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confident. This is a back and forth, a power loop. His expertise is knowing what other people know. Which surely offers a unique sense of confidence that it is possible to understand how the world works. And in a time of such radical flux and existential instability, everybody wants to seek out someone who might have some answers or at least make you feel like he does— even, and maybe especially, the rich. The fact that he’s an outsider, even a pariah, nobody you have to fear, in his own way a secret (and all powerful people like secrets) is—if you’re not caught in his company— reassuring too. In the last days of my interviews with Epstein, he was called by a particular world-stage individual, indeed among the richest and most powerful—proudly louche himself—who, feeling out of his depth in a world of crashing oil prices and wild currency fluctuation, had come to believe he might benefit from some private tutoring. And so the math teacher got on his plane. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022893