“Okay,” he says, after listening for a bit to Pierce and his update on the rapid Bitcoin price swings, “I have opportunities here. But an additional feature of my decision problem, roughly speaking, is that the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—I mean I don’t look that great now—but I could go from being seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less probity...” “Well,” says Pierce in seeming dramatic understatement, “‘ no question I expect as in any nascent business one is going to have some low quality characters playing early in the space...” That evening, in the Epstein dining room (he seems rarely to use the rest of the house’s 50,000 square feet), there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and Thorbjorn Jagland, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, who offers an affable, but generally scathing, critique of U.S. diplomacy (and a brief defense of Obama’s Peace Prize award) and to whom Epstein offers a ride back to Europe on his jet. The next morning, it’s Ehud Barack, the former Israeli Prime Minister, for breakfast. Barack 1s, over his omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then a high ranking official from the Obama White House, whose name | am asked not to use. There follows the former head of the UN Security Council, Hardeep Purie, and then head of the central bank of Kazakhstan, Kairat Kelimbetov. Then Nathan Myhrvold the former chief technology office at Microsoft. Then Martin Nowak, a Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, the institute that Epstein has funded with $30 million. Part of Nowak’s research has to do with trying to “describe cancer mathematically.” (Epstein preempts Nowak’s explanation : “Think of cancer the same way as you think of a terrorist group. The NSA has been able to