NPR

We all know the saying it's not what you know, it's who you know.

And so for career advancement and business success, what matters more? Honing our skills or building our network?

Well, it depends.

But the recently released Epstein files have shown in unprecedented detail how elite politicians,

business leaders, and celebrities profit from connections.

Case in point, Jeffrey Epstein giving former Israeli prime minister

Ehud Barak advice on how to make money after leaving political office.

They will know more about what you can do for them than you can guess.

In other words, private companies will know how they want to use ex-politicians for their reputations

or for the doors they can open. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Daryon Woods.

And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, Elite Power Brokering. The Epstein Files have revealed

extraordinary details about how many top business people and politicians operate inside an economy

of favors and implicit debts. We'll learn just how much personal networks are valued compared to

competency, and we'll hear more of that conversation between Epstein and Ehud Barak.

In government, there's a concept called the revolving door. That's when people in the private

sector go to work for the government, maybe as a regulator. Later, if they go back to work for the

industry, they were just regulating. The door revolves around and around. Looking through the

Epstein files, one thing that was striking was just how blended the

networks of elite decision makers were between the public and private sectors. And this

revolving door has some problems, of course. It could mean that regulators go soft on the industry

if they're hoping to later get hired by them. At the same time, it means that people in the government

...