Every organization that produced an Epstein-related villain once called him a leader.
Peter Attia. Larry Summers. The head of the World Economic Forum. HR statements issued. Leadership transitions announced. The story told as if it’s over.
It isn’t.
Not for the women inside those organizations, who are right now having a single quiet thought: Ah. That explains everything I’ve experienced.
The subtle dismissals. The closed doors. The invitations that never came. The jokes that weren’t funny but nobody challenged them. The way one man’s voice filled the room and everyone else just . . . made room.
And not for the rest of us—because the real scandal isn’t what these powerful men did. It’s what we accept as normal that made it possible. We didn’t build this city. We inherited it. And until we see how it confines us, we’ll keep calling it home.
If you’re a leader—or in HR, or in communications drafting the familiar “we take this seriously” memo—the real question isn’t What did he do? The real question is What did we normalize?
Here are three places to look.
Entitlement: The Monologue
Someone arrives at a meeting where the agenda has been planned for weeks. They take the floor and slip into a monologue—a story about their cab driver, a stray shower thought—and just like that, the shared agenda vanishes. And the room lets it happen. Whatever, he’s just doing his thing.
But monologues aren’t harmless. They’re a quiet power play. They hijack the room. They take all the oxygen as if no one else needs any.
Every time we let a monologue run, we trade what we could have made together for one person’s need to feel important. Monologue cultures don’t just reward the person taking up space—they teach everyone else in the room to compress themselves into the tiny amount of area that’s left. They make dissent feel risky. And eventually, they teach the room that one, and only one, voice matters.
Control: The Data Demand
This one sounds responsible. Analytical. Rational.
But in practice, demanding data before considering an idea is how you control what gets considered at all. Quantitative data is inherently backward-looking. To build what comes next, we have to explore the quality of ideas, develop insights, and tap imagination. If you require solid, confirmable data before entertaining anything new, every new idea gets killed before it breathes.
It’s also a dog whistle. When we define intelligence as purely rational and severed from emotion—strictly intellectual, detached from intuition—we don’t just narrow the definition. We narrow ourselves. We strip the team’s intelligence of its full power, reducing it to something cold, calculable, and incomplete.
The narrowness, it turns out, is very convenient for the people who already control what gets measured.
Denial: The Label
When someone brings up something uncomfortable, the easiest response isn’t to investigate the issue. It’s to label the person.
Too demanding. Too sensitive. Too negative. Too emotional. Not a team player.
Labeling people as the problem is how defensive people go on the offense. The moment the messenger becomes the issue, the actual problem disappears. No investigation needed. No change required. In fact, research shows that if you just call someone emotional, not only will everyone in the room discount what they say, but the speaker will too.
The system stays intact. Which is, of course, the point.
Dozens of norms
These are three norms. But there are 21 more just like them.
I’ve spent years studying what stops us from doing our best work—and found 24 specific, concrete norms that, in both subtle and significant ways, keep us stuck. I write about them in my new book, Our Best Work: Break Free From the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us. When I share this, people almost always ask me to simplify it. To reduce the list to something smaller.
I get it; 10 would be more manageable.
But we miss a lot when we oversimplify things.
It’s like looking at just part of a cage and wondering why the animal inside doesn’t escape. If you studied any one wire, up and down its length, you might believe the animal could simply push past. If you see just some of the wires, you’d wonder if the beast actually wants to stay where it is. But until you see the whole, you miss the point. And that’s when it hits you—how the wild thing is fully ensnared. Caged. Trapped.
Not because it chooses to be. Not because it lacks power. And certainly not because it doesn’t try hard enough to escape.
The power of these norms isn’t how persuasive they are. It’s how persistent they are. It’s not just one, five, or ten things that trap us in place—it’s the way those things intertwine and twist together, a tangled network of systematically related barriers. It is their relationships to each other that make the seemingly lightweight barriers as confining as a cage.
Our complicity
So many of us shrug at the monologues. We kludge together data when asked, even when we know it’s the wrong question. We stay quiet, go along, get along—hoping to affect change without ruffling feathers. And we become complicit in our own oppression—limiting our own freedom without ever seeing the bars we built.
This is how a cage works. We don’t see the bars. We just find ourselves not going certain places, not saying certain things, not becoming certain people. And we tell ourselves that’s just how it is.
By allowing entitlement, control, and denial to be acceptable, we create an operating system that makes the Epstein Island visitors feel right at home. We participate in it. We perpetuate it.
Things will change only when we name what’s limiting us all. Not the villains—the norms.
Their own institution
Meanwhile, founders like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Casey Wasserman largely remain in place. They are, in effect, their own institution—controlling the companies, capital, and networks around them so the usual mechanisms of social accountability never quite apply.
We pushed out the ones we could reach. And called it done.
But here’s the harder question—the one that actually leads somewhere: What are we still normalizing that will grow the next set of villains we call leaders?
The cage doesn’t care which warden is in charge. It comes down only when we stop building it.