[VISION] | PEOPLE: There are no visible people in the image. | TEXT: ``` understand English?" Epstein: "Ok. Count me in." Hence, Epstein, like many in the late 70s, arrived on Wall Street. As will happen to a generation of others, by the fortuitous luck of being on Wall Street at that point in time, Epstein is transformed by a new, much faster, form of upward mobility than has ever before existed. With an extreme facility for mathematics as well as for getting along with rich men, he transforms at an even faster rate than so many others who are also being quickly transformed. He moves into the penthouse of a new building at 66th Street and Second Avenue—still in the shadow of the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s on Second was the glamour address—a building that was he says, as a fond memory, full of “actresses, models, and euro trash.” (It would shortly become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, who has never had drink or taken any drugs, was a regular). If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to embrace a level of acute financial abstraction. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a 50’s mentality. But in the mid 70s stock options started to be traded on an exchange. In essence, the first formally traded derivatives. The movement of these instruments are not directly tied 1to 1 to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from relationships to mathematics. In a sense I didn’t really make money as much as I tried hard to create it.” This was an intellectual activity of a fairly high order. Intellectual activity aside, he meets Helen Gurley Brown and she makes him Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Bachelor of the Month in 1980. “What,” I ask, “was your social life like?” “Well, I was a playbo