Anand Giridharadas

JPMorgan flagged over a billion dollars in suspicious transactions.

He is revealing how these elites make decisions about trust that I think are really different from the way folks at home go through the world and make decisions about this.

I think you make decisions about, make character judgments about people, make judgments about kind of how honest they have been and therefore will be.

These billionaires, these super elites, these super lawyers are,

are working on a whole different kind of system.

And their system has to do, as you say, with how kind of loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given day in this network.

And what Epstein figured out was how to game this.

He figured out

the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character.

In fact, character may be a liability for some of them, maybe kind of an unnecessary source of friction.

These people are actually not that grounded in the evidence of how someone has lived.

These people are making very thin-slice judgments

about how central you are in the same networks they are.

And therefore, something as simple, and this is true, something as simple as dining at Michael's restaurant here in Midtown can do extraordinary wonders for people in the super elite.

Now, most people listening to this will not have heard of the restaurant Michael's in Midtown.

But Michael's is an example of a restaurant, a perfectly nice restaurant,

But as an example of a place where if you can arrange to have lunch there, you will create an impression among certain people in publishing in New York, among certain people who are in network television in New York, in certain people in finance in New York, that you are in a certain place.

And on your way in and out,

Someone might introduce you to this person, and I've seen this kind of organism flourish.

And then these people will just assume, like, you must be fine, right?