How to Stay Off the Island
What normal people can learn from the Epstein disclosures
This past week, the Department of Justice released over 3 million pages from the Epstein files—including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
Commentators can debate whether something uniquely shocking came out of this latest release. But what is absolutely undeniable is how far-reaching Epstein’s social circle was. Well after he pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and registered as a Level 3 sex offender—the highest classification—he was enjoying the company of elites of nearly every type.
Just think about this. Someone whose sex offender status was available to anyone with Google was hanging out with:
Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, polar opposites of the Israel-Palestine debate
Steve Bannon and Larry Summers, a MAGA strategist and a Clinton/Obama economic advisor
Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—different flavors of billionaire
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, and Kathryn Ruemmler, Obama’s former White House Counsel
Earlier, of course, he was also quite close with both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
He had fully enchanted the highest echelons of tech, higher education, and politics. Even the royal family.
How?
If you take time to read the emails, you’re likely to come away even more confused. The banter is usually, for lack of a better word, stupid. Here’s how Charlie Warzel, writing in The Atlantic, described an earlier batch of releases:
Perhaps most striking is how unimpressive Epstein seems. He appears to have been a serial emailer, frequently pecking out barely legible, one-line messages in rapid succession to political advisers, journalists, and well-known personalities such as Peter Thiel and Deepak Chopra. The emails reminded me of the Elon Musk text messages that were made public in 2022 as part of a legal dispute with Twitter: Here we have another coterie of men infatuated with their own ideas and engaged in shallow conversations and insipid gossip.
So what’s going on here?
Let’s pick one person and examine their journey. I nominate Dr. Peter Attia.
Attia is a 52-year-old physician who has built an empire around longevity science. He hosts one of the most popular health podcasts in the world, wrote a bestselling book called Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, runs a medical practice that charges six figures for personalized health programs, and was just named a CBS News contributor. His whole brand is optimization—living longer, living better, making smarter decisions.
I’ve been a fan of Attia’s work for some time. Outlive is perhaps my favorite book-form distillation of longevity science, and his podcast is remarkably thorough on questions of medicine, exercise, and nutrition.
The Attia in his book and podcast is thoughtful, rigorous, and seemingly objective. Which is why it was all the more shocking to see his name in the Epstein files.
And to be clear, it wasn’t just in the files. He was mentioned 1,741 times, with extensive email correspondence between 2014 and 2019. Here are some quotes from those emails:
“You know the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…”
“Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”
“Have you decided if you’re interested in living longer (solely for the ladies, of course)?”
“I go into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him.”
The “JE,” of course, being Jeffrey Epstein.
And he wasn’t kidding about that withdrawal.
On July 11, 2017, Attia’s wife called him from an ambulance. Their infant son had stopped breathing. No heartbeat. She’d resuscitated him with CPR. Attia was in a cab in Manhattan. He didn’t come home.
We know this because he wrote about it in his 2023 book Outlive, framing it as a confession about workaholism. What we didn’t know until Friday: the “important work” was Jeffrey Epstein. The day after his son’s cardiac arrest, Attia emailed Epstein to set up a meeting. “Can you do before 10am tomorrow?” Epstein asked. “Sure. I can come earlier, also, if you have a hard stop at 10.”
His wife spent four days in the ICU alone. Attia stayed in New York for ten days.
Attia now claims that after the Miami Herald’s 2018 investigation—the one identifying 80 of Epstein’s victims—he confronted Epstein and “told him directly he needed to accept responsibility.” The emails tell a different story. In December 2018, weeks after that exposé, Attia wrote: “What is fallout from recent story? Legally any change?” Epstein replied: “same as usual, just tougher.”
That’s not a confrontation. That’s a friend checking in on legal exposure.
And even before the Miami Herald story, the public record was damning. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to “procuring a child for prostitution”—not some vague “prostitution-related charges,” as Attia claims Epstein described it, but a felony specifically involving a minor. He registered as a sex offender. This was not hidden information. It was on the internet. It was in court records. It was in news coverage at the time.
When Attia started meeting with Epstein in 2014, all it would have taken was a Google search to learn that the man hosting him in the largest home in Manhattan had pleaded guilty to procuring a child. The 2018 Herald story revealed the scale—80 victims, the sweetheart deal, the co-conspirators who escaped prosecution. But the basic fact that Epstein was a convicted child sex offender? That was public knowledge for six years before Attia claims he “came to learn” the truth.
The defense isn’t that he didn’t know. It’s that he didn’t bother to look—or he looked and didn’t care.
So call me a skeptic on Attia’s recent apology. (You can read his full statement here.)
Lesson 1: Don’t hang out with pedophiles.
Don’t talk about picking up women with them. Don’t do that when you’re married. And if your infant son is coding in an ICU, maybe—just maybe—skip the breakfast meeting with the convicted child sex offender to go be with your family.
I realize I’m setting the bar almost comically low here. And yet.
Why did so many powerful people fail this moral test?
To find an answer, let’s examine one part of Attia’s statement that I actually believe:
At that point in my career, I had little exposure to prominent people, and that level of access was novel to me. Everything about him seemed excessive and exclusive, including the fact that he lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727, and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics.
I suspect this is probably true. Epstein played the elite access game better than perhaps anyone—especially factoring in what little he brought to the table innately. No singular talent. No successful startup. No great art or invention. Just access, and the promise of more access.
His island was his most powerful asset. When you read the emails, nearly everyone—not just Attia—is obsessed with the island. Even mega-rich people like Elon Musk seem keen to visit. (”What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk wrote in one email.)
“Excessive and exclusive.” That’s the recipe. The same recipe that brought people to Diddy’s parties is what docked them on that island.
Lesson 2: Beware the lure of the exclusive.
There’s a reason luxury brands create artificial scarcity. There’s a reason velvet ropes exist. We are wired to want what we can’t have—and to value it more simply because others are denied it.
The psychologist Robert Cialdini called this the “scarcity principle”: perceived scarcity generates demand. It works on handbags. It works on restaurant reservations. And it works on invitations to private islands owned by mysterious billionaires.
I recently attended a poetry reading by David Whyte. He read his poem “Everything is Waiting for You,” which contains these lines:
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone... Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink... Everything is waiting for you.
The whole poem is a reminder that beauty, meaning, and connection are not scarce. They are everywhere—in a kettle, in a door handle, in the “simple keeping of this conversation.” You don’t need to find the exclusive room. The room you’re in is already full of what matters.
Epstein’s island was a lie. The scarcity was manufactured. The access led nowhere good. Everything you actually need is waiting for you—and it’s not behind a velvet rope. For Attia, it was his loving family and thriving medical practice. Many people would have killed for that but he lost sight of it, chasing empty thrills and the validation of others.
Lesson 3: Stop looking up.
Here’s a question worth sitting with: Why do we assume that people with more money, more status, more access have figured out something we haven’t?
Read the Epstein emails. These are billionaires, heads of state, Nobel laureates, legendary investors. And what are they doing? Trading gossip. Making crude jokes. Jockeying for invitations. Seeking validation from a man whose only real skill was making other people feel special for being in his presence.
There are no answers in elite circles. None. The people in those rooms are not happier, wiser, or more fulfilled than you are. They’re just richer. And often, as these files make painfully clear, they’re more morally compromised—because wealth and access create opportunities for corruption that most of us will never face.
Social comparison is a trap. We look at the people above us on some imagined hierarchy and assume they’ve solved problems we’re still struggling with. They haven’t. They have different problems. Sometimes worse ones. Sometimes problems that involve private islands and NDAs and lawyers on retainer.
The Epstein files are a gift in this sense: they let you see behind the curtain. And behind the curtain is just a bunch of insecure people trying to feel important.
Stop looking up. Look around. The people in your life who show up, who keep their commitments, who treat others with dignity even when no one is watching—those are the people worth learning from. Not the guy with the Boeing 727.
Lesson 4: Hold the line.
To stay off the island, we have to be clear about our values—and we have to enforce them.
There’s a debate raging about how much we should hold Attia accountable. CBS is apparently in a pitched internal battle over whether to fire him. He’s already stepped down from his role at David Protein Bars. Some people think this is going too far.
They make some version of these arguments:
People make mistakes. Let them apologize, learn, and move on.
Nobody is perfect.
His science is separate from his personal life.
These are worth considering. But here’s where I land: I don’t buy that he has learned and moved on. I think he got caught and is still deflecting. His “apology” reads like reputation management, not reckoning. He claims he confronted Epstein after the Herald story—but the emails show him asking about legal exposure, not demanding accountability.
On the question of his science: I’m not going to go out and do the opposite of what he’s recommended. But I will work to find alternative voices I want to spend more time with—people I can recommend to my fitness community without the moral baggage.
And there’s an irony here worth noting: Attia built his brand on optimization. Living longer. Living better. Making smarter decisions. He tracks every biomarker, scrutinizes every input. And yet he couldn’t be bothered to Google the man he was having breakfast with (if we are to believe him). The optimizer didn’t optimize for the thing that mattered most.
Conclusion: Stay off the island.
“The island” is not just a place. It’s a deal.
The deal is: you get access—to rooms, to people, to experiences that feel rarified and special—and in exchange, you don’t ask too many questions. You extend the benefit of the doubt. You look past the thing that should disqualify someone from your company because the company is too interesting to leave.
Attia took that deal. So did a lot of smart, successful, otherwise reasonable people. And the files make clear that most of them weren’t scheming villains. They were just... flattered. Curious. Hungry for proximity to power and wealth and the feeling of being on the inside of something.
That’s what makes the island dangerous. It doesn’t announce itself as a moral test. It feels like an opportunity. A party. A networking event with better views.
The pull is real. I’ve felt it. Most ambitious people have. The chance to be in a room you’re not sure you belong in—and the intoxicating validation of being allowed to stay. That feeling can override a lot of judgment.
But here’s what the Epstein files teach us: the rooms are not worth it. The access leads nowhere good. The people inside are not more impressive up close—they’re often less so. And the price of entry is always higher than it appears.
Just remember, the island is always out there, waiting to welcome you. The drinks are strong. The guest list is impressive. And the cost of admission is just a little bit of your soul.
Don’t go.
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One word, incisive. A great read.
This one is so good, my friend.