The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power

At the end of January, Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Epstein files: millions of pages of emails and texts, F. B. I. documents and court records. Much was redacted and millions more pages have been withheld. There is a lot we want to know that remains unclear. But what has come into clear view is the role Epstein played as a broker of information, connections, wealth and women and girls for a slice of the global elite. This was the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and it reveals much about the infrastructure of elite networks more generally. Anand Giridharadas is something of a sociologist of American elites. He’s the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.” He also publishes the great newsletter The. Ink. Back in November, after the release of an earlier batch of Epstein files, Giridharadas wrote a great Times Opinion guest essay, taking a sociologist’s lens to the messages Epstein exchanged with his elite friends. So after the government released this latest, enormous tranche of materials, I wanted to talk to Giridharadas to help make sense of it. What do they reveal — about how Epstein operated in the world, the vulnerabilities he exploited and what that says about how power works in America today? Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails” by Anand Giridharadas “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein” by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” by David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre Book Recommendations: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo Unpublished Work by Conchita Sarnoff Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  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 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 Blanch, who before he joined the DOJ was Trump's personal lawyer, has said that investigators identified 6 million potentially responsive pages, 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? Representatives Rokana

• 1:14Ezra Klein?

  and Thomas Massey, who co-sponsored the House legislation that mandated the files release, have argued that the DOJ is engaged in a cover-up, and is using redactions to protect powerful men who may have committed crimes.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Mr. Speaker, yesterday Congressman Massey 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% of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  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 this story. 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,

• 2:35Ezra Klein?

  why so many famous and powerful people from so many walks of life orbited around him, even after he's 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 of modern power and elite networks more generally. Anand Girdardas 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: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. I often think of Anand's work as a kind

• 3:17Ezra Klein?

  of sociology of American elites in 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, [email protected].

• 3:38Ezra Klein?

  Anand Girdardas, 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 a picture that emerges?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  You know, 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 R. Cunha calls an Epstein class, one could say, 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.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  And it isn't pretty.

• 4:46Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that is the most striking thing about the files is the range of Jeffrey Epstein's elite network. I mean, you have someone 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. It crosses ideologies, it crosses industries, it crosses professions. It is an extraordinary range of contacts, of Republicans and Democrats, globalists and anti-globalists.

• 5:22Ezra Klein?

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

• 5:29Speaker 02

  This is the great mystery, you know, 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 on 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, which is, as you say, a coast-to-coast, industry-to-industry, right-to-left, as 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.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  And as I wrote in the New York Times piece that I wrote in November, this diversity masks 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

• 6:55Speaker 02

  help getting, I think it was Brad Karp, into the Augusta National Golf Club. And Steve Bannon talks about basically how hard it is. He's gonna help, he's gonna 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.

• 7:13Ezra Klein?

  Why would, sorry, why would Steve Bannon have access to the Augusta National Golf Club that Brad Karp, you know, 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.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:32Ezra Klein?

  In a lot of these emails, it doesn't lie where you'd expect.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  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, you know, didn't allow black members, didn't allow Jewish members. And so when you're dealing with like a club with kind of a white nationalist history, you go to Steve Bannon for a little help to get in. You gotta know 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.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  He uses a racist term for white people. 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 and and people of, you know, 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 and these emails, and some are an extraordinary and rare chance to see what they really think

• 8:53Speaker 02

  about you, how they really move through the world, what their actual ends and projects are. Maya Angelou is right, and people show you who they are, believe them.

• 9:02Ezra Klein?

  He 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, and some of it's 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 is the, you can't be a great con man without understanding human beings at a very deep level. But there's also a just endless transactionalism, an endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers, ultimately, women and girls.

• 9:46Ezra Klein?

  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 fellowship. But what can you do for me? And if you can be the one who finds it for them, that's real power.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  And it's different needs, right? So the money people may not need money, although they always want more of it. They often want to seem and feel smart, right? 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 a, as a, as slander, they know it. I, I've 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.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Well, it's a tough era to be an independent thinker and, you know, and so the academics want money and access. And Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, talks about, how's life among the lucrative and the loosh? He asks Epstein. So he wanted access to a kind of, like, 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.

• 11:15Ezra Klein?

  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, dollars, 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 is a signal.

• 11:57Ezra Klein?

  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 JP Morgan Chase, which was his bank for a long time when he was coming up. And probably with just Staley, who was very high up at the bank. Tell me a bit about the Epstein-Staley relationship.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  It's an extraordinary story of...

• 12:33Speaker 02

  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, I think, 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 JP Morgan need?

• 13:05Ezra Klein?

  This is why this piece is so good.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  ... 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 kind of the base layer. There's some point at which JP Morgan becomes interested, and Jess Staley specifically becomes interested in the idea that JP Morgan 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.

• 13:52Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  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, right? You, Ezra Klein, if I'd tried to reach out to you 20 years ago, I could have just probably emailed some Gmail address, right? But now you got a podcast, everything, I gotta go through this person, I gotta go through this person. So actually, the more important these stratospherically powerful people become, there's publicists, and the 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 Sergey Brin is actually in the bar at night.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  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 it's like, it's

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  Figure you're overestimating Ted if you think Sergey Brin is at the bar.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I have been with Sergey Brin at the bar.

• 15:15Ezra Klein?

  Really?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 15:16Ezra Klein?

  You know these worlds, then?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I was at the bar with him with my friend Esther Perel, he's always talked to. I've never seen, 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 to watch.

• 15:44Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Correct. That was actually a really revealing moment to me. I mean, they can contact anyone they want. They can fill out whatever, you know, 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, the Epstein was. He exploited certain gaps in our culture now. He was not only grooming teenage girls. He was grooming all of these people. Right? 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.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  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 food? I can get this made for you. Do you like that kind of food? What kind of food? Are you sure? What time you get here? Right? 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.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  That I think a lot of those powerful people weirdly are not being attended to.

• 17:19Ezra Klein?

  The connections are doing two things at once for Epstein. One is he's able to use them transactionally. They make being in a relationship with him profitable for other people, but they also cross subsidize him in credibility.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:35Ezra Klein?

  Epstein is taking out cash at a rhythm and in amounts that should flag investigations.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  JP Morgan flagged over a billion dollars in suspicious transactions.

• 17:51Ezra Klein?

  And so there ultimately are a series of internal fights at JP Morgan about whether or not to keep him. 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 JP Morgan keeps working with him, 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, trumpeting Epstein's large volume of business with JP Morgan 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."

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:32Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  He is revealing how these elites make decisions about trust 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 kind of 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 kind of 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.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  He figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character may 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 sliced judgments about 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.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Now, most people listening to this will not have heard of the restaurant Michael's in Midtown. But Michael's is an example of a restaurant, 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 like, 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.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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, if you were at that party, if you were at Davos, if you were at TED, must be all right.

• 21:17Ezra Klein?

  There's this quote from Staley, then JP Morgan later leads Barclays Bank. Epstein relied on his network for his legitimacy. And I, 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.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  And we haven't said yet in this portion of the conversation, but Epstein was also helping to occasion sexual activities.

• 22:01Ezra Klein?

  We're gonna get to that, yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  For Staley. So, all aspects of this brokering were at work. And the kind of leverage that that provides is obviously even more potentially for someone with so much to lose. You know, deals come and go, but Epstein had the power to destroy potentially a lot of people.

• 22:20Ezra Klein?

  And here we're talking about him and other, like 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 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."

• 23:05Ezra Klein?

  And there's just such currency, right? You know, we've been talking about the wealthy, but for the academics, for a lot of the other kinds of people that Epstein cultivated, 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 Rummel, 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, you

• 23:46Ezra Klein?

  know, 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.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  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, you know, everybody's so interested in longevity. What about living well and honorably in the existing time? Whatever that is, right? Yeah, 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 judgment for the quality of the time, for the quality of your decisions, for the quality of your relationships.

• 24:31Ezra Klein?

  See, I don't think that's, I don't think that's fair, actually. Or I'll say it in a different way, because whatever at his work. But to a Tia, 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? Right? That's his explanation for what he was doing.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  That a lot of people passed it up. I mean, there's this incredible meme about, you know, all the people who didn't meet Epstein? Right?

• 24:59Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  There's not a lot of people of color in these revelations. Three million documents, right? For obvious reasons, there's not a lot of women, although there are some like Kathy Rummler. 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. A lot of people whose names you and I don't know, had the judgment, saw photos of underage girls lining his walls, as Virginia Giuffre describes it, and were like, this ain't right.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Different levels of things were, were known to different people, but none of it was a deal breaker to many of these people we're talking about.

• 25:52Ezra Klein?

  Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary, because as you're saying, you, you 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, you know, we're talking in the low dozens, maybe. 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 pedos ball? Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly. Sees him perfectly clearly.

• 26:36Ezra Klein?

  And so is Epstein a way you see, quote unquote, the elite? Or is this a, like a subcategory, right? 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 or less transactionalism. I mean, even in this JP Morgan 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.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And it's an important point to dwell on for a second, right? Because I think, you know, 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 like, 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, right? There is no doubt that there is a core group of people

• 27:59Speaker 02

  who were knowledgeable about, engaged in and shared participation in crimes of pedophilia at the heart, 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 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?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  That just, you know, universities that maybe knew a Larry Summers was pally with him or were accepting money and just didn't stop the thing. Right? 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, you know, 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.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  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

• 29:46Speaker 02

  to make it possible for that guy to commit the murder. And a lot of other people who didn't commit murder, who would never commit murder, who are not okay with murder, who maybe opposed 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 Rummler

• 30:30Speaker 02

  who presumably had nothing to do with that burning heart of the story. It's the fact that today Kathy Rummler, as you and I speak, is still the chief lawyer at Goldman Sachs. It's the fact that that association.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  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 our, 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 were forced to give tours to Jeffrey Epstein at the Media Lab. It's these law firms that before they were capitulating to Donald Trump,

• 31:28Speaker 02

  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 were so many reasons to know he was a problem, even when Tina Brown knew enough to call him a pedophile.

• 31:56Ezra Klein?

  Even when Donald Trump was giving quotes to New York Magazine saying, Jeffrey Epstein likes him on the younger side.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  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 a larger 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.

• 32:57Ezra Klein?

  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 is fundraising. 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.

• 33:40Ezra Klein?

  So tell me a bit about Epstein and Les Wexner.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a remarkable story, and The Times has done extraordinary reporting on this. Let's start at the beginning. 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 is 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.

• 34:18Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Donald Trump. And he gets a job teaching at Dalton, an elite private school on 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. Like, 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 Barre.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  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 kind of grasp of, of human acupressure points. He sort of perfectly frames it to this boss who himself had a kind of attitude of being an outsider and I'm, you know, I, I, I proved my way here and I don't, you know, had a sense of like school of hard knocks. He convinces him that, you know, I lied because I knew I'd never get a chance if I told the truth of my biography. And this sort of, you know, resonates with this school of hard knocks boss.

• 35:33Ezra Klein?

  And he's also, by the way, dating the daughter.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:36Ezra Klein?

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

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:40Ezra Klein?

  So the connections are operating in his favor too.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  And, and you're starting to see this understanding, which I think of him as like, having once been a foreign correspondent myself in India. I think of Epstein as like, operating in New York like a foreign correspondent from Coney Island, right? And I think this is really, really important because he's mapping, he's socially mapping, anthropologically mapping what is happening here in New York, but is not named out loud, right? Like the way that charity galas function in New York. I mean, if you're rich and, you know, eighth generation rich in New York, you don't think about what they are, you just go to them.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  But if you're an outsider, you understand the gala is doing a very specific thing. It, 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 kind of 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 kind of helping to manage money for him. And over the course of time, manages more and more money for him.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  And, and it appears now, basically was stealing a lot of money.

• 37:14Ezra Klein?

  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 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, right? You can't find people to work with. Somehow for Trump, that wasn't true. And for Epstein, that wasn't true.

• 37:58Ezra Klein?

  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, you know, winning the lawsuits or the lawsuits don't have, you know, 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

• 38:41Ezra Klein?

  from the outside, because you would think when things are so relational that that would get around. But he's a con man and he is leaving people broken in his wake, right? 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. And he's always one step ahead of his own catastrophe.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  There's a very kind of 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. Like, 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 with like brilliant businesses.

• 39:33Ezra Klein?

  He becomes Wexner's, I mean, this is jumping out in your story, but he becomes Wexner's money manager. Maybe he just moves Wexner's money into his own accounts.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:41Ezra Klein?

  It's not that complicated of a con. He has power over the money.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  I never think of simple ideas like that. That's my problem. That's my problem.

• 39:48Ezra Klein?

  You're trying to write books, man. It's a lot of sweat.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Do things the hard way. No, but you're right, but, but I think what's so interesting here, think, think about something now we've had more time to metabolize in 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, right?

• 40:25Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is, I think the human capacity to just, to not want to stick your neck out.

• 40:51Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:06Ezra Klein?

  Let me give an example of this. We've mentioned Kathy Rummel, right? The former- White House Chief Counsel under Obama. Right? So you're dealing with somebody-

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Which, just for the folks at home-

• 41:16Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Is the lawyer who represents the American presidency.

• 41:21Ezra Klein?

  And there is no human being in America. This is 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 Ts and dotting your Is. 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.

• 42:02Ezra Klein?

  So this email I want to read it to you is from Rummel to Epstein in 2014. Right? 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."

• 42:20Ezra Klein?

  Epstein writes back, "Girl, careful, I will renew an old habit." This week, Thiel, Summers, Bill Burns, Gordon Brown, Jocelyn, Counsel on Europe and Nobel Chairman, Mongolia Prez, Hardeep Puray, India, Boris, Gates, Jabbar, Qatar, Sultan Dubai, Kossen, 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 Counsel. Holy shit. I'm, 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,

• 43:05Ezra Klein?

  "Hey, look, we can all joke." I mean, this after his conviction-

• 43:09Speaker 02

  She refers to herself as a girl jokingly. And he says, "Careful, don't call yourself a-

• 43:14Ezra Klein?

  This is after his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor, but she-

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Don't use that word 'girl' around me, otherwise I might renew an old habit."

• 43:22Ezra Klein?

  And then, "Hey, look at all these people I can put you next to."

• 43:28Ezra Klein?

  It's just a kind of remarkable, you see it all there in one.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  It really is.

• 43:32Ezra Klein?

  And with somebody who, of anybody in this country, would understand risk.

• 43:39Ezra Klein?

  And yet, even for her. Like, the possibilities outweigh whatever voice there should have been inside that should have been like a, like an alarm going off.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  How you go from

• 43:57Speaker 02

  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 kind of way it glides from

• 44:39Speaker 02

  a joke about how he's a criminal pedophile to here is this kind of Mad Libs of the Davos elite. Like, 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.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  But, but this is, and then, of course, now she's at Goldman Sachs. And I hope the PR department there will, will get in touch with you and let her come on the show. She makes $20 million a year, so has a good life, but...

• 45:38Speaker 02

  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 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 within this new economy. Or AI is gonna... And you're just like swimming in the muck. It is people like these folks that we are...

• 46:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  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 Hermes Apple Watch banned as a gift from Epstein. This is what they're doing as you struggle to just eke out your life.

• 47:47Ezra Klein?

  So I want to talk about the the girl side of Epstein. And I want to do this in a in a way escalating from the way he used that reputation as power and currency, all the way to the way it looks to have become, I mean, the way it was criminal.

• 48:05Ezra Klein?

  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, right? 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. It is 2013. Epstein writes to Musk, "Any plan for NY? The opening of the General Assembly has many interesting people coming to the House."

• 48:50Ezra Klein?

  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. Pivot's. 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? Just kidding. There is no one over 25, and all very cute."

• 49:34Ezra Klein?

  Substein shifts to saying, "No, no, this party isn't going to be UN diplomats. It's going to be girls 25 and under."

• 49:42Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  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 it's, 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 in Larry Summers' mind, like Epstein is a guy who like knows a lot about sex or something, it's like it's not category.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  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, you don't want resistance. You don't want pushback, right? 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.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  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

• 53:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:30Ezra Klein?

  I think that 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, about how many underage women and girls he's abused.

• 54:04Ezra Klein?

  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, right? Lucrative and loose. 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 loose, right?

• 54:44Ezra Klein?

  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. There's 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, they're pretty wild.

• 55:24Ezra Klein?

  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 is it is pulling people towards him. Yeah. Because even that conviction is part of his loose-ness. 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.

• 55:53Ezra Klein?

  Of living.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  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 described in the Times piece as a kind of meridional aristocracy, where they have aristocratic powers. But for most people, it's not inheriting land or a family title that gets you into that world today. These are highly educated, credentialed people for the most part.

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  I always think this is so telling. The elite used to work less, fewer hours than the working class.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Striking facts in modern American life.

• 56:37Ezra Klein?

  And now they work more.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yes. 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 mistakes. It's conservative, it's safe, it's 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 like 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,

• 57:21Speaker 02

  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 like maybe offering like a toxic opinion on something. And this was this entree into something maybe different, maybe something they felt they were owed.

• 57:46Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 58:31Ezra Klein?

  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 tits? Redacted. She's a character, short term, has an older boyfriend going to acting school, a tennis. 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?

• 59:15Ezra Klein?

  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, for two reasons. One is because you see this in this moment, like when he recognizes like somebody who's got a shared interest, right? Begins to pull them in and begins to, he's 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, right? This is like 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.

• 59:57Ezra Klein?

  So what we are seeing here, and I mean, there are emails and files and texts and so on. We don't yet have that have not been released.

• 1:00:05Ezra Klein?

  It's very, very incomplete. But you can see how it goes from the reputation is the guy who is always covered in women, all the way down to the procure 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's going to be very different.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  I think it's a very important point. Because people like Steve Tish don't actually email. Like this a lot there. I mean, again, this is a 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 10 times more than it. Imagine 10 times more names. Imagine, you know, that is happening in phone calls, that is happening in things that we will never see and never know, right?

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  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 Lori Tish, who's Steve's sister. And, you know, 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, you know, things like, "It's a very unfair world.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  It's a 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

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  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 change this kind of thing? How could this kind of thing ever change? And I, 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

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  the system is encouraging them to behave and allowing them to behave.

• 1:03:11Ezra Klein?

  I want to stay for a minute, though, on discretion. You were saying a minute ago, why would Steve Tish do this with Jeffrey Epstein? 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, right? 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

• 1:03:56Ezra Klein?

  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 caution, like I'm surprised to see these people writing and talking this way, with

• 1:04:28Ezra Klein?

  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 I, 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.

• 1:05:13Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  You know, 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...

• 1:06:04Ezra Klein?

  A lot of people.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And again, Republicans, Democrats, all kinds of people.

• 1:06:07Ezra Klein?

  And they were consistent.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. One has to assume that at technical level, everyone there knew different facts and different amounts of things. And yet, if you were to read them as a text together, and it's a book, there's like a cloud of common sense about who this guy is. That's what's so interesting, right? It's contained in that. And maybe it is a coincidence that they all talk about him and women. Maybe he had... He was equally interested in classical music and they all just forgot to mention it. Maybe...

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  This was not only about what had happened before that. Right? And so what a lot of them, who had kind of prestige to spare, you know, these universities that take money from dodgy people and then to give them the glow of the university. They were kind of selling him these reputation laundering services that weren't just about getting the reputational stink off of him. 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.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  The reputational cleanse allowed this to keep going.

• 1:08:53Ezra Klein?

  I think that is right. That is clearly right. But I want to stay on Trump and Epstein here for a minute.

• 1:09:02Ezra Klein?

  One thing I've been thinking about across the course of this conversation is the sort of 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, right? Trump does seem to drop the relationship at a certain juncture. But here at this moment, they're very close. Oh, three. Every day is another wonderful secret. And the thing I've been trying to track through this conversation is the way that power acts

• 1:09:40Ezra Klein?

  as its own fact and shifts what other facts mean to other people. There's much of this known, suspected, intimated scene 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 is just a, 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?

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  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 you would like not allow anyone in your life to act. There's January 6.

• 1:11:00Ezra Klein?

  But there's just so much power around him now that it's like there's nothing to be done about it. So everybody just accepts him as a kind of social fact. I mean, he is. I mean, he is a president. 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 become powerless, all these people who, you know, in their hearts kind of hate him, which are, 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

• 1:11:43Ezra Klein?

  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 like, power is what makes you invincible. The power can come through many different mechanisms. It could be money, it could be connections, it could 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, you know, 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

• 1:12:26Ezra Klein?

  at one point. And like, 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 just, it's all so on point.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  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, the distribution or the, or the paucity of bravery.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  This country is full of people today, and I'm speaking specifically of leaders and elites with opportunities to form some sort of resistance to the loss of democracy in this country.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Our elite, including some of the people we've talked about today, is full of people whose grandfathers stormed Normandy and who are lionized in those families

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  and who don't have the bravery as the grandchildren of those people to like 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.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  I think we have found out

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  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

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  that you and I might have,

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  but no courage. And I think you're right that Epstein exploited that in an earlier phase, obviously on a smaller...

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  But barbaric scale. But in some ways, it's a dress rehearsal for now someone who's a con artist in the same vein, 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.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  That's progress in and of itself. All these women who risked everything to tell this story, ruined their own lives, tell this 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, you know, clickbait and politicians who, exactly as you say, like 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,

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  "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 am morality,

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  the mercenary mentality, the view of other people who don't have power as kind of disposable things to kind of get past on the way to your own quest. We have a choice of...

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Who we elevate in so many spheres of American life. And I hope this this story doesn't just become the greatest clickbait of all time and actually becomes a wake up call.

• 1:18:14Ezra Klein?

  I do think that this story is a lesson of what power does, right? 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 will 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 it is cowardice on behalf of elites who are not cowardly in the first Trump term.

• 1:18:56Ezra Klein?

  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 bald faced, 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

• 1:19:41Ezra Klein?

  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 know, his politics. Or did he do it because he's buying excess? And that's the that's the rules of the game right now. And it'd be good for OpenAI to have that relationship with Donald Trump. And either way, like, I find it reprehensible.

• 1:20:19Ezra Klein?

  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 gonna have to learn about Epstein.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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 kind 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, you know, your connections are more of a source of power than, say, if you go back a couple hundred years, the land you owned was like a really big source of power. I wonder if part of what is happening is, in an age of network power, courage becomes harder.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  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 kind of support from their church community, or from the sports league they were associated with, these other things. A lot of those things have kind of vanished.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  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, like, do you know this person? Do you know this person? And I just wonder if courage is a value that has suffered in a network age. Because to be courageous is to break ties.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  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're out of the network, you go to zero very quickly.

• 1:23:17Ezra Klein?

  Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  I have been deeply myself, going back to narrative nonfiction, after, you know, my first two books were very much in the kind of reported in stories, then 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 Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc, one of the greatest works of 10 years of immersive reporting, deeply understanding community in the Bronx, and Behind the Beautiful Forever is by Catherine Boo, another one of the

• 1:24:00Ezra Klein?

  I think one of my

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  in that field.

• 1:24:02Ezra Klein?

  Top five or 10 books of all time.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  And then I'm going to tell you a third one, that maybe the listening audience can help with. This book has 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, in a way that makes her look good. But her name is Kunchita 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 like, the really big story here, a lot of things you

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  and I've been talking about, not just Not just this piece, not just that piece. And I have been fascinated to learn that, you know, while people have been willing to publish individual stories of individual survivors and this and that, you know, 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. I want to read Conchita Sarnoff's book, and I hope someone will publish it.

• 1:25:14Ezra Klein?

  Anand Giridharadas, thank you very much.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:25:29Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Zoklans is produced by Jack McCordick, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristin Lin, Emme Kelbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina C. Maluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Spinning Audio is Andy Rose Strasser.