Transcription
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 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.