Anand Giridharadas

If you have met people in those kinds of worlds, finance people, even if you make a lot of money in it, they're often very, very, very boring people.

And I don't say this as slander, right?

They know it.

I've had so many conversations with people in this world where there's an insecurity about how boring they are.

So they want something else.

Then there's a bunch of academics.

Academics, I think, really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising.

Well, it's a tough era to be an independent thinker, and so the academics want money and access.

And Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, talks about how's life among the lucrative and the louche, he asks Epstein.

So he wanted access to a kind of like a party scene that's not available to him.

So everybody...

had something that they needed.

But his gift, I think, if it can be called that, was understanding and mapping that so well.

It's an extraordinary story of...

All of these kinds of brokering that he was engaged in occurring in one relationship of two people.

So Staley and Epstein cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship between Epstein, the individual financier, and J.P.

Morgan, now in its current form, the largest, I think, financial institution in the world, if I'm not mistaken.

And again, for folks listening to this at home, it may seem a little strange.

Like, what does J.P.

Morgan need?