00:00Can you talk about that top, that relation, those associations or relationships he had with the mathematicians and with Harvard and I think with MIT to some extent as well.
00:11Official MIT too, yeah.
00:13From what you observed, what's the reason behind him having, developing those ties with Harvard, with MIT and with certain professors and others associated with those institutions?
00:30He really was profoundly interested in that area of science and in the brain and in, I mean, if you were in Stephen Jay Gould or the major scientist on happiness, it came, I believe, from a genuine area of interest, not from anything.
00:51And how did he become friends with them? How was he able to spend time with them? Meaning, did he donate to the university and then they were kind of, it was mandatory fun for them or did he have relations with them where he would, you know, host them?
01:12I don't know if the chicken or the egg came first, but when I met him first, I mean, he was already doing a lot of this stuff. This is not, I've read, so this is why I'm saying this, I was not responsible for these, for this area of interest.
01:28I mean, I certainly, sorry, just to balance a second before it slips my mind and I leave something out. There was an institute in New Mexico called, anyone? The Institute of, it's very famous.
01:48We're not talking Alamos. We're not talking Alamos. Anyway, all right, there's a very famous institute in New Mexico, you can look it up. It'll come to you the minute you put it in your computer.
01:56And there, I had some of the biggest brains ever. Those, that relationship came through me. So I, that's me. And that is because my father was, um, one of the major scientific, hit up my family fortune, when I had one, came from scientific
02:18scientific publishing. And when, uh, started from the thing that you were asking me yesterday. My father was in, uh, the Second World War, I told you. And he won the military cross. And then he actually did become, he was part of intelligence back in the war. And his job was to, um, interrogate German scientists and prisoners of war.
02:40Um, and then he had parlayed into a business with Springer Verlag and then into Pergman Press, which was the scientific journals business.
02:51And he had an interest. He, he believed that, um, its knowledge is what would prevent war. And the biggest scientific discoveries, well, not all of them, but many of them are coming from the Eastern Bloc.
03:04And that's, uh, and that's how we have the relationship with Santa Fe Institute and Murray Gelman specifically. And I introduced Epstein to Murray Gelman. Sorry.
03:15This is the Santa Fe Institute.
03:17Yes. Thank you. And, um, Murray Gelman was there. And Murray Gelman and Epstein got along very, very well.
03:24He was the man of the war.
03:25So, so, so do you know whether, um, so while you, when you meet Mr. Epstein in the early 90s, continuing on, so not what he had done before, um, did he, why do you think from what you saw or what you heard, he had the relationship or wanted to have the relationships that he had with Harvard and with, and with MIT?
03:51So, so I think that, uh, that may have come with Wexner. I'm not sure. But that's something that I think that Wexner maybe had a relationship with Harvard and that he used that relationship to, uh, I believe he funded a lot.
04:06And if he didn't, that his clients, of which Wexner obviously was one, would fund and he would, he would then make, he would arrange the fund or organize the fund or.
04:21We're going to take, we'll take a break in a, in a, in a minute, but just to kind of set us up for what we're going to talk about next. Um, Mr. Ep, we talked yesterday morning about Mr. Epstein's kind of business and how he
04:35had money, um, did he seem to live beyond his means as far as what he was making? So, did you ever get the sense while you were with him that it was, um, suspicious or curious how he was able to have the funds to, you know, buy, you know, two planes, you know, an island, New Mexico, you know, the ranch, um, almost, almost unlimited funds.
05:04Uh, you said it perfectly. I thought it was astonishing, but I didn't have any reason to believe that it came from anything nefarious. I saw him work. I never saw him really do anything other than be on the phone. There's that.
05:21And he had a lot of meetings, but he had a lot of accounts. And he dealt with pretty much every financier that you could care to mention. And if I could have access to the names, I'd be able to tell you which ones you were.
05:36I just don't remember them all. But in every bank, Goldman, Lehman, um, all of them, to my mind, anyway. And most of the major businessmen at that time, he was in the Council of Foreign Relations.
05:53So you had access. That's an extraordinary list of people. It just is. And then he, you asked me about his, so I thought about it last night, how to try and explain what it was.
06:06And I think the best thing is to focus only on Wexner's business. So I was present for some of their meetings in some of their business.
06:14And, um, and I listened. And, um, so things that I personally recollect and I know I heard was that he would, when I, I told you yesterday, I think that he would, no detail was too small.
06:29So he would do the contracts with the staff, I think. And I saw that myself. Um, and he also organized all the trusts for all the children.
06:39So if Wexner had kids, and if he did, he did have children. So every time there was a child, he would create a trust for that child.
06:47And I don't, these were complex, uh, financial structures, um, that would contain stocks of the various businesses.
06:56He restructured, when I was there, Wexner's business in its entirety, as I recollect.
07:02And then, not only that, but there were business interests. So Wexner owned, or built, or designed, or I don't quite know how to characterize it, but New Albany, which is a center outside of, uh, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, specifically.
07:18And he built, I remember this conversation, he, he built himself a very large house, like, truly enormous.
07:26And it's one of the biggest private homes I've ever been to. And he built all the houses around him. And I'm like, this is so random, why would you do that?
07:34And he said to me, well, because I want to make sure that the people around me are my friends, I want my friends around me and my neighbors.
07:40And I was like, well, whatever, okay. You know, I, I, I've been around enormous wealth my whole life.
07:47And I've like, at some point, I just say, okay, whatever, I get it. And I don't, and so that's what he did. But Epstein ran New Albany, which included a country club, and a golf club, and a, I mean, gosh, your boss is one of the all-time great, you know, businessmen in this area.
08:04You know what that is. And, and he certainly does. So, there'd be that. And there was a business business that Epstein, well, he told me he owned it.
08:11Of course, I can't say that for sure, because, I don't know, but, but it's a sports thing. Riddell, is that a business? Riddells? I thought about it last night. It's red, and it had hats, helmets. Riddells?
08:28Riddell.
08:29Riddell. Yeah, Riddells.
08:31Okay.
08:31Now, how he owned that, well, he told me he owned it. But how he owned that, I, but that was before I, I think I came in and he had it. Or he said he did.
08:41Got it.
08:41And he had other businesses. He had, I know this notion that he did nothing, and he just was a grifter and whatnot. Okay.
08:49I'm not going to say that's not true, but it's not what I saw, and it's not what I believe is true.
08:55Not because it couldn't have been that he didn't grift, or whatever the word is, of people, but I saw what I thought looked like real work.
09:05Bye-bye.
09:06Bye-bye.
09:06Bye-bye.
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