’t have it or take care of needy

people.

But what it’s actually doing is cementing power

relationships and allowing people to display their share

price in a social market.

So he understands that stuff because he’s not from it.

And so you see him start.

He’s going to this gala, he’s going to that gala.

He’s hosting this party.

He’s having these people over.

And he starts to build this mystique.

And then he meets Les Wexner, who built The Limited clothing

company and other companies and becomes talks his way into

of helping to manage money for him.

And over the course of time, manages more and more money

for him.

And it appears now basically was stealing.

Can I stop you for one moment?

We’ve been bringing Trump in and out a little bit

and reading this Times piece, which again,

is going to be in show notes about how Epstein built his

money.

He reminds me of Trump in another way,

you would think in business.

And we’re talking a lot here about relationships and what

it takes to tend them over time and connections and being

of use to people.

An amazing thing to me about Trump,

when you go back into his background as a businessman,

is how many people he stiffs.

How often he just doesn’t pay up and turns partners

into enemies.

And you think if you do that a bunch and you get a reputation

for that, at some point, you’re ejected.

You can’t find people to work with.

Somehow for Trump, that wasn’t true.

And for Epstein, that wasn’t true because we’re about

to get into what he does both for and to Wexner but before

that, he just steals money from a bunch of people Yeah,

he pulls people into deals that never pay out.

He ends up getting sued.

And winning the lawsuits or the lawsuits don’t have they

get overturned on technicality, whatever it is.

But he is running around.

I mean, he actually ends up pushed out of Bear Stearns.

He is amassing what would seem to me

from the outside for somebody who does not

have much power at that point to be a lethal reputation.

But somehow he just kind of keeps moving in a way

that I find actually perplexing from the outside,

because you would think when things are so relational that

would get around.

But he’s a con man and he is leaving people broken in his

wake.

He is lying to them.

He is running schemes and he is taking their money,

and that he’s somehow able to keep rising and moving

on to the next one.

He’s always one step ahead of his own catastrophe.

There’s a very catch me if you can aspect to it.

And I think what the Times reporting

showed so masterfully is that this was not

someone who made a bunch of money

in business, who also did some shady things the scamming is

how he made his money.

I think it’s at this point the reporting bears out the notion

that the fortune was inseparable from the scamming

and the stealing.

This is not someone who had brilliant business.

He becomes Wexner’s.

I mean, this is jumping ahead in your story,

but he comes Wexner’s money manager.

He basically just moves Wexner’s money into his own

accounts Yeah, it’s not that complicated of a con

He has power.

I never think of simple ideas like that.

That’s my problem.

It’s my problem.

You’re trying to write books, man Yeah, that’s the hard way.

Do things the hard way.

No, but you’re right.

But I think what’s so interesting here.

Think think about something.

Now we’ve had more time to metabolize as a society.

Think about Harvey Weinstein.

It’s the same story in the end.

Now, today, 2026, how many people knew.

Maybe thousands knew enough.

And you think about this guy being

able Harvey Weinstein to operate at the highest levels

of the Democratic Party.

Obviously, Hollywood, finance everything.

But it’s not the same story because Weinstein is loathsome

and a criminal and a rapist.

But the thing at the center of his power was real.

He really did produce those movies.

He really did make that studio. With Epstein.

It is a con all the way through, which is amazing.

But what I’m saying is, I think the human capacity

to just to not want to stick your neck out Yeah to not be

the person at the party, not be the skunk at the garden

party, to wait for someone else to say something I’m

talking about just a more basic human thing creates

an immense vulnerability that people like this know.

Let me give an example of this that I think is we’ve

mentioned Kathy Ruemmler, right,

the former White House Chief Counsel under Obama.

So you’re dealing with somebody... Just for the folks

at home is the lawyer who represents the American

presidency.

And there is no human being in America.

There’s probably maybe not true for Chief Counsel under

President Trump, but certainly under a very rule following

presidency like Obama’s.

What that person is charged with doing

is operating at such a high level of procedural fidelity.

Such a high level of crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s,

such a high level of seeing.

Could anything blow up in our face later?

Is there a risk here?

Legal risk.

Reputational risk.

We are not looking at the White House.

Counsel’s job is to keep the White House out of trouble.

So this email I want to read it to you

is from Ruemmler to Epstein in 2014.

So post the time of her work at the White House.

She’s writing in response to some things she’s dealing

with.

Most girls do not have to worry about this crap,

Epstein writes back.

Girl, careful.

I will renew an old habit. This week.

Thiel, Summers, Bill Burns, Gordon Brown,

Jagland (Council of Europe and Nobel chairman), Mongolia

Pres, Hardeep Puree (India)

Boris (Gates)

Jabor (Qatar)

Sultan (Dubai)

Kosslyn (Harvard)

Leon Black, Woody, you are a welcome guest at any

Also, if you think there are interesting people in town,

everyone here for climate summit, Clinton Security

Council.

Holy shit.

And he gives her his telephone number

for the next 30 minutes.

And so it’s like in that email you have him both saying

to former Democratic White House counsel, hey, look.

We can all joke.

I mean this after his conviction to herself

as a girl, jokingly, and he says, careful,

don’t call yourself.

This is after his conviction for soliciting sex from

a minor, which she don’t use that word girl around me.

Otherwise I might renew an old habit.

Habit and then Hey, look at all these people

I can put you next to.

It’s just a kind of remarkable.

You see it all there in one.

It really is.

And with somebody who of anybody in this country

would understand risk.

And yet even for her the possibilities

outweigh whatever voice there should have been inside.

That should have been like an alarm going off Yeah

how you go from a lawyer representing

the American presidency that George Washington and Thomas

Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln once occupied.

To and we think this is normal.

But just like cashing in at big law firms,

which is fine to going to a convicted sex offender for sex

crimes against a minor for advice,

as she does about whether she should accept Obama’s job

offer to be attorney general.

So she’s going to.

Do you think I should be attorney general?

And as you see there, the way it glides from us,

a joke about how he’s a criminal pedophile to here is

this kind of Mad Libs of the Davos elite,

when they invented the UN in the mid 1940s and had New York

chosen as the location.

And whenever that September gathering of the UN General

Assembly came together, I don’t think what they had

in mind was creating opportunities for a disgraced

pedophile financier to have all these different global

people coming over for dinners or salons or whatever it is

they were doing, and then offering to this lawyer who he

would give career advice to the chance to meet whoever.

But this is.

And then, of course, now she’s at Goldman Sachs and I hope

the PR Department there will get in touch with you and let

her come on the show.

She makes $20 million a year.

So as a good life.

But I think if you want to understand

I guess what I would say to people

is I think a lot of people listening

to this live downstream of people like this.

All you may know on a day to day basis is that your pay

doesn’t feel like it’s enough, or are the adjustable rate

mortgage you got feels like it’s screwing you over,

or your union doesn’t have the leverage it used to have.

Or your kid’s school keeps having these funding cuts

and you’re really scared for whether your kid is going

to be able to make it in this new economy or AI is going to.

You’re just like swimming in the muck.

It is people like these folks that we are talking.

These are the people deciding upstream how you live,

what your pay is like, what kind of companies,

the quality and timber of the companies you end up working

for, what kind of pension you have or don’t have what kind

of prices you pay or not, whether you get foreclosed

on or not.

Because their bank bets against itself in the run up

to a financial crisis and imperils the whole system you

are just trying to swim through,

and you don’t normally get a glimpse of how these people

talk amongst themselves.

This is a glimpse, and it turns out

to not be particularly brilliant,

not be particularly insightful.

They don’t know a bunch of stuff that you don’t know.

They’re literally gliding from jokes about how one of them

used to be a pedophile, to advice about taking

an attorney general job to her,

requesting a Hermes Apple Watch band as a gift from

Epstein.

This is what they’re doing.

As you struggle to just eke out your life.

So I want to talk about the girl side of Epstein,

and I want to do this in a way,

escalating from the way he used that reputation as power

and currency all the way it looks to have become, I mean,

the way it was criminal.

One of the things that really struck me reading the emails

is how everywhere Epstein’s reputation and I guess

mystique is probably the thing to call it that he cultivates

is as the rich guy covered in women.

Richard Branson saying to him, you’re welcome back anytime,

as long as you bring your harem.

So I want to read you an email between Elon Musk and Epstein.

This is 2013.

Epstein writes to Musk.

Any plan for NY?

The opening of the General Assembly

has many interesting people coming to the house.

And so here you see Epstein thinking

that what he can do with Musk is offer connections

to important people.

Musk writes back, it’s actually kind of funny.

I run and lead product design engineering

for two complicated companies.

Moreover, SpaceX is about to launch

what is arguably the most advanced rocket in history.

Flying to NY to see UN diplomats do

nothing would be an unwise use of time.

So Epstein has misjudged what Musk wants.

Pivots, I’m going to read this the way Epstein writes it,

even though not a word I normally use because I think

it’s important to see the signaling.

"Do you think I am retarded?"

Question mark.

Just kidding.

There is no one over 25 and all.

Very cute.

So Epstein shifts to saying no, no, no,

this isn’t going to be diplomats.

It’s going to be girls 25 and under. No evidence that Musk

comes to this party or this whatever.

But this is another kind of currency.

You see him using a lot with the rich, which

is you may have thought you would get rich

and you would have access to all the fun parties,

and you would be a playboy and you would have girls

all over you.

And for a lot of them, it didn’t work out that way.

And you can come into it and he will give you entree

into this, which for the people who don’t need more

money but maybe want this is a kind of power and leverage

and transactionalism.

I want to read you a quote from Virginia Giuffre’s book,

"Nobody’s Girl," that gets at this in a really powerful way.

She talks about she makes an observation,

and this is in the really early days when she’s I think,

15 or 16 and she is first forced into sex by Epstein

with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell themselves.

And then he starts to force her

to have sex with other men.

And she makes an observation about these other men.

And she writes, My impression of many of these men is that

they didn’t know how to pursue women awkward and socially

immature.

It was as if their big brains were missing the ability

to interact with other people.

I don’t think this is true about Epstein himself.

I think it is true about some of these other guys,

and it’s absolutely at the heart of this appeal.

You see it with a lot of these guys,

whether they were involved in sexual activity that Epstein

arranged or not, or in the case of Larry Summers,

just reaching out to Epstein for dating advice,

you reach out to a convicted pedophile for dating advice

about how to sleep with a young Chinese economist

as a married man, I guess because Larry Summers,

mind like Epstein, is a guy who knows a lot about sex

or something like that category that a lot of these

guys are very smart in the area that they’re smart in.

I think, as Virginia Giuffre wrote,

not very deft maybe in other areas,

and didn’t want to have to be deft in those areas.

I think in a lot of that stratospheric world,

whether you’re a powerful academic or a super rich

person, and you don’t want resistance.

You don’t want pushback.

These are guys who, when they have some idea for something

they want to do at their university,

or some if they’re very rich, some place they want to go,

they’re not standing in line at the airport.

They’re not dealing with meetings and committees.

They’re acting on the world.

And I think this extended, as Virginia Giuffre wrote,

to their encounters with women.

They didn’t want adult, sentient, conscious, complex,

full women who could talk back to them,

who might have thoughts, might have opinions that they would

share with them, might have the self-confidence to be

another person in the room.

What they seemed drawn to whether it was consensual

or in some cases, rape.

Whether it was underage or overage.

They seemed drawn to women who,

to quote Virginia Giuffre.

Again, Epstein liked to tell his friends

that women were merely a life support system for a vagina.

Women whose personhood had been either taken away.

Or was limited through the fear they were living in.

And I think it is again revealing about the men

to whom this was appealing.

I think that quote from her is important,

because I do think this helps solve a mystery about him,

which is how is this guy who is a criminal sex

offender for soliciting sex with a minor.

Later on the subject, and many of these people

are sticking with him after this

of massive reporting in the in the Miami Herald.

Amazing reporting, Julie Brown,

how many underage women and girls he’s abused.

And I think you can't understand him

unless you flip what you think the polarity of that

would actually be.

Not for everybody.

As we’ve talked about before, many people had nothing to do

with this guy.

After that, many people never had

anything to do with this guy.

But for some this was actually part of his mystique

that he was the one leading the life that they thought

they had been promised.

Showy. Summers puts it in there.

Lucrative and louche.

There are a lot of rich people.

You’ve run into them.

I’ve run into them.

They made it to lucrative, and they

thought at some point that would create louche

They were the grinds in school.

They’re smart, they’re hardworking,

they’re resentful.

Maybe they had a tough time in high school and they made it.

And all there was at the top was I mean,

there was money, which is great,

but there was more meetings and more work

and more work and more work.

And that thing they were promised never showed up.

And here comes Epstein.

And part of his whole mystique is that for him, it did.

He has an island where there are parties

and those parties are legendary.

And maybe you don’t really even know what goes

on at them.

But you’ve heard intimations are pretty wild.

And that becomes not what is pushing people away from him,

at least prior to the Miami Herald

reporting in these emails.

What I see it is pulling people towards him,

because even that conviction is part of his loucheness.

I mean, he describes it to people as he didn’t know she

was underage, but he’s living the life.

They do not feel themselves unleashed enough

or capable of living Yeah for folks who haven’t spent time

adjacent to any of these worlds,

you might think that these people live in a kind of Great

Gatsby.

Fantasy They don’t.

Epstein was highly unusual.

This elite, particularly in our era,

in which it is a kind of what I describe in the Times

piece as a kind of merito-aristocracy,

where they have aristocratic powers.

But for most people, it’s not inheriting land or family

title that gets you into that world today.

These are highly educated, credentialed

people for the most part.

I always think this is so telling.

The elite used to work less.

Fewer hours.

This is one of the working class striking facts

in modern American life.

And now they work more.

And so this is a group of people

who, as it is in Washington, I think.

So it is across a lot of this American elite.

They work really hard and their life

consists in not making the mistakes.

It’s conservative, it’s safe.

The straight and narrow, and they’re often quite boring

lives.

I think a lot of them are in bed by 8:30 PM,

and they’re listening to longevity experts and on weird

diets and don’t drink alcohol because they’re trying to do

this and that.

Like, so when he came along again,

we talked about exploiting vulnerabilities.

He offered, I think, as you said,

so well, he offered to these people

a life that maybe at some earlier point

they thought would be the endpoint of making

a lot of money in finance.

But in fact, they’re just sitting in some house

in Connecticut, kind of like alone and scrolling x

and maybe offering like a toxic opinion on something.

And this was this entree into something maybe different,

maybe something they felt they were owed.

And so this is, I think, where you

get going into the concentric circles towards the heart

of the actual criminality.

Epstein is raising this flag.

He’s like, I’m the rich guy who’s covered in women.

I’m the rich guy with a harem, with an island,

with these crazy parties.

I’m the rich guy with rumors about me.

Rumors which push some people away but

actually act as an attractor for others.

And so you then begin to see the people who maybe what they

want isn’t just a party where there are models.

Maybe what they want is actually direct access.

So here’s an email between Steve Tisch,

the billionaire scion and co-owner of the New York

Giants football team.

This 2013.

Hi, Jeffrey.

I just had lunch with your assistant’s friend who I met

at your house Wednesday morning.

The name is redacted here.

Very sweet girl.

Do you know anything about her, Epstein.

No, but I will ask redacted.

All confidential.

I will get all info.

Did you contact the great ass fake tit?

Redacted she’s a character short term has an older

boyfriend going to acting school a 10 ass.

I am happy to have you as a new

but obviously shared interest friend.

And then Tisch writes back.

Thanks, Jeffrey.

Curious to know about Redacted.

I will contact redacted.

Then he asks pro or civilian and Epstein writes back,

send me a number to call.

I don’t like records of these conversations and I wanted

to read that one for two reasons.

One is because you see in this moment,

when he recognizes somebody who’s got a shared interest,

begins to pull them in and begins to use acting as a pimp

here.

The other is, all we know right now

is what was written down.

There was a lot here that should have been investigated.

That hasn’t been.

This is an ongoing story in that way.

There was a lot that was said in phone calls.

Epstein clearly has some situational awareness of what

shouldn’t be in an email chain.

So what we are seeing here, and I mean,

there are emails and files and texts and so on, we don’t yet

that have not been released.

It’s very, very incomplete.

But you can see how it goes from the reputation

as a guy who is always covered in women all the way down

to the procurer of women, and then those people

are woven in with him.

Then they share something that the rest of the world

is not supposed to know about.

And that creates an intimacy that is

going to be very different.

I think it’s a very important point.

Because people like Steve Tisch don’t actually email

like this a lot.

I mean, again, this is an obviously reckless email.

And the ultimate recklessness is

that Ezra Klein is reading your emails about soliciting

women on a podcast.

So obviously it didn’t work out for him.

However, generally these people are very careful.

And so it is worth remembering, as you point out,

that we are seeing whatever you’re seeing.

Imagine ten times more than it.

Imagine ten times more names.

Imagine that is happening in phone calls.

That is happening in things that we will never

see and never know.

Imagining what is happening in rooms that is not documented

in a legal paper trail.

That’s really important.

Not to mention just documents that the Trump administration

will not release.

In my book "Winners Take All," which

is a lot about this class of people.

One of my characters is Laurie Tisch, who’s Steve’s sister.

And, when I was writing that book,

it was really important to me to not simply judge this world

from the outside, but to talk to people

who are in this world about how they see the world.

And I did that with many different types of people.

And Lori was one of the billionaires

I spoke to who I was very grateful, came on the record

and basically talked about the world from her point of view.

And she said, things like, it’s a very unfair world.

It’s very unequal world.

This kind of power is unjust.

She talked about when she thinks about how that family

fortune was made, including cigarettes and other things,

she feels sick to her stomach.

Sometimes people thank her for philanthropic gifts.

She feels bad because she thinks about in that moment

where the money came from.

But she also said, look, we are here now.

The best I can do is give things away,

try to be a good person.

But look.

And she said it’s very striking.

She said at the end of that section I had with her that

at the end of the day, it’s hard to convince someone like

me to give up power.

So then I said, how do you so so

then how do you change this kind of thing?

How could this kind of thing ever change?

And her words were revolution.

Maybe I’m not encouraging any particular approach here,

but I think it’s revealing that someone in the heart

of that world, ultimately is like it’s very difficult

to ask us to be different from the way we are when this is

the power distance, when these are the incentives,

when this is the way politics works.

It’s very, very difficult to get people to behave contrary

to the way the system is encouraging them to behave

and allowing them to behave.

I want to stay for a minute, though, on.

Discretion you were saying a minute ago, why would

Steve Tisch do this with Jeffrey Epstein,

of all people, but probably for a bunch of people.

It actually seemed that if anybody was going to know

the discreet way to do it, it was going to be Jeffrey

Epstein, either because he seems to be doing it

and getting away with it, or because he’s been burnt once,

so he’d be careful now, whatever it might be.

I don’t know how Jeffrey Epstein signaled safety

to people.

What I will say is that of all of the documents

that have come out here, the strangest and most suggestive

and in some way.

Most revealing is the birthday book, which is 2003.

So it’s prior to his conviction for soliciting sex

from a minor.

But what is so remarkable about it and what makes

it will make it forever just incredible fodder.

I want to say conspiracies, but there’s clearly something

here, so I don’t mean that pejoratively,

but you have some of the most powerful people in the world.

And so many of these entries, these notes to Epstein,

combine an extreme lewdness like a deep incaution like,

I’m surprised to see these people writing and talking

this way with a reference to mystery, secrets,

something that cannot be told or shared.

I want to read the one from Donald Trump,

which is framed by an outline of a woman’s body.

And I should note, Trump says this letter is fake.

He denies signing it.

But what appears to be Trump’s signature is a woman’s pubic

hair.

And it reads voiceover.

There must be more to life than having

everything, Donald.

Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is, Jeffrey,

nor will since I also know what it is.

Donald, we have certain things in common.

Jeffrey Jeffrey.

Yes we do.

Come to think of it, Donald.

Enigmas never age.

Have you noticed that? Jeffrey.

As a matter of fact, it was clear to me

the last time I saw you.

Donald, a pal is a wonderful thing.

Happy birthday and may every day

be another wonderful secret.

Donald J. Trump

What do you make of it?

There’s been this whole attempt by people who were

caught up in various levels and durations of friendship

with Epstein to the only defense is I didn’t know. I met

him after this point, or I only met him here,

I didn’t know.

But what the birthday book shows and you just read one

Donald Trump’s.

But there was messages like this

from various a lot of people.

And again, Republicans, Democrats,

all kinds of people.

And they were consistent.

Exactly they painted, one has to assume that

a technical level, everyone there

knew different facts and different amounts of things.

And yet if you were to read them as a text together.

It’s a book.

There’s a cloud of common sense about who this guy is.

That’s what’s so interesting.

It’s contained in that.

And maybe it is a coincidence that they all

talk about him and women.

Maybe he was equally interested in classical music

and they all just forgot to mention it.

Maybe when Donald Trump talks about enigmas never aging.

Maybe it had nothing to do with the age of girls.

Maybe could be.

I don’t believe that, but sure possible.

You have to really strain yourself to argue that

the people around him in these financial, political, legal,

academic and other institutions shouldn’t have

known better than to consort with and enable him.

And fast forward to years later,

when he’s convicted in 2008, and then after that time he

comes back and tries to rehabilitate himself.

And these friends who, if they had access to Google as you

and I did in 2009, had reason to know who he was.

These stories are developing, and I really

want to stress this.

They’re not just failing to vet someone properly,

they’re befriending him or sustaining friendships with

him.

They’re allowing him to give to their university.

They’re allowing him into these worlds,

enabled future predation.

This was not only about what had happened before that.

Getting the reputational stink off

allowed him made it easier for him to move through the world

and do it again and do it more.

And I think that this was not about an earlier

phase of criminality.

And then some reputational cleansing

after the reputational cleanse allowed this to keep going.

I think that is right.

It is clearly right.

But I want to stay on Trump and Epstein here for a minute.

One thing I’ve been thinking about across the course

of this conversation is the weird symmetries between them,

the kind of outer borough resentment,

the stiffing of people over and over and over again.

They are very, very close.

At some point in time later on, they’re not as close.

Trump does seem to drop the relationship

at a certain juncture.

But here, at here, this moment, they’re very close.

'03, every day is another wonderful secret.

And the thing I’ve been trying to track through this

conversation is the way that power acts as its own fact,

and shifts what other facts mean to other people.

They’re as much of it is known, suspected, intimated,

seen about Jeffrey Epstein during all these periods.

But so long as there is enough power around him,

enough connections, enough money, enough social cachet.

It’s both inconvenient for anybody to act on it.

But in a way it just becomes almost,

I think, for many of them, unthinkable.

I mean, Jeffrey Epstein he is himself a kind of social fact

His power, his wealth, his connections.

If he knows all these people, who

are you to go against that.

Who are you to not get your cut of that.

And I think Trump at this point

is that on a much larger scale.

He’s tremendously corrupt.

The way he’s using the White House for profit is completely

visible now to the naked eye.

Dozens of women have accused him of sexual misconduct.

He’s bragged about it on tape.

He was found liable in a case in court.

He acts in ways that obviously would not allow anyone

in your life to act.

There’s January 6, but there’s just so much power around him

now that it’s like there’s nothing to be done about it.

Everybody just accepts him as a kind of social fact.

I mean, he is I mean, he is a president and he’s the center

of the system itself.

If Trump had fallen apart after 2020,

people would have really turned on him

if he had come powerless.

All these people who in their hearts

kind of hate them, which there are plenty of those

still in the Republican Party certainly

were a couple of years ago.

They could have acted on that.

But as long as he was the deciding figure in primaries

and so on, they all get in line.

And I don’t mean to draw this too tightly,

but I always think about it when I look at this note from

Trump and Epstein, which is they do have a similar genius

to me, which is the recognition that power is what

makes you invincible.

The power can come through many different mechanisms.

It can be money, it can be connections.

It can be literal political power in Donald Trump’s case.

But if you have enough of it, you

become functionally immune, or at least immune

up until a certain point.

And the fact that Trump in part

rose by weaponizing the mistrust of this kind

of power, the sense that you needed a champion

to take it apart.

But of course, he’s completely part of it.

Was best friends or very close friends

with this guy at one point.

And their suggestive relationship, just

still sits there, completely unexplained with none of what

this message is legible.

Really even now, we don’t know what’s being held back

by the Trump DOJ, which I trust that Department

of Justice, as far as I can throw it,

it’s all so on point.

It is.

I think maybe if I had to think about what I have most

learned from now, 13 months of the second Trump term, most

learned about this country and the character of this country

and the way this country functions right now.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me

is about the distribution or the paucity of bravery.

This country is full of people today,

and I’m speaking specifically of leaders and elites with

opportunities to form some resistance to the loss

of democracy in this country.

Our elite, including some of the people we’ve talked about

today, is full of people whose grandfathers stormed Normandy

and whose are lionized in those families and who don’t

have the bravery as the grandchildren of those people

to put out a statement at their law firm.

There has been I mean, it’s in the song,

right "land of the free, home of the brave."

I think it’s a really important part of American

self-conception.

Bravery, courage.

I think we have found out that it is in really short supply

and that people who actually have

the things that you would think

would make you courageous.

I think that if I had Harvard’s endowment

at my back, I think I would be more courageous than Anand

sitting here with you right now.

It turns out that’s not what it seemed to do for people.

If I owned a law firm, I would think

that would make me more courageous.

But we’ve found otherwise.

And then you look at these people in Minneapolis

whose names no one even knows, except for the two

that they shot and people who after they were shot, go out

again and again and again.

And you look at their courage, and it’s incredible that all

of these people in academia, in law firms, in corporations,

you and I go out enough.

We hear these people talk about Donald Trump at parties.

They have the same contempt for him

that you and I might have, but no courage.

And I think you’re right that Epstein exploited that

at an earlier phase, obviously on a smaller but barbaric

scale.

But in some ways it’s a dress rehearsal for now,

someone who’s a con artist in the same vein,

the same kinds of business dealings and misdealings,

who’s been able to hijack the American Republic itself

because of how timid people with voice to actually say

something turn out to be.

And what I would say here is that.

It’s great that you and I are talking about this and that

frankly, the whole country and world are talking about this

story right now.

This is a story of a magnitude that comes around, but rarely.

That’s progress in and of itself.

All these women who risked everything to tell this story,

ruin their own lives, tell their story.

Virginia Giuffre, who I’ve been quoting is not with us

anymore, having committed suicide.

But talking about it will not on its own,

or being angry about it, will not on its own,

lead to a world that is different from this.

This outrage could be harvested

for clickbait and politicians who exactly,

as you say Trump could very much harvest

this anger against the network, only

to get into power and deepen the hold of these networks.

Or this outrage could actually lead to transformative places

of saying, we don’t have to be run by people who operate

in networks like these.

Our political parties don’t need to be dominated by donors

who are at the heart of these networks.

There are so many amazing people in this country,

including some who were exposed to the opportunity

to be friends with Jeffrey Epstein, who said,

no, thank you.

There are so many people outside of these networks,

outside of these ways of thinking.

And again and again, we turn to people to run

our companies, to run our political organizations who

happen to have the mentalities,

the kind of amorality, the mercenary mentality,

the view of other people who don’t have power as kind

of disposable things to get past on the way to your own

quest.

We have a choice of who we elevate in so many spheres

of American life.

And I hope this story doesn’t just become.

The greatest clickbait of all time.

And actually becomes a wake up call.

I do think that this story is a lesson of what power does.

I mean, there is a lot we don’t yet know and I think we’re

going to know a lot more over the coming months and even

years.

I think we’ll know more if Democrats win the House

and all of a sudden have subpoena power.

But to what you were saying a minute ago about the cowardice

of elites in the second Trump term, which

is I would also say, been one of the most striking facts

about it.

And what has been to me, more striking about

it is cowardice on behalf of elites who are not cowardly

in the first Trump term.

People like Jeff Bezos, who approached it

very differently.

The first time Trump got worse in between the two.

It’s not like he gave up his undemocratic or corrupt ways.

It all became more baldfaced, more violent, more strange,

more abhorrent to the virtues that

are supposed to sit with the leaders of our system.

And I just think this is such an important lesson

of all of it.

There is so much people can know and choose not to act on,

simply because no one else seems to them to be acting.

Or more to the point, because no one else like them,

or to not enough people like them are acting.

I saw Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI.

He gave $25 million to Trump’s super PAC.

Did he do that because he’s so excited about Trump’s policies

or corruption or attacks on democracy?

I mean, maybe I don’t his politics.

Or do you do it because he’s buying access and that’s

the rules of the game right now.

And be good for OpenAI to have that relationship with Donald

Trump.

And either way, I find it reprehensible.

You have really watched so much reorganize itself around

the fact of Trump’s power.

I don’t mean to take this entirely off of Epstein.

I just at this moment, there is more we’re going to have

to learn about Epstein.

But I think this piece we have learned and this piece,

it’s worth taking seriously.

I think it’s very important, and I actually think it does

tie back to Epstein in this really profound way.

We started this conversation as being

about the network dynamics that

made what he did possible.

I think we live in an age of and there’s been a lot

of books about this of network power,

that the way in which power works now has more to do with

networks and the dynamics of networks.

And that has many implications.

That means your connections are more of a source of power

than say, if you go back a couple hundred years, the land

you owned was a really big source of power.

I wonder if part of what is happening

is in an age of network power, courage

becomes harder because if you think back

to that person whose power came from,

they were rooted in a community.

They had some land, they were somebody in the town.

Maybe they were the Deacon in the church on the weekend.

They had multiple kinds of clout.

They had some money they gave to the local civic thing.

They maybe had a bunch of different things

that might make them courageous

about some other thing, so that if someone started

to take over their political party who was a fascist,

they would have support from their church community

or from the sports league they were associated with.

These other things, a lot of those things have vanished.

And your power really consists in your position

and your number of connections and the density and quality

and lucrativeness of those connections in the network.

And if you go to a place like TED or the Aspen Institute,

you see this working like no one

cares about the land you have or your family

name or these other things that have mattered

for most of human history.

It is really about, do you know this person?

Do you know this person?

Like, and I just wonder if courage has become

is a value that has suffered in a network age.

Because to be courageous is to break ties,

and the more valuable ties become,

the more exponentially valuable more ties

become, the more exponentially expensive it

is to cut off that tie, to burn that bridge.

And it seems to me we are surrounded

by elites who are much more afraid than their parents

and grandparents were to take a stand to say this crosses

a line because maybe they fear at some deep level, you out

of the network.

You go to zero very quickly.

Always our final question.

What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

I have been deeply myself going back

to narrative nonfiction after my first two

books were very much my own, were very much

in the kind of reported in stories.

And I did two that were more opinion advocacy.

And then I’ve gone back to more stories.

So I’ve been reading, rereading books that were

really important to me in terms of that kind

of journalism that can deeply inhabit people’s lives.

So two of my classics.

"Random Family" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

One of the greatest works of 10 years

of immersive reporting.

Deeply understanding community in the Bronx

and "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo

Another one of the greatest in that field.

Top five or 10 books of all time.

And then I’m going to tell you a third one that maybe

the listening audience can help with.

This book is not published yet because no one

will publish it.

There’s a woman.

Incredible woman.

She shows up a lot in the Epstein files.

She’s one of the only people who shows up in a way that

makes it look good.

Her name is Conchita Sarnoff.

She’s a lifelong campaigner against trafficking. In the Epstein

files, you see lots of people afraid of her scheming about

how to keep her quiet.

Does someone know her?

Can someone.

She even talked to Epstein.

But she’s been doing heroic work.

She has a book that she’s working on that I am reliably

told no one in New York will publish.

That is like an explosive version

of the really big story here.

A lot of the things you and I have been talking about,

not just this piece, not just that piece.

And I have been fascinated to learn that,

while people have been willing to publish individual stories

of individual survivors and this and that when it gets

to these really big banks, some of the stuff we’ve been

talking about, some of these bigger international forces,

there’s a silence.

So I want to read Conchita Sarnoff's book,

and I hope someone will publish it. Anand Giridharadas .

Thank you very much.

Thank you.