I highly recommend reading Helen Rumbelow's UK Times article, 'I Studied
The Latest Epstein Files. As A Woman, This Is What I Felt.' Non-paywalled
link here:
https://archive.ph/hI1gs

Here are four of my posts on LinkedIn about the Epstein files and who's in
them, from a female perspective:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7424869059839574016/

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7425176380268662785/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cindygallop_reminder-this-month-makes-it-17-years-that-ugcPost-7424944258350120960-Xorx

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7425186871225270272/





On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 9:00 AM John Sundman via Silklist <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I suppose it goes without saying, but please do not share this gossip
> (below) outside of Silklist. It's tangential to the question of the
> humanity of billionaires, but you may find it amusing.
>
> I reside on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, USA, a place
> where many people have (second or third. . .) vacation homes. In times when
> I didn't have income from freelance technical writing, I have worked for my
> friend Lou, a general contractor, on construction/home-remodelling jobs.
> Over the years I've done a lot of work — a couple of months — on a house
> that belongs to Harvard professor Dan Goleman. Most of this work was done
> during the colder months when Goleman wasn't there. It was a nice but not a
> grand house. Four bedrooms, 3 bathrooms. It needed *a lot* of
> maintenance. It had a view of Vineyard Sound and the Elizabeth Islands,
> which made it worth millions.
>
> From wikipedia:
>
> *The term [emotional intelligence] became widely known with the
> publication of Daniel Goleman's 1995 book: Emotional Intelligence – Why it
> can matter more than IQ. Goleman followed up with several similar
> publications that reinforce use of the term. Late in 1998,
> Goleman's Harvard Business Review article entitled "What Makes a
> Leader?" caught the attention of senior management at Johnson & Johnson's
> Consumer Companies. The article argued that EI comprised the skills and
> characteristics that drive leadership performance. Johnson & Johnson funded
> a study which concluded that there was a strong relationship between
> superior performing leaders and emotional competence, supporting theorists'
> suggestions that the EI is a distinguishing factor in leadership
> performance.*
>
> According to Lou, Goleman and his wife purchased the house in partnership
> with another Harvard professor & his wife. Alas, Goleman evidently did a
> poor job assessing this couple — his EQ failed him? — and he ended up
> getting swindled by them and losing a lot of money. Goleman also bought a
> fixer-upper house on the New Jersey palisades, and lost a lot of money on
> that project. Which is why he was always hustling to make as much $$ as he
> could from his status as the Guru of Emotional Intelligence. I met Goleman
> only once. Lou introduced me to him saying 'John's a writer, like you.'
> Goleman was nice enough but didn't strike me as especially emotionally
> astute. He asked if I would give him one of my books, and offered to sell
> me one of his, lol.
>
> I also spent nearly a year working on the trophy house of David Wetherell,
> who was, very briefly, a billionaire. In 1999 his company CMGI was the
> poster child for 'the new economy' — later better known as 'the dot-com
> bubble.' When I was working on his house the CMGI stock price was
> ~$300/share. Two years later it was fifty cents and the stock got
> delisted from NASDAQ. I wrote an essay for *Salon* about that experience
> — *How I destroyed the New Economy
> <https://www.salon.com/2002/10/23/wetherell/>*— in which I hypothesized
> that the reason the bubble burst was because I had helped to build
> Wetherell's mansion on an ancient Wampanoag burial ground.
>
> In my very brief encounters with Wetherell, he did seem to conform to the
> 'billionaire == arrogant jerk' stereotype. My main job on that site was
> moving heavy stuff from point A to point B — hard, dirty, grunt work, which
> made me virtually invisible. Wetherell barely registered me as a fellow
> human. But he did notice the essay, lol. It still rankled him five years
> later when he threatened to sue me and *Salon*. "Whenever anybody
> searches for me on the internet, that damn story is the first thing that
> comes up!" But everything I had written was true & I had witnesses
> (including the Wampanoag tribal genealogist & tribal medicine man) who
> backed me up & *Salon* stood by the story. Wetherell did not sue.
>
> jrs
>
>  P.S. The Wetherell stuff is not confidential ;^)
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 5:46 AM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 3:59 PM Manar Hussain via Silklist <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> I had a long chat with an SF friend last year about the challenge of
>>> maintaining a meaningful healthy relationship with his best friend who went
>>> from modest to billionaire over the last few years. Despite the friendship
>>> remaining mutually strong and important to both of them, he's found himself
>>> *silently* self editing what he does and says to keep it workable. This is
>>> the progressive adaptation, ecosystem change, that fuels the emerging new
>>> reality for his billionaire friend that ratchets down awareness of what it
>>> is to be "ordinary folk"... lower empathy, lower EQ by default.
>>>
>> One thing I have observed with the few billionaires I have worked with in
>> the past is that, outside of a small subset of their pre-existing
>> friends+family network, almost EVERY SINGLE interaction with a human being
>> has to do with said human being asking them for money. That is also one
>> major factor in warping their worldview.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Silklist mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
>>
>
>
> --
> *Sundman figures it out! <https://johnsundman.substack.com/>* — an
> ongoing autobiographical meditation.
> --
> Silklist mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
>


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