Very wealthy people can hold lots of gatherings you can’t afford to hold, Eric Weinstein notes:
This is a superpower.
They then take what they learned at the last gathering, tweak it and repeat it at the next one, and repeat this to learn more and more. Dinner as an intelligence tool that pays for itself many times over.
Epstein did this. How do I know? Because he did it with Physicists and there aren’t all that many top ones with original ideas. So we all kinda know everyone in that circle.
Thus, when someone does this in a tiny scientific community, you knew exactly who he was tweaking if you were honest. “Oh that’s Lee and Carlo disagreeing in there…That’s Lisa…and I can hear Andy’s change of heart from last year too!”
It didn’t work on me just because I knew those people because it was a small science community. If it were sports or vacation destinations, it might not have been as obvious to me at all. This was a flaw in his construction.
Second Conclusion: He was holding gatherings and repeating scientists to each other. Scientists who wanted to see the magic trick for what it was could see it. Scientists who needed his grant money could also look past it because he wasn’t repeating things verbatim. Hence the disparity. Not going to lie: I also wanted to look past it. I just couldn’t ignore it for some reason. It was menacing, even before the Florida conviction.