Extreme Wealth – Episode 1: Clay Cockrell and the Champagne Problems of the 1%
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we debut a special project within Bribe, Swindle or Steal: single-topic episodes that focus on extreme wealth. For years Alexandra Wrage has worked on corporate compliance and anti-corruption efforts, a field that provides a front-row view into human corruptibility. In these episodes, she digs into the practical, philosophical, political, and even spiritual roots of why people risk everything—from scandal to criminal charges—for the allure of money, even when all of their material needs are more than covered. She will explore some surprising challenges of wealth alongside the ways in which greed changes people and extreme wealth changes the rules that we all live by.
Her first guest in this series is Clay Cockrell, a therapist in New York City whose Walk and Talk Therapy practice specializes in treating very wealthy clients. The problems they bring to therapy give him a unique insight into the privileges, the anxieties, and the perils exclusive to the 1%.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | And I say this a lot. Wealth at this level is dangerous. It's toxic. It's not good for you. |
| 0:12.0 | It's not good for us to watch it. So there has to be an awareness here that people die of this. |
| 0:17.0 | Drug overdoses, jumping out of planes, searching for adrenaline rush because |
| 0:22.2 | you're just bored with life. Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, windle, or steel. I'm |
| 0:27.5 | Alexandra Rogge, and we're doing something a bit different today. We're launching a series that |
| 0:31.5 | won't look at financial crime so much as the great driver of financial crime, the pursuit of |
| 0:37.4 | or preoccupation with wealth itself. |
| 0:40.3 | I want to understand how extreme wealth changes people, both the people holding the money and those close to them. |
| 0:46.3 | How does wealth either reveal or alter human nature? |
| 0:50.3 | We'll be speaking with some people who are very rich and others who have unique views into this community that few people ever get. |
| 1:06.9 | We're joined today by Clay Copperle, who has a unique perspective on the ultra-wealthy as a therapist in Manhattan. |
| 1:13.6 | He focuses on a clientele that is squarely within the top 1%. |
| 1:18.6 | Can you just start by talking us through how you ended up with this client base? |
| 1:26.6 | Yes. It's an odd story. So I had a unique practice to begin |
| 1:31.6 | with that instead of meeting in an office, I walked with my clients in Central Park, |
| 1:37.5 | walk and talk. It was actually my wife's idea. And it took off and I loved it. My client found it |
| 1:44.1 | very effective. About five years into it, |
| 1:47.1 | I got a client who was an entrepreneur who liked to think outside the box. And he loved it. |
| 1:54.0 | He was very wealthy. And I hadn't worked a lot with wealthy people. He kind of passed my name around, a very small world that you really can't market to this world. |
| 2:06.1 | They're very cautious. |
| 2:08.4 | But because he vouched for me, I began seeing a lot more of the ultra-high net worth individuals. |
| 2:15.8 | And then it kind of became a specialty of mine. People would say, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.