Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/17/25: Wiles Caught On Tape Lying, Bari Weiss Erika Interview Flop, NYT Mocks Eptsein 'Conspiracies', MIT Scientist Murdered, Gaza Travel Ban

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Susie Wiles caught in lie, Bari Weiss Kirk interview flop, NYT mocks Epstein 'conspiracies', MIT scientist murdered, Trump Palestine travel ban.    Brian Blase: https://x.com/brian_blase?s=20   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Donald Trump has responded to Susie Wiles' shocking 11 interviews with Vanity Fair that were reported out in a two-part series yesterday that absolutely stunned Washington. Everybody was trying to figure out exactly what happened here. Trump was asked by the New York Post if he stands by Stozy Wiles after she was quoted in Vanity Fair saying he has a quote, Alcoholics personality. Trump basically is like, yep, spot the lie. Sounds about right. And, you know, Ryan, I actually think of all of the Wiles quotes to pull out and say this is problematic or super newsworthy, that is the least of.

almost all of them in this long two-part series from Chris Whipple in Vanity Fair, because, again, like, he's self-deprecating, and he understands what she means by that. I think we kind of all understand what she means by that. Right. So, of course, it's interesting to see her talking like that about her boss in a liberal media outlet, but also I think it just speaks to, like, Trump understands when you call him things like that. It's like, what did he say to Zeran? And he's like, I've been called much worse than a despot.

Yeah. Trump famously doesn't drink, but he has said, and he said again, if he did, he would have, he has an addictive personality, he likely would have become an alcoholic. His brother was, which is a formative experience in his own life. He has the big personality and the wild mood swings of some, of that kind of person, which Wiles talked about, kind of like a dry drunk who was never a drunk. I mean, Caroline Leavitt was asked, how, what went wrong? Let's get a response on Fox here.

I wanted to ask you, Caroline, about the two-part series of articles in Vanity Fair on Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and the president's inner circle. I mean, clearly there was a lot of cooperation between the White House and Vanity Fair on this because there's numerous interviews that Susie Wiles had with the writer over the course of pretty much a year. Portraits were taken of his inner circle, including her, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller. I mean, it looks like the White House was working hand and glove with Vanity Fair, and yet here's Susie Wiles' reaction to the series of articles. The article published early this morning as a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest president, White House staff,

and cabinet in history. Significant context was disregarded in much of what I and others said about the team and the president was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president and our team. She goes on after that. You can read the full thing on X, but what happened? What went wrong? Well, look, I would just echo my boss, Susie Wiles, who is the best chief of staff in our nation's history, working for the greatest president in our nation's history, and that this was, unfortunately, another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief's words out of context.

But I think most importantly, the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story. The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House. And as Susie said today, it's deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won't distract us from making America great again. And President Trump has been such a productive president and has accomplished. more in 11 months than most presidents do in eight years because of his vision and his tenacity, which is executed on and facilitated by our great White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles,

whom I'm very proud to call a boss and a mentor and a friend. The whole taken out of context and the whole you didn't include all the good things we did is so silly because nobody reads the articles anyway. So even if they included from the administration's perspective, of all the amazing things that they think that they did, people would just pull out the quotes and circulate them on TikTok and Twitter and talk about them.

Well, and it's non-responsive to John Roberts' question, which is basically like, why is the White House cooperated? Why would Susie Wiles as a White House chief of staff? We know that's how Vanity Fair did the story. Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you all are more aware than any administration in history how the media works,

and you are like probably the most, sharp or ardent, you're probably the most ardent opponents of the media in history of presidential administrations, and that's a high bar. So why would you ever allow for 11 long interviews? Why was your chief of staff, who, by the way, in a stroke of complete irony, is the one person who's seen as Trump's gatekeeper, the only person who has successfully sort of kept Trump in line, meaning you're not letting random articles from like gateway upon it being printed out and put it on, put on his desk. You're not letting random, like Laura Lumer into the Oval Office. Reportedly, Susie Wiles is the one. Laura Lumer was at the

White House last night, by the way, but is the one who sort of keeps that type of thing at Arms Lank. Ler was at the White House last night? Yeah, I think it was for a Hanukkah celebration. But anyway, going to, moving on. Trump announced her engagement. You haven't seen this video, we're actually not moving on. No, and so we got, yeah, and so he also announced, like, banning Palestinians from the country. Is this a coincidence, or? Great question. But this is the irony of ironies is that Susie Wiles is the person who is like the gatekeeper of media access. And Susie Wiles was the person then who was giving 11 interviews. My best theory on this is that she, for a shrewd of an operator, she reportedly is,

probably thought she was off the record or would have quote approval or something like that from the journalist, whether it was a miscommunication or naivete on her part. I doubt that it was naivete. We're going to get into a second, one second about the validity of the quotes themselves. But the Caroline Levitt point here is to emphasize there was a massive. circling of the wagons yesterday. Now, we can put this next element D3 up on the screen. This is all, like, cabinet secretaries, people from every corner of Trump world going on the record in defense of Susie Wiles yesterday. And so there's this question hanging in the air

when Crystal and Sager covered the story. Because the revelation that Susie Wiles had said all of these things and spoken 11 times with this Vanity Fair reporter, is she out? Is she going to be out of a job because Trump is going to look at this as disloyal. It's going to look like a massive error in judgment from the one person who is supposed to have the best judgment in the administration. And then we pretty quickly, within a couple of hours, got an answer that question and it's no. And that question was important because that means the Trump White House without Susie Wiles would likely look more like the first administration. It would probably start to become even more chaotic. If you think it's chaotic now, it'd probably become even more

chaotic. But circling the wagons happened. Susie Weil seems to be perfectly safe in her job for now. Let's put D4 up on the screen. This gets into the validity of what actually happened here. So Wiles said it was ridiculous in an interview with the New York Times that she would have commented on Elon Musk and ketamine. Which is a lot of why is that really, why is that ridiculous? Yeah, it sounds like something someone would. We all commented on it. But anyway, go ahead. Right. Well, the author of the Vanity Fair story, according to the New York Times, played a recording for the Times where Susie Wiles is heard saying that quote. So, shockingly, the thing she was said, the thing she was quoted saying she actually did say. So, if there are any people, so Wiles said he was, quote, an avowed ketamine user, quote, odd, odd duck.

She is. All of these things, defensible. She calls him brilliant. The full quote is odd-odduck like a lot of brilliant people are or something like that. Yes, yes. He is an odd duck. Would anybody say that's a normal duck? No, a normal duck.

It's not a normal duck. You should make t-shirts, drop-site t-shirts. It's not a normal duck. But anyway, they, so this is like, you can see how Susie Wiles is in a probably very friendly back and forth with a Vanity Fair reporter. Maybe thinks she's going to have quote approval. Maybe you think she's on background or something. and is saying what everybody talks about privately when it comes to Elon Musk

over the course of the last year and it ends up in print tries to say it didn't happen. So if there were any people in the administration who were saying we think some of these quotes are fully made up, this revelation from the New York Times that the author has the recordings.

That's not ideal. Susie obviously said these things, but the question of the context, I don't doubt, and I don't think either of us doubts, that some of these things probably are more sensational. There's context left out that might make them more sensational than they actually were in conversation.

But that is what that's what journalists do. It's you have your principal, the White House chief of staff saying something. It's probably going to be sensationalized in print, which is why you don't talk to Vanity Fair if you're Susie Wiles. And a main thing we really just learned is that she has the same thoughts as most Americans on most of these people, which like, when it came to J.D. Vance, for instance, she's like, yeah, I think his conversion from like never-Trumper to pro-Trump was kind of political in a way. Right. It's like, okay. So you're

willing to just not lie about that conversion. When it comes to who's the, who's the like complete lunatic over at OMB? Russ. Yes, Russ Vote. She's like, yeah, that guy's a complete lunatic. She called him a zealot. She called him a hard right-wing zeal. Russ vote, yeah. Russ vote is, I think, anybody on the right would tell you rest vote is a hard right-wing zealot. And Maga people would be like, hell yeah. Yeah, he is. Last night, he said he's shutting down the climate, the atmospheric measurement agency that's based out of Colorado because he said they've been doing climate alarmism for too long. So, like, yeah, this guy is like a total right-wing revolutionary.

Revolutionary, there you know. Yeah, counter-revolutionary. But we'd have to have a revolution to have a counter-revolutionary. He's out there, and she agrees with that. She said that... We had a revolution after Woodrow Wilson. Okay, we don't have to get into this. She said she thought it was a little bit nuts for Trump to pardon every single January 6th,

and she was overruled on that. She said it was nuts for Musk to completely eliminate Doge and put at risk all the people that were getting PEPFAR and the AIDS treatment. So, like, and that she immediately then scrambled to do everything.

everything she could to rescue the, like, the best parts of, of USAID. So, like, we, um, and, and we also got her defense of, like, RFK Jr. She's like, he's not a kook, but my kook or something, whatever, something, something like that and that, you know, you need somebody who's, um, you know, gonna maybe, is he pushing too hard? Yeah, maybe he is, but you have to do that to, like, get back to balance. So he got some real insight into kind of like, you know, who she is and what her, what her politics are. I wouldn't read too much into the defenses, though, of her. Because up until the

second that she is chief of staff, she's the gatekeeper and she's in charge. And if you work for her, you praise her. You praise her, yeah. Like, whether you agree with it or not. And maybe you praise her in public and privately you're working to get her out. Although, rebuttal to that just quickly is that if you think Trump is pissed at her, you don't praise her. So that's where I think there's, it was safe to read a bit into it, is that they wouldn't have gone out of it. Because it's Trump and then her. And so if it was being telegraphed to them that Trump was furious about what Susie did.

Once Trump defended, then it's like, all right, let's all get in the pool. Let's jump on in. Yep. And finally, I mean, another reason you see Fox asking Caroline Levitt, like, you clearly cooperated very closely with Vanity Fair because, because they did these photo shoots, and then, of course, like, made the photos look as unflattering as is humanly possible. We can put this up on the screen in the last element here. This is the Trump team. You see James Blair. You see Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles,

Caroline Levitt, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio. It's interesting to me that you have two cabinet secretaries in this picture with, like, staffers. Not that Stephen Miller is just a mere staffer, but he is a staffer. He's not in the cabinet. So I thought that was actually kind of interesting in and of itself. I mean, it's clearly Trump's inner circle

among people who are at the White House. Do we have the Bush one to compare it to? Yes, we do. This immediately reminded people of another photo shoot. Ryan, what do you think? Do we have any staffers there? Who we got in the back?

Yeah, we do. So we've got... Actually, this is mostly... Oh, you're right. This is mostly... Well, Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State. Vice President, President.

That's Andy Card. Would you call Condoleezza Rice a staffer? She was, like, head of NSA. Depends on what point in the presidency this was, right? Yeah. What, Andy Cardin and then who's the other? Chief of State. Andy Carder was Chief of Staff.

But who's the other dude there? Oh, George Tenet. Oh, CIA, both. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, but look at that. Power poses all around. Did you see?

I did one of those from Politico magazine. No way. The Intercept. I think it's a profile of us in, like, 2019 after, like, the AOC election. Really? Is it still around? Yeah, yeah. Go Google, like, Politico Intercept 2019 or something. It's a dangerous thing to pose for. It was, it was fine. We look, Maddie was still with us, so he's in the picture.

Oh, I see it. Oh, my gosh, you're doing the crossed arms and everything. This is so funny. We'll add it in post. We're adding this in post. You look intimidating. Right, yeah, look out. I'm scared. If you're a corporate Democrat in 2019, you were... This guy's got his sleeves rolled up. Yeah, they asked me to roll the sleeves up. I was like, all right.

They asked you to roll the sleeves up? Oh, that's incredible. I was like, but I don't do that. They're like, we don't care. Let's do it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I mean, it's a dangerous... I don't know if you caught this.

Trump in the Oval Office was when he had the miracle... The guys from Minnesota, the miracle hockey team, and the other day, they had him put on a cowboy hat, and he was like, there was a man named Michael Dukakis. It's like, they put on the hat. Didn't that go well for him? Yeah, so he's very conscious of these image questions, which we all know. And by the way, this is the last point I'll make about this big story is if you don't think people of the White House believe some of these decisions are crazy, then you have not been paying enough attention. You do not understand the right in Trump's, under Trump's Republican Party, because the dissension privately about a lot of these policies is constant.

And she said tariffs, too. She was like, I thought his tariff ideas were wrong. And like, I didn't want him to roll it out. And it hasn't worked. And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you see that playing out on camera. There was disagreement in the Trump administration at the time publicly between Elon Musk and, I mean, Jameson Greer, others about the tariff policy. And so the story, it's very interesting to see how Wiles is describing it. It's fascinating to see that she did this to a journalist.

But just, no, this stuff is. of course what people are thinking behind closed doors. And you can make up your judgment about whether or not that's good or bad, but it's happening. Last point for people who might be confused, Chris Whipple is, he's most famous as the author of a book on White House Chiefs of Staff. Yes. And so my, if I had to guess, she maybe thought that this was coming out after her tenure was over. And maybe her tenure is about to be over. That's so interesting. And I think that their first conversation was pre-inauguration. And I think as they continue to have conversations and no article came out, despite her saying kind of controversial things,

she got more and more comfortable that, oh, yeah, this is coming later. This is not a problem for you now. So I'm just going to be completely honest. And so that I can give my perspective to the historian of American chiefs of staff of presidents. Yeah, that's super interesting. So he's not just a normal journalist from Vanity Fair. Like, that's the thing he's known for. So she's speaking to her own legacy. Yeah, she agrees to give a book interview. And Kushner has recommended this guy's books, by the way. So that's one of the rumors of how maybe this happened that is going around is, did Kushner make everyone feel comfortable? She probably has also talked to former chiefs of staff. Yeah. Like, what should I know about the job? And they would have spoken well of him because

she probably will in a year. Principals, you know this better than I do, but principals get afraid about book interviews because you never know how it's actually going to be used and what context it's going to come out in. And so that actually seems like a pretty good theory, too. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this?

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So first of all, the New York Times, and we'll talk about this later in the segment, New York Times did it like 30,000 word or something, article. New York Magazine, I was wrong. So this was New York Magazine. New York Times did a Jeffrey Epstein piece. So we'll talk about that at the back half of this segment. But yes, New York Magazine is out with a new profile of Barry Weiss's return from the wilderness.

Of Los Angeles. And we'll also talk about her town hall on Saturday night with Eric Kirk and how poorly the ratings turned out. But so tell us about this New York magazine profile of Barry Weiss. and like what do we learn about the way that she went from effectively fired but sort of quitting, pushed out of the New York Times, and now at the top of the kind of world of journalism. Yeah, and if people don't remember, Barry Weiss was pushed out of the New York Times because she was writing journalism that made people uncomfortable over Me Too stuff. There were constant leaks about the New York Times of the New York Times.

Times like internal slack channel of people just like gossiping about Barry because honestly a lot of it started with what she was writing on Me Too. And Bill Maher in this New York magazine article talks about how he read that Me Too piece that Barry wrote it went pretty viral at the time and said, I'm going to make this woman famous. So he's sort of trying to take credit for Barry Weiss to New York Magazine. But when it all started to crescendo was after the New New York Times published that Tom Cotton op-ed, then retracted the Tom Cotton op-ed, the bunch of staffers at the time. He said send-in the guard. They put the headline on it that said send in the troops.

So it's June of 2020, and it said we should use the Insurrection Act to quell violent protests. It did specifically say violent protests. New York Times staffers posted in unison that the piece put black New York Times staffers in danger. It became a very, very 2020 controversy. And James Bennett gets fired. Barry kind of self-deports after that to end up with Nellie Bowles, who was also at the New York Times,

a reporter at the New York Times, but married, now they have kids, they were in Los Angeles for a really long time, and what we learned from the story is that her arc at the Times, she'd been at the journal before, her arc at the Times actually piqued the interest

of some people in Los Angeles when she was originally blogging on her subset called, sense, which turned into the free press. And this is interesting because there were salon dinners happening reportedly in L.A., and I had heard about some of this. I didn't know the extent of it, with CEOs and Hollywood actors where Barry was being sort of commoditized as the hot dinner guest in L.A.

There was a joke on curb about it at the time, actually, too, that some people might remember. But she was, people were convening salon-type dinners to have Barry talk about the stifling of free expression and censorship and what was like going on with the left. And this is a lot of rich people. So you can kind of see then how this congealed and built to 2024. And then to the Ellison deal, which brought in the free press, because what was happening in the background is as there was, were struggle sessions, literally, happening at so many of these corporations, as you would imagine, there was some dissent. And it seemed as though because you had Barry Weiss, this centrist social, I don't even know what you would say. I would call her sort of socially

liberal, but what does that even mean? I don't know. But you have this kind of centrist lesbian from mainstream media that made people feel comfortable venting. their frustrations with the left. And that builds into common sense becoming big, getting major investors at the free press. And so the New York magazine piece tells that story and shows the extent to which it was bringing in extremely rich people, extremely powerful people all around Barry. And it helps us, I think, contextualize what she means to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, which is she became the go-to. And her early career and her college activism was around Israel, Palestine, where she led a

bunch of campaigns to try to get Palestinian professors fired. And a lot of people remembered that when she emerged as this leading cancel culture voice, like, wait a minute, the same person who was like literally leading cancel culture before it was a thing trying to get people fired for their political views is now saying that you should not try to get people fired for their political views but she never in the 2020 to 23 range never she didn't make Zionism or canceling Palestinian professors remotely part of her politics not one bit it wasn't and you can go through her like social media or her and her writing at the time It's basically absent from there.

And so the thing that the rich people in Los Angeles were really glomming on to was like, oh, yeah, somebody who looks young and liberal, but saying things that I agree with. Right. And then when they find out later, after October 7th, that she's also like a hardcore supporter of Israel and will bend all journalistic norms to defend Israel, they're like, well, that's a wonderful bonus. And so they got the whole package. there. So then Ellison winds up getting lunch with her or whatever they meet. And she's like, and he talks about poaching her to come to CBS if he, uh, if he ends up buying it. And to her

credit, she's like, cool, I'll do it. I'll run it. Right. I'm going to be the boss. And she reports to him. Not to the news division. Like she is the head reporting just to him. And taking a very unusual turn for an executive, turning the camera around. Right on her because she thinks that what the American right apparently wants is more people like Barry Weiss on the camera. David Ellison, by the way, just quickly before we move on to the ratings, I think that's where we're about to go. I pulled his FEC record last night. He was in 2024 a big Dem donor. And yeah, and it just makes the point that you were, because apparently it was in 2024 when he met with Barry and started talking about whether they could do some type of merger.

and in the piece that's mentioning how she's getting introduced to Jeff Bezos and, I mean, some of the richest people who have ever walked the face of the earth, and they are fascinated by her. And it just makes so much more sense that you have this $150 million deal between Paramount and the free press because she is not, she's seen as like this giant among journalists by these people who just are, I think she's, the best thing since sliced bread, because they had some well-founded fears about illiberalism creeping into the mainstream. The Tom Cotton op-ed was legitimately a bad decision. Retracting that was legitimately a bad decision from the New York Times. And so she then becomes the focal point of that angst. And it makes, I think that the story helps everyone makes sense. We had this fuzzy knowledge that this was happening, but it really fleshes out exactly how it was happening. Yeah, and so

she comes to CBS News Saturday night, she did a town hall. There was an Army Navy game leading into the town hall and ratings into it absolutely nosedived and then

kind of climbed again after the town hall was over. Glenn Greenwald, put up E2 here, making the point CBS News has 7 million subscribers on YouTube. Beyond the anemic ratings, they also put

Barry's prime time special on their YouTube channel, and it has a grand toll of 72,000 views after two days, which in fairness to Barry is 10 times more than most free press videos get. He also had said, I actually didn't think it was possible to take one of the three major

TV networks, and in prime time, drag it down to the lowliest ratings level of DNA. You're so catty. Yet Barry Weiss, in her first on-camera special, managed to a accomplish this remarkable feat. And he was sharing a Dylan Byers article there, which we can put up. This is E3. So the numbers coming in, so 1.9 total viewers, 1.9 million total viewers is across streaming and broadcast networks. This is CBS's framing of it. It's up 32% boost in the CBS

time slot, outpacing CBS seasons at date for Saturdays at 8 p.m. But if you compare it to a year ago, it was down substantially. Now, I will give her credit. It says 185 million views on social. Now, a bunch of those views are made up. Oh, social views are bullshit. TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Yeah, they're bullshit. Even, let's say it's 10% of that. Like, we covered it. Like, we talked about it. Yeah. It was on social media. Like, nothing else that CBS News has ever done it like, or CBS has done at 8 p.m. on a Saturday, um, is actually making, um, hey, on social media. Now, most people were making fun of it, so I don't know if that's, well, people were really talking about it. I mean, it definitely had people, uh, engaging in like discourse about Erica

Kirk. Yeah. I mean, it was definitely, it was definitely newsy, but the question of whether you're able to draw people back to CBS with newsiness, that's the problem she's supposed to be solving, right? I mean, she's supposed to be doing, like, good journalism and the like, but also that's supposed to be a magnet for more and more eyeballs. And that's where you see them boosting those social numbers, but we all know. And I'm sure their executives know, though I'm constantly surprised by how gullible some of these folks are, that Twitter just counts like people scrolling past it as a view sometimes. And sure, it's the same as true on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, that you don't have to actually tune in. much of it. It could be a couple of seconds to count it as a view. So are you monetizing? And are you, like, is your influence scaling up with those numbers? That's a huge, huge question. And that's,

I think, what Glenn is getting at. It's, you can say season to date going up with a big interview like that, people would probably expect bigger numbers for such a big get. I wasn't surprised by those numbers at all. I just, Erica Kirk is still not, it's not like getting the president. She's everywhere, too. Didn't she host the five? I don't know. Yeah, she like guest hosted the five. There's no shortage of Erica Kirk content, if that's, if that's your thing. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What, what's this, where is that? Where is that? Why is it wet?

Boy, do we have a show for you. From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players, comes Crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Rory Scoval, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfish is a city? and meet some memorable anti-heroes.

There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think she's a witch. And it freaks you out. He has x-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow me. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Barry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe. In season two of RipCurrent, we ask who tried to kill Judy Barry

and why. She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging

logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more that it was the culture, it was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car. a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity

that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one, or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are running late, so we'll try to do this real quickly.

But if you put up E4, new like investigation by the New York Times that runs like tens of thousands of words called scams, schemes, ruthless cons, the untold story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich. Now, the point of this seemed to be to knock down conspiracy theories. One of their lines in here, in his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. Classic New York Times formulation. Abundant conspiracy theorists say X, but we found a thing that is completely non-responsive to that thing. Like, I don't know anybody that's claiming that his blackmail operation was lucrative. Do you know, like, I've never seen somebody say the way he made his money was through a blackmail operation. If you want to talk to the conspiracy theories, the blackmail is on behalf of intelligence agencies. Right.

And also helps him stay out of jail for all of the different crimes that he's committing. Like, that would be the theory behind the blackmail operation that I've never even seen the theory that he was shaking people down. Now, I think Leon Black, actually. Maybe, like, there might be a little bit of like, okay, I'll pay you $40 million a year because you know what we've been doing. And we're just hypothesizing here and not talking, not, not, um, and we're all, and we're talking all in the realm of allegations. But that, so anyway, so that, nothing that they found here to me disproves that he worked for spy services. I was so curious to get your take on this because I saw people, um, bouncing the story around social media saying we learned so much from it. Case closed. Okay, so does it fill in some details? Yes, absolutely.

It fills in some details. Yeah, it's interesting stuff about people who were investing with him early in his career. But absolutely, you get through all of these thousands of words, and it's not case closed at all about how he made so much money. The implication or the suggestion or in some case the accusation is that his fortune was kind of from siphoning off funds from people like which I think it's true, by the way. I'm sure that is, yeah, I'm sure that's true. It doesn't, it still does not explain how he went from a fail, like he was basically pushed out of Bear Stearns, and this article explains that.

And then how you keep failing up and up and up, it doesn't actually ultimately explain that at all. That still remains, if anything, it's more of a mystery after you see how many people were screwed over by him, powerful people were screwed over by him in his early years. And actually throughout his entire career seemingly, it doesn't make any more sense. I don't think at least. Yeah. And so the Epstein Transparency Act kicked in Friday. We're supposed to get a big release of information. It'll probably come five o'clock on Friday before the Christmas break. But that'll be interesting to see what's in there. We have to cut this short. But two things I would point to. And we'll have a story on this hopefully by Friday.

Because then we can talk about it on the Friday show. At drop site. Yeah. So two things I would flag in. here that are interesting, that they, that raise more questions that they answer. So he says, they started, so he's talking about this, he said that year the couple traveled to England. While they were there, Hale took Epstein to visit a rich acquaintance of hers, Nick Lease, at his family's countryside manner. There they met Nick Nick's father, Douglas Lease, a defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government. He took an immediate liking to Epstein. The story we've been working on, focus on.

significantly on this Douglas Lees character. Go ahead and look up Douglas Lease. If you're the New York Times, you think it's sufficient to just tell your readership that he's a, quote, defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry. You're going to have to wait for drops of that news to tell you a little bit more about who Douglas Lease is and who these connections were in the arms industry and, you know, who he did as quote unquote defense contracting with. You won't be surprised to learn.

Was it Venezuela? It was not bad as well. A lot of it going on in the Middle East. Separately, they say, and this is a useful revelation, that, quote, back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger, and Pottinger's brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South.

The broker told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the the commission and then they kind of just move on uh who was pottinger a central figure in the in iran contra in which the u.s worked with israel to send weapons to iran in exchange from cash that they would eagerly send to the contras we'll get it we'll get a lot more into that so robert maxwell so they've all kinds of stuff we're tight yeah so we've connected you so new york times connected him to lease um which he had denied a connection to douglas lees by the way They don't even mention that in the past he had angrily rejected any connection to, like, Douglas Lees, and said maybe he knew the kid. And there's a reason he would want to angrily reject a connection to Douglas Lees.

And then he's got him connected to a key figure in a wrong country. But to the New York Times, this is more prosaic. Yes, just as is, yep. Yeah, I'm glad you're doing reporting. like, because when I saw the line defense contractor, I was like, this is, again, not answering questions. You are creating questions. Like, yes, because I clicked on the link from somebody who had posted it and been like, lots of questions answered here. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, no, lots of questions raised here. Yeah. What are you talking about? All right. Looking forward to that draft site report and hopefully we'll be able to talk about it on the Friday show.

Let's move on to updates in the Brown University shooting that left two students dead. Bash Patel announced yesterday. They're offering a reward. We can put this video up on the screen. You'll watch it. You can see they put out a video of a person of interest in that shooting at Brown University from the weekend. They have now announced a $50,000 reward. You can see the person, if you're listening to this, you can see the person walking around different parts of the Brown campus in the, seemingly of the Brown campus, in the daylight. A person is dressed in all black. Can't really make out details of who it is, but that's where the FBI announced yesterday. Actually, they have this person of interest. It came, though, as we learned, next element up on the screen, that MIT, which is, of course, in Boston, not all that far, well, Cambridge, if we're going to do that thing, not all that far from Providence. A professor at MIT, who was a nuclear scientist, essentially, was shot to death at home in Brookline. So huge, huge update potentially in the Brown story. We have no evidence that this is connected or not, but Brian, as you saw, I was combining Brown and Ryan.

The Brown, this is the next video. We put this up on the screen. over at Brown, you see the FBI agents. I don't want to laugh at this ride because they're just scraping the snow here, looking for evidence, and they're like tripping around as they're kicking the snow, looking for evidence. So I'm sure that we're going to get to the bottom of this soon enough. But as you put earlier, you either have two people on the loose,

or one person who has now killed three people on the loose in New England. And so the FBI scrambling is now offering a $50,000 reward, or presumably you can get a private flight to Vegas with Cash Patel valued at $50,000. He recently appeared on Katie Miller's podcast. Yeah, but it dropped last night, yeah. Apparently it was recorded before the Brown shooting. Okay. In any event, it's about him and his little, his, like, girlfriend. Right.

Tell them maybe to hold the episode until afterwards. Or maybe don't do that at all. Like, what are you doing? Well, there's that too, yes. When he was appointed, I said good, because I think it's good to have an incompetent boob running an agency that does a lot of bad things. I now am regretting that.

Like, apparently, you do need some level of competence at the head of this agency. Like, come on. Well, in the case of Brown, If this MIT shooting turns out murder, turns out to be connected to the Brown murder, mass shooting, you have a situation where in Brown, the authorities were saying, first of all, Patel said they had, he said they had detained, they had somebody who was a suspect in detention. And it was kind of, it was like a long ex post. And the tone of it was sort of, we got the guy. And maybe I'm being uncharitable and reading too much into that. But that was the tone that I took from Patel's post on. X. And the authorities in Providence were basically like everything is fine, everyone should feel safe. So if it turns out that the same person shot then murdered another professor this time at MIT, so someone else from a campus, they're going to look even dumber for trying to assuage the fears

of the community, which we're like learning as the person is still in the loose actually should be, that people should be afraid in Providence because they don't have the person. And obviously all human life is precious. Nuno-Lerrero appears to be like one of the most brilliant guys you can imagine. Like just a brain that it just has like an inconceivable level of intelligence in it.

And so like tributes are pouring in from people talking about the, you know, what he will now be unable, what he will now be unable to contribute to society. And it's something we can't even conceive of because he's one of those kinds of people who's able to, you know, think beyond, you know, other, you know, other mere mortals. And obviously there's speculation happening right now that this is, well, foreign policy related when you have a leading nuclear scientists. Yeah. According to Israel, he is a completely legitimate target. Like all nuclear scientists to them are legitimate targets, which is, which I hope that underscores just how Barb it is to be bombing nuclear scientists and their families at will.

Will obviously keep everybody updated on the story because if it's connected to the Brown case, if it's connected to any foreign policy, it's huge. And so we're going to follow it really, really closely. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this, where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you.

From smartless media, campside media, and big money players comes crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Roy Scoval, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into

some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who cat fish is a city. And meet some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap if you think she's a witch. And it freaks you out. He has x-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow him. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Michael Lewis here. My book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and birth of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened.

Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade, after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy

and also today's politics. Get the Big Short now at Pushkin.fm. or wherever audiobooks are sold. Ilana is a spirit. It's not just a city. I didn't really have an interest of being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. It's where Kronk was born in a club in the West End.

Four World Star, it was five, five, nine. Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars, where preachers go viral, and students at the HBCU turned heartbreak in the resurrection. How do you get people to believe in something that's dead? Where Dreamers brought Hollywood to the South, and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth. Nobody's rushing into relationships with you. Where are you from? They want to look in the eye. Where the future is nostalgia.

I'm talking to chat, GPD. She's like, you really did first lady to have a gayfrey girl's tape in Atlanta, Georgia. Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people. And I'm like, oh what, you're right. Atlanta doesn't wait for permission. It builds its own spotlight. Um, big rude. Let us guide you through the stories behind

Atlanta's most iconic moments. Listen to Atlanta is on the I-Hard Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your fire case. Ryan, should we move on to Gaza? So, first of all, kind of out of nowhere, Trump issued a new travel ban

expanding the list of countries to include the Palestinian Authority. So putting people from the Palestinian Authority on the travel ban has an added layer of cruelty because they don't have their own country. Like, it's one thing if you ban people from Chad from traveling. They can be in Chad. But the Palestinian Authority, they may be at extreme risk from the occupying country. They don't have their own sovereignty to fall back on. And so we'll be

exploring that and the consequences of it more thoroughly in the days to come. But today I wanted to talk about living conditions in Gaza in a way that goes beyond the kind of normal headlines that we get. We had a story yesterday in a drop site that you could put up G2 here. The headline tells it all. Garbage is poisoning Gaza. And this is by Abdel Khadr Saba, who's a videographer and photographer in Gaza who works with our editor Shreif Abdul-Kadouz, who co-authored this piece. And the footage and the photos that will be showing you here of the trash pile-up is from Abdel Qadrassad. So you can roll the next element. I'll just read some of this piece here.

Over the past two years, Gaza's civilian infrastructure has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military, including waste management services. And what you're looking at here is a transfer station. And this is the Yarmouk waste transfer site. So typically, at a transfer site, people bring in garbage, and then it gets transferred to its final resting place or its incineration place or a landfill or what have you.

The final waste treatment facility where this transfer site would transfer the waste to is now behind the yellow line that Israel has drawn. And so they're not taking anymore. So every day, more and more trucks coming in and it just piles up. So you see children playing on it there. see people setting up their tents, you know, absolutely right next to it. The quotes that that Abdul Qadar Sabha got from people who are living there are just just horrifying. One person told them that this is my tent and this is the garbage dump I'm living across from. We don't

sleep, not at night, nor during the day because of the garbage. The smell comes at us constantly. and our children are all ill. They suffer from severe headaches. We're dealing with an infestation of germs and insects. You can see why. Yeah, you can absolutely understand it. Another person said, we were displaced from the city of Bait Lahia

in northern Gaza Strip, and we came to Gaza City. We found that the displaced were crowded in every corner of the strip. We were forced to live among garbage in the Yarmouk garbage site of the Gaza municipality. we had thought we'd stay somewhere safe, somewhere decent, but we were forced here. There's nowhere else to go. We were forced to stay at this dump. I'm suffering because of this dump. Suffering from the germs, the rats and dogs. Every day, I find 20 or 30 rats inside my tent, right? Inside of it, I don't even have a tent fit for human life, unquote. So that is in the best of scenarios. That's when the weather is nice, the sun is in the sky. The last couple of of weeks have seen the opposite. Maybe we can roll to G5 here. You can, this young kid, giving a tour of the tent village that is now constructed, you don't have to be able to understand Arabic to understand the absolute fury at what the world is delivering here as the wind blows, you know, people have been living now three years, so you can see garbage blowing into

their tent. You can see their tents blowing away. It's a third winter that people are going into with these tents. While sufficient supplies for over a million people are sitting outside of Gaza, just outside, in trucks, just outside. This is Al-Shefa Hospital. So even the hospitals are, we're flooding from this, from this, from this storm. And if, and so, just just to underline that, supplies for more than a million people facing these conditions are in trucks outside of Gaza. We have a ceasefire. We have a ceasefire agreed to. They're supposed to allow that in. They're just simply not allowing it in. We talked to the head of, a relief organization who's in Gaza and he said his theory is that they're trying to make it

just utterly unlivable and they've you know they've offered to open the rafa border in one direction out to say like look it feels like it's like okay look um if you were holding on hope for the war to end and then you were going to stay um what we're trying to do is destroy that hope Because now the war has technically ended, yet your life is just unlivable. So why don't you just leave? Right. Like that that is the message that he believes that Israel Netanyahu is sending with this. Well, and that's one of my questions for you was going to be, is the U.S. involvement in,

it's the best word for this, being the Sharpa over this peace process, what is the, what is U.S. involvement? right now looking like? And is this then also a U.S. strategy to squeeze Gazans for the raising of the strip into Mara Gaza or whatever? Right. I mean, you would think it has to be. The policy is what is doing. The U.S. military, you know, they set up this coordination center with Israel to try to de-conflict during the ceasefire, which Israel breaks effectively every single day. And announces, that it has broken it. But we, so we, the U.S. military sent some of our top logistics experts that we have. And the U.S. military does have, like when it comes to logistics, like they, they have

been taking it extremely seriously for 200 years and have some of the best at it. So we sent our best and brightest to this coordination center to figure out how is it that we're not able to get the supplies in and get the supplies distributed to the population. within weeks they all left because they were like oh this is not a logistics problem this is a political problem and the military said this publicly that the problem israelis have a list of things that they called dual use dual military use that they won't let in and the list includes tent poles pencils paper most like cooking fuel is almost non-existent at this point And so they're like, you don't need us.

We're not the answer to this problem. The logistics are solvable. The political problem is what you need to deal with. Those images, if people were just listening to this, go ahead and find the YouTube video of this segment because you can see the proximity of the tents to the garbage and it's horrifying. Yeah, and just getting worse every single day

as it piles up and piles up. Meanwhile, there was a, I don't know if you saw this, there was an AI image going around of a fake account who's trying to just raise money on chuffed, saying, like, look at my family. And it's like 12 Palestinians in a tent, but the water's up to their waist, which is, of course, is impossible because the tents are not watertight. So you're not getting, like, and there wouldn't be that packed in. But it was, it was other than that, wasn't the water, if you look at it, it's like, wow, that looks real. So you're going to see a lot of And to X's credit It did have a note on it that said this is AI generated Because they could figure out with the hands and stuff like that And also the water level But like so people like AI is going in and just

Exploiting this misery Yeah and obviously I know you're reporting follows this closely But everyone is happy that the war is over You know humane people are happy that the war is over But on the other side of that, the political incentives to keep an eye on the humanitarian crisis are obviously diminished at this point here in the U.S. And all over the world. Yes, indeed. Awful.

So, yeah, so we will be back on Friday, and then we'll roll out for a couple weeks, two weeks, we're going to have pre-tape segments. Yes. Yesterday I interviewed Nathaniel Raymond, who's a Yale humanitarian researcher on Sudan. I think we'll post his video. That was incredible and sobering, intense interview with this guy talking about, like, as bad as things are in Gaza, like in Sudan, like the number of people getting killed and starved. It's like, if it continues like this, we're going to be at Rwanda levels. And then we'll, for 20 years, we'll have people talking about why nobody did anything. I'll look forward to watching that. Yeah, we have some great pre-recorded content coming out, Ryan. I interviewed Emily. I interviewed Ryan.

So that'll be fun. And we will have a Friday show this week. So this isn't us signing off until 2026. You will still get another dose of us on Friday and then some pre-recorded doses of us. over the holiday. But I'm looking forward to being back here in the new year. Ryan, the first Wednesday of the new year is going to be January 7th. All right. So it's going to be a while before we're back in the studio. All right. Stay safe. We'll see you then. See ya. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?

Who catfishes a city? Is it even safe to snort human remains? Is that the plot of footloos? I'm comedian Rory Scoville, and I'm here to tell you, Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcast. The show was ahead of its time to represent a black family in ways the television hadn't shown before. Exactly. It's Telma Hopkins, also known as Aunt Rachel. And I'm Kelly Williams or Laura Winslow. On our podcast, welcome to the family with Telma and Kelly. We're re-watching every episode of Family Matters. We'll share behind-the-scenes stories about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in some special guests to spill some tea. Listen to

Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever You get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. On our new podcast Health Stuff, we demystify your burning health questions. You'll hear us being completely honest about her own health. My residency colon was like a cry for help, honestly. And you'll hear candid advice and personal stories from experts who want to make health care more human.

I feel like I never felt like I truly belonged in medicine. We want to make health less confusing and maybe even. a little fun. Find health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.