is, in Epstein’s dining room, always an alternative

is, in Epstein’s dining room, always an alternative version of world events—“perception versus reality,” says Epstein, “not to imply that one necessarily has greater weight than the other.” “Why,” I ask Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do so many people keep coming back here, everything considered.” This is before the most recent blowup but has been an obvious question ever since his stint in jail. “Why we camp out here? I guess because there’s no place like it.” Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brock Pierce, a former child actor and dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious dotcom burnout with its own sex scandal—who now describes himself as the “the most active investor” in Bitcoin and the programmable currency space. After a bit, Epstein invites his next appointment to join them. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Sheikh Hamad chocolates, then focuses in on the Bitcoin investor. “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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022903