The Daily Beast Podcast - I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Get 15% off OneSkin with the code beast at https://www.oneskin.co/beast #oneskinpod Anand Giridharadas joins Joanna Coles to unpack what the Epstein files actually tell us, not just about one disgraced financier, but about the elite network that worked with him. The bestselling author explains why so many of what he calls the Epstein class stayed in his orbit even after Epstein’s crimes were widely known. Coles and Giridharadas dig into the strange rituals of this rarefied class and examine emails involving figures like Larry Summers and former Obama White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler. They also confront the darker question at the center of the scandal: How a network built on access, status, and mutual advantage created a culture where no one ever seemed to break ranks—even when they knew the crimes Jeffrey Epstein committed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What went through my head is you were describing that encounter with a rich and powerful person is how strangely similar it is in certain ways to Virginia Joufrey's account of being groomed by Jolene Maxwell and Epsine. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Efsene's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum. I'm Joanna Cole. this is the Daily Bees podcast and we have an epic conversation today for you with a philosopher, a writer, a big, big thinker

and his speciality turns out to be the Epstein class. Anand Girdadas has read through the mountain of emails and what he comes up with is fascinating and the techniques that Jeffrey Epstein used to groom teenage girls were largely the same techniques that he used to groom billionaires. And you think, well, why would a billionaire even be interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein?

But Jeffrey Epstein was able to bait his conversation with people and reel them in like an expert fisherman. Anyway, I really want you to share this conversation with your friends, subscribe to the Daily Beast. We're almost at 600,000 subscribers and we really want to get there in the next month. With your help, we will. leave us a comment. But let's come back to my conversation with Anand. And I shared with him what someone I ran into over the weekend was telling me when he got momentarily caught up in Jeffrey Epstein's web and how clever Jeffrey Epstein was at trying to woo him in anyway. I loved this conversation. It's longer than normal because I just didn't want it to stop. And you know what? I know my hair doesn't

look great today. You don't need to put it in the comments, but you know whose hair does look great today. And Anne's. So, let's get into it. First of all, I really want to talk about your hair, but we're going to do that at the end because it's so much. Is that bonus content? Bonus content. Yes, it's exclusive content for members. It's so good. I want to lean across the table and run my hamster, but we'll talk about hair later. But I thought we could start. We're recording this on a Monday morning. I wanted to start with a piece that was in the Times this morning, talking about the network of people who help each other get into the most elite, prestigious private schools in New York.

And there's an exchange in the Where Else Epstein files about Mort Zuckerman, who is a billionaire, well-known billionaire businessman in New York, trying to get his child into Trinity. And I think this is the child of the fourth or fifth wife. possibly. That's a lot of wives. Quite a lot of wives. Even for that world. Right, even for that world. And Jeffrey Epstein immediately sort of muscles in and tries to offer help to get Morts Zuckerman's child into Trinity. And I was thinking, why on earth would Mork Zuckerman remotely need someone like Jeffrey Epstein's help getting their child into school? You've been parts of these networks.

You grew up, you went to Sidwell, you went to Harvard, you understand this world. Can you talk about the sort of network of these wealthy people that's been exposed in the Epstein files? I think one of the, that exchange is so fascinating because it illustrates something important, which is obviously there is a giant elite network that we're talking about here, and both of those men would have been in those elite networks. However, there are some people, I would say probably like Mortzuckerman, who have a job. You know, they sort of are doing an actual thing in the world.

Right. And they're in those networks as a byproduct of some activity they're engaged in in the world. They own a business. They own multiple businesses. Whatever. They're an academic. They used to be in the government.

And there's, I think, a smaller group of people, who Epstein was a perfect example, for whom the cultivation and maintenance of network ties is the job. So he's like the sort of middleman. he's creating connections between people and that's his value. And some of those people might also technically have a job. But if you go to a TED conference or if you go to, frankly, any conference, you'll meet some people there who just seem like people who incidentally happen to be there. And then you'll meet these people.

And by the way, in the 2010s when this culture was sort of at its peak, people in their bios of this ilk would call themselves connectors. Like it would often be on the by. Do you remember this trend? Yes. Totally. People would be like convener, convener, connectors. create, right?

Well, and Malcolm Gladwell actually wrote a piece about the importance of connectors, right? In the New York, which was very sort of, it went on to everybody was talking about it, everybody. Rule one of like, don't model your life on something you read in a Malcolm Gladwell Airport book. But Epstein is a perfect example of someone who is maintaining those things,

not as a byproduct or some other activity, but as the center of his life. And what he shows, and of course, he is a convicted peddle. who did it, so that has its own flavor, but there's others who do it who are not convicted pedophiles who are basically brokers between these different worlds. And so, you know, most people know a lot of people within their own world. Right. Most academics. Most successful people. Yes. Right. I mean, all of us in a way, you know, most, you know, an Italian American guy in New Jersey

knows probably the average Italian American knows a bunch of other Italian American guys in his neighborhood in New Jersey. Right. Right. Um, an academic, most academics. you know, having spent so long studying for that degree, so long, and it's a very kind of closer environment, most of their friends are probably academics. I think most business people after a while, you don't have time, you're working 80-hour weeks, like, you know, a lot of business people. People like Jeffrey Epstein, but others who are kind of these network maintainers, their skill is actually maintaining ties to various types of people. Right. And so if suddenly you are a business person who needs to, it's not like you're not powerful enough to access that

private school. It's just that you may not have cultivated a couple of those bridges of networks to slightly different worlds, someone at that law firm, someone at that university that you might need for that specific thing. And so what Epstein did is serve as this kind of bridging function, which turns out to be very, very valuable. In part, and again, it's not obvious to people, because what you said is exactly, I think most people's intuition. Like, he's, Mort Suckerman's powerful. Why would he need someone? Right. He's already powerful.

Right. But the thing is, if you don't know people personally in a lot of these worlds, you have to go through the formal channels, right? And so someone like Jeffrey Epstein, who is kind of on a text basis with whatever, who do you need to get to? You need to get to Steve Bannon. You need to get to someone at Goldman Sachs. You need to get to someone at the Treasury Department. You need to get to someone in Dubai, right?

Someone like that who can kind of offer you this like gruesome buffet of business cards. Right, right. It becomes valuable to people who are more siloed in particular worlds. Well, and also I love what you say about he's got direct access to them because there's nothing worse for someone like Mort Zuckerman or indeed even the humble moi to have to go through the same process that everybody else is going through, you want to cut through the process, right?

You want the shortcut, which Jeffrey Epstein was able to provide. And I've written about this a little bit, you know, in our Epstein class series where, you know, I think to be in that rarefied elite is to have friction removed. Mm-hmm. It's to have friction removed in,

just think about map from, you know, 6 a.m. to midnight in a typical person's day. Lots of friction. You stand in line to get your coffee. You know, you try to get a parking spot at the office. There's no spots today. I mean, just like you map it out. And that's life.

Your kid is sick. You weren't planning for your kid to be sick. Now you have to take the day off work. Just friction. It's all friction. Well, to be very, very rich, to be a billionaire, is to have lots of those points of friction that everybody watching this will have in their life

and have them removed. You don't have to stand in that line, right? The food is waiting for you on the table when you get to the restaurant. You don't have to wait in line. You don't have to drive to Newark. You don't have to wait in line at Newark. You're flying out of Titoboro and the jet will leave whenever you want. I think what happens to those people is when they encounter some areas of life where there continues to be friction, it really causes an allergy.

So when you are dealing with a Trinity school where it actually doesn't function like private jet travel. I don't know, but it doesn't seem to function like private jet travel. It probably does have a real admissions process. It probably does turn away, given where it is. It probably does turn away lots of fancy people every year. I think it's shocking for some of these people, because unlike everybody watching this, they haven't encountered a no all day. They haven't encountered a no all week. They haven't encountered a kind of break. So I think part of what Epstein did was offer the promise of extending that kind of seamlessness that you're expecting, that life has taught you to expect, into domains where

maybe even for you, like a Mort Zuckerman, it would be a little hard to access. And he did that by kind of keeping himself right at the center of a lot of these kind of worlds. So I love this idea of creating a frictionless experience, and Jeffrey Epstein was trying to help people smooth that out. Can we talk about the people that he had in his network? And you mentioned as we were sitting down the four-pack, which I love. I love the idea. Tell people what the four-pack is. And then I love the series.

We should just reference your series on the Epstein class on ink, on your substack. And I want to get to talking about the women because you have an excellent essay on how there are no grown-up women around and when they are, Kathy Rumler probably being the sole example, for the most part, the men are eating without the women. There's just no women there.

The women are for decoration, they're sex, but they're not there for conversation or ideas or to be heard from. Anyway, let's come to that in a minute. But talk about the four-pack And then let's talk about the specifics of the lives that these very wealthy people live. Let me tell you about this company called One Skin. It was founded by four Brazilian PhD scientists and One Skin's products are designed to make your life easier.

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Use the code beast and don't forget to tell them we sent you. Okay, so when you hear the phrase four-pack, I imagine most people listening to this are starting to think about some kind of beverage. Maybe they would expect it to come in a six-pack, but they're, okay, maybe there's some kind of new four-pack drink. I was thinking of I might have a four-pack, not a six-pack, in terms of, I just haven't been to the gym for so long. Right, exactly. Used to be at six now, it's a four. Yeah, and it's very soon going to be at two.

But anyway, sorry. My son once told me they had a one-pack, which I thought was. That was so sweet. Yeah. The four-pack, I learned about this when researching my book Winters-Stake-all, which is about a lot of these billionaires and the way they use kind of giving back as a mechanism to consolidate their wealth and power. And the four-pack refers to, I think it's particularly for New York-centered, super-rich people.

The four-pack is the number of houses that is considered kind of a bare minimum. in that social world. So it's a Manhattan house or apartment. It's a Florida place. Now let's just pause there for a second. That alone is the part of the reason for the Florida place is to usually be able to keep your Manhattan days under 183 days.

And so the Florida place is typically for that purpose. I mean, maybe people also like the warmth, but they can afford to go to nicer warm places than that. It's an easy way to get your days under half, which then saves you a few percentage of a New York City income tax. Then Hampton's House and House in Aspen, kind of a skiing place. So that was considered the four-pack, just basic hygiene in that billionaire's world. But it just gives you a flavor of how people are thinking in that world. And also you can avoid the friction of cold weather and the snow pileups and things.

You just don't have to deal with it, right? You can either go there for the whole of the winter or you can go down for the weekends if you've got your own transport. There's a really important word in this world also that's the word optionality. So optionality in its origin is a finance term. And so, you know, you think about buying options on Wall Street. You're not buying the stock. you're buying the right to buy it if a certain thing happens. So I buy an option to buy it a year from now if it crosses 50,

or I buy an option to sell it if it goes below 22. And buying options gives you optionality. It gives you, you know, and the whole idea of optionality is like you have all the upside, but none of the downside. You don't have to do the thing, but you can do the thing if you want to do the thing. So optionality has leapt from business school classes and finance classes. It sort of became over the last, I think, 10, 15 years the life aspiration for a lot of these folks. And what optionality means is having lots of choices and the choice to make additional choices

and choices that preserve more choices, doors that open more doors, and never being on the hook for anything, never being tied to anything. There's a lot of manifestations that we can talk about. Some of that is really rich people who seem to be very interested in Jeffrey Epstein providing him young women or girls. That's one form of optionality. A wife is not optionality. Right. Going to an island where you could have a, again, a gruesome buffet in this case of people. That's optionality.

But also the housing is optionality, right? The kind of, and people talk about optionality in dating, a lot of finance guy. But it's now broadened beyond finance people to use that concept. So much so, and I quoted this in one of the Epstein class pieces, I think, that one of the Harvard professors who wrote about, he's a finance professor who wrote about the concept of optionality,

gave a commencement speech or something in which he warned, it was called like the risks of optionality. He was afraid that this finance term had like metastasized into the culture too far. And people were applying it to their life in ways that were actually really destructive. Right. And so what?

It was stopping them from committing to things? Yes. Right. And so, you know, you'll remember a few years ago, now I guess it's a decade ago, when Brexit, the year of Brexit, I think Theresa May. Who was then the British Prime Minister? Was it kind of earlier? Was she the Prime Minister of Wright going into it?

Well, she was the Prime Minister that had to pick up after Brexit and try and organise it. So she had this line, which was very controversial. Shit, I better check on that. There was a lot of prime ministers at that time. Yeah, I mean, Teresa, yeah, because Boris got dumped and Theresa May had to pick up the pieces and try and get it organized. So she had this line. I don't know if you remember this. It was very controversial the time people considered it kind of very nationalistic.

I remember thinking, having a little bit of a jolt and then realizing she's exactly right. She said, if you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. Mm-hmm. you don't understand what citizenship is. And I think people, there's lots of ways to interpret that. Is she talking about immigrants? Is she, like, what did, I think what she, my generous interpretation of what she was saying

is in the age of kind of liquid money that moves everywhere, and people moving among their four packs, and people, as you've seen this Epstein network, London today, Dubai tomorrow, doing a deal with Paris and Korea to invest in a Mexican hedge fund that'll buy out some, you know, old person's home in California and then strip mine it.

That, again, most people watching this are actually from somewhere, whether you born there or not, I don't care. But you're somewhere now. You have some loyalty to it. You're there, like, most of the time. You have a connection to the community. Yeah, and you're part of a thing.

That's like the normal human way to live. And one of the things that is distinctive about the elite, because there's always been an elite, right? that's distinctive about the modern super elite that we see in the upscene files is that it is an elite uniquely untethered to place. If you think about, think about in Britain, right?

Go back, I mean, I think this is probably still true in Britain, but you go back, you know, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years in Britain, the more clout, stature, power you had, the more you were like associated with a place. Right. You were the earl of this, of this house. That house really mattered. And your granddaddy lived in that house.

And the paintings on the wall were like off in that house. And there's a certain kind of dog that you went hunting with. There's always that dog. And a certain kind of thing you hunted, right? That has been more typical, historically, of what we associate with rich and powerful people. That they own land. You can't, you know, land is not very fungible. Yeah, it's like the Hearst's owning San Saminian.

Right. And I think this, in the era of globalization and digitization, what happened is we ended up with this kind of Epstein class, you could say, that really doesn't work like that. They are nowhere people. They are always on a plane. They're most comfortable in planes because it's touchpoint free, as they call it. They avail of global opportunities, but they're not part of communities. And if you, again, live in a, normal town in this country. And I was driving all through Connecticut yesterday by chance and just all from one side to another. And except for the really prosperous towns like Greenwich, Connecticut's a rich place by comparison. But you just see that this country's been strip-minded. Like every town is like a shell.

It's cute, like cute old things. Like no one's there. There's no opportunity there. Right? And it's just like you can just feel this kind of like blitz. Life has drained out. Drive anywhere in this country, except for the places that are exceptions, right? It just feels like juice was removed from the whole thing.

And it was. It was. And so you don't have, in those little towns I was driving through, you don't have, like, the slightly rich guy who was, who owned the car dealership, which would have made him five times richer than the average person in town, who then donated to the baseball league. Like, that guy doesn't live in that town anymore. Like a private equity firm owns a chain of those dealerships, and there's no guy. Like there's no one, the only people living there, people can't afford to leave, right? Senator Chris Murphy.

And the kids get out, the kids leave. The kids get out. Senator Chris Murphy, who's Senator from Connecticut, he has a new book coming out in, I think, a couple months called the New Common Good, that actually talks about this in a very deep way. What actually happened to many places that he represents and beyond? But, you know, there has been there. this kind of just removal of life force in so much of our society. And the people we're talking about in this Epstein class,

they're just buying, selling, trading, moving around. And they have no loyalty to any of the places they come from. All of their emails, when I was reading through the Epstein emails, they all start, where are you today? Where are you today? I'm landing in this place. Where are you? I'm going to be in Dubai next week. Where are you? Where are you? And at first I just thought it's kind of an interesting, you know, quirk. And then I realized it is because the assumption is not being in place.

The assumption... Right. You're on the move. You're constantly on the move. So in terms of the Epstein files, when you were reading some of the emails, which were the emails that stood out to you? I mean, there's a Cathy Rumler email, which I know stood out to you,

which I want to talk about. But I wondered if there were others. I think what's, I'll say some of what's stood out kind of in general and then some of the specific emails. So a couple things in general. So one is this notion of this kind of silly, seemingly silly ritual, where are you, where are you going to be tomorrow? Are you going to be in Athens? I know, seem like a silly ritual. I started to realize, I think these are the kind of pharomones of a exchange of pheromones of this class of people who do not belong.

do not consider themselves part of places, don't consider themselves loyal to places. And so their loyalties are horizontally to other people in this network. Not downward to the people they live among. I mean, even if you have the four-pack, my guess is if you go to their block in Manhattan, or you go to their place in Aspen, or you go out to the Hamptons where they live, or you go down to Florida and you went a couple doors side to side and asked, how are they as neighbors? How are they as community members?

What's their role here? My guess is you'd draw blanks. You'd draw blank stairs. I don't think people would experience them. You don't think that the same people are just moving around the same places, because that's been my observation, that there's a kind of move out to the Hamptons in the summer. There's a move to Floridone.

And basically you're seeing the same people. But I don't think they're forming community even with people that they're doing that with, right? It's each to each. So the community itself is more tenuous. And I think they don't, I mean, I think community is a word that is irrelevant. to a lot of these people. I think they have networks, right? A community is like, I don't know, people you'd sacrifice for,

people you do things that don't make sense. I mean, if I think of people I consider in my community, like, I'm willing to lose money on them. I'm willing to cook food for them in a way that would be much cheaper and more efficient order takeout, but I'm willing to cook for them anyway. You know, I'm willing to, like, have their kids sleep over when they have to go out of town on a, like, that's community.

Right. I don't think people, I don't think these people live in that way in general. They have services, not community, right? They have services, right. Community is what people do, I guess, when, you know, when they don't have services. And again, you know, it's interesting thing about Epstein, and we'll get to the specific emails, but the thing about Epstein, he was a world-class exploiter of specific insecurities and kind of lacunae in people he was talking to. And actually, I think one of the things he identified

is a lot of these people are very lonely. Right, right. Again, you at home may not think that because you think they have everything, but they actually don't have everything. They have a lot of some very specific things. Right. And they actually don't have,

these are often not great marriages, as attested by the number of them that often get cycled. Well, and then it becomes very expensive to get divorced, right? Yep. You know, these are often, when my winter's take all came out, I was written to by so many,

children of people like this, talking about how little admiration they have for their own super wealthy parents and asking me for, I mean, I didn't know what advice to give them. How do they, you know, they're going to inherit this money, but they basically hate their dad. How do they deal with that? Well, it's a little bit like watching Rupert Murdoch emerging from his 95th birthday party. Here he is, you know, a man still above his whole Fox network, which he's now bequeath to his son. And three of his children are missing from his ninth. 95th birthday and you think in what world would you rather have all that money and all that power

and arguably all that impact on American culture, global culture, and not have three of your children at your 95th birthday? Let's just dwell on that for a second. I don't think there could be a greater definition of life failure. 95 is late enough in the game to call it. Right. And he's had, he's on his fifth life. He failed. He failed at life. That many of your children? Right. What was What was it for? The newspapers? By the way, he also broke societies. No argument.

But I don't have any expectation that Rupert Murdoch cares about breaking societies. Well, it's a very interesting question, too. Would you rather be at 95, would you rather have $20 billion and an enormous network and have had undoubtable influence, many argue for the worse, over the world? Or would you rather have half a bit of it? million dollars and your family intact. You know, the love of your kids, the connection with your grandchildren, all of that. It's a really interesting sort of question. I mean, if you, if you told me right now that at my 95th birthday, several of my children would voluntarily stay

away, I'd jump off this roof. Right. I mean. I think your kids are going to be there. I hope you get it. It's a 95. What, what? And you, it is a such a revealing clue to what these people, value. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, if you can't even love your family enough to hold them, how do we trust you with, in his case, the minds of like one-third of Americans who watch Fox News? Just like think about this very objectively. If this man's love and virtue and character were not enough to hold his children and family,

that is the same level of care at best that is being brought to bear on Fox News and these other things. Right. Well, and also it's an interesting thing what culture rewards, right? What society rewards, you know, lots of people at his party fawning over him. And yet, as you say, a man who, what most people would consider the most significant part of your life utterly broken, at war with his own. kids, going to court with his own kids, three of whom out of the four, don't turn up at his birthday party. Probably his last birthday party. He's 95, who knows how many he's got left. It just, it says a lot about what we reward as a culture, too. It does. Total failure of a man.

Yeah, total failure of a man. So interesting. So, so, so let's get back to the emails. I want to read you one of Kathy Rumler's emails, which you, in fact, pointed out to us. And I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it in my voice because I don't know what she sounds like, though. I love doing impressions as regular readers and viewers and listeners will know. I won't stop you from doing an impression. Well, my favorite one to do is Melania, but I don't know Kathy Rumler and I've not met her. So she writes to Epstein, going up to New York Friday morning, think I'm going to drive. I will then stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. We'll observe all of the people who are at least a hundred pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation,

and we'll then decide I'm not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear. I will end up like one of these people. Please diagnose this female for us. Let's assume that many folks listening to this have no idea who Kathy Rumler is. So it's actually a nice way to do it. Nice set up. But I like you actually reading the quote first. Okay. So now you've heard the quote.

I imagine people have reactions of that quote. So now let's tell you who she is. Right. Because she's not a random person on the street who, okay, fine, they have a toxic view. Or you have some uncle who would spout something like that at a family get together. Fine. Who cares? She is someone, the kind of person, who has shaped your life.

She was Barack Obama's White House counsel. You may have heard the job White House counsel. Let's just be really clear. It is the lawyer, not for the president, for the presidency. It is the lawyer who represents the American presidency. When decisions are made about all kinds of things, can we torture people or not torture people? Right. Is it legal to go to war? Dron strike or no drone strike.

You know, today you can imagine people probably having discussions about using AI in war. You know, should we, can we bomb around without checking with anybody? That's the person, one of the key people, advising those decisions. And not just any president either, Barack Obama. Barack Obama. As, you know, someone with as much good character who I think has never been caught in his life. even in a off moment, even in a leaked tape, I don't think there's a world in which you would catch Barack Obama

with that attitude to people ever, or anyone closely connected to him. And after being White House counsel, she considered offers from Obama to become attorney general when she was, I don't know who you go to for a career advice. You've had an illustrious career. I'm sure people you asked about. She, Kathy Rumler, went to Jeffrey Rumler,

went to Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile, for advice, Obama's going to, you know, maybe nominate me for Attorney General or do you think I should take it? I generally don't go

to convicted pedophiles for... Hopefully you don't know any convicted pedophiles, do you? I don't think I do, but I always avoid them in particular

for any jobs about attorney general, any legal kind of facing jobs. Then she becomes a fancy law partner. He's asking her at some point about some immigration questions.

bonds about her $2 million signing bonus from some law firm, just like going from like immigration to. Well, and wait a minute. Doesn't he also say, no, don't go and be attorney general. I can help you at doesn't he want her to go and work at Rothschild's on his behalf? I don't, I don't actually see that one. I think so. Well, he's to figure out, you know, she's like, well, my apartment in New York is too expensive to take such a low paying job. And then he, in the way that is, again, really interesting. And him, very him specific, he's like, how much is the rent? Let me see if I can. offload it for you. That's what also makes him different. Like most super rich people are not at that level of the weeds of like how much is your rent. Let me see if I can offload it.

So he's a sort of unusual guy in that way, which we can get to. It's an old world. Well, and interesting that he keeps homing in on her insecurity about her home and he's going to help with it. Yes, exactly. He understands that everybody has needs, that needs are kind of these holes that you can fill. And if you are the one who fills that hole, you can keep the kingdom. Right. She then became the chief counsel for Goldman Sachs. She has since stepped down after a lot of pressure, but because of this. So she's now the chief lawyer for this giant financial institution.

A financial institution, you know, before she joined it, that, you know, famously was caught up in the financial crisis and had, you know, legal issues because it had, you know, told its clients one thing while betting the other way and, you know, helped contribute. to that mortgage meltdown that, you know, again, lots of people watching this will have lost homes in that crisis. There are people watching this today whose wealth was greater in the summer of 2008 than it still is. There's a significant number of Americans who never recovered from what those financial institutions helped trigger. She was not at that bank at that time. But that's the world, right?

And so what I hope I've convinced you is that when you read those sentiments, and there's others in the emails, but that's a really good one. You're not, this is not just your drunkles opinions at Thanksgiving. This is a window into how someone thinks about you and your family when they are White House counsel making decisions about whether, for example, we need congressional authorization to like send your son to war or not. Right. The same, think about someone who is so dehumanizing the people at the restop, seeing them as just a sea of fat bodies.

It's the same moral compass that is making a decision about, you know, advice on whether we can afford casualties in a war and what to recommend to a president, right? The same kind of contempt for a person surely can't be so easily ring fence. That's what you feel to most people in this country, towards most people in this country. towards most people in this country. By the way, in the most elite corridor of this country, even though it's a highway arrest stop, then surely that way of seeing people, regular people, whose existence you seem to be offended by in the email,

surely it goes into your other decisions. When you're Goldman Sachs and you're thinking about, you know, how do we deal with the housing market? How do we do this? How do we deal with that? How do we diversify the bank? Should we? surely the same basic attitude that is so clearly that anybody reading that email or hearing that email will recognize that attitude. We've all known people who look at other people that way.

But my point to you is that attitude is not just a toxic attitude. It shapes your life. And it shapes policy. It shapes policy which impacts all of us which shapes society. And I would venture to guess that many people listening to this know that, even without hearing the quote or knowing who she is, because you've experienced the effect. What the Epstein files is showing you is some of the causes that you may not have seen,

but you've lived the effects. You've lived a health care system. You've lived your own insurance policies that feel like shit that make you feel like you're paying money and no one's holding you. Right. You go to work every day at places

that feels like I give everything for this company, but does this company have my back? Right? You see cuts at your kids' school. Now they can't do music this year. Now they can't do gym anymore. You've experienced all that. So you know the effects.

What the Epstein files are so helpful is assigning causes to affect. Ah, ah, this is how these people think. Oh, this is who they're loyal to. Oh, this is what they're actually thinking about. Even though they claim that their wealth needs to be left untouched, so that they can dream up ideas that will benefit all of us. No, what they're actually talking about in their emails,

as you see in the famous correspondence between Epstein and Leon Black, billionaire private equity guy, is how to set up LLCs for the purchase of paintings to avoid unnecessary taxes, right? So you've lived the effects. This glimpse into the causes is incredibly helpful. Okay, so absolutely fascinating. So I spent the weekend

with a group of friends, one of whom had gone to see Jeffrey Epstein because Jeffrey Epstein wanted to manage his money. And he was curious to me. Scariest in the English language. Absolutely. Absolutely. Anyway, he was explaining to me the process, and I'm really interested to get your feedback on it because it was sort of illuminating for me. And he said, and this is a very sophisticated, wealthy man who went in to talk to him. And he said that first of all, it was incredible the amount of research that Jeffrey Epstein had done on him. He knew who he hung out with. He knew where he lived.

What era was this? This was sort of 2014-15. Right. So. Heyday. Peak Epstein, probably, peak Epstein. And so he was kind of impressed by that. And he didn't want to give his money to Epstein.

But he decided to go because other people had said, you must go and, Did he know he was a pedophile? Yes, he knew he was a pedophile. But he didn't know he was... That's an interesting weekend. Right. Well, but he did... I mean, he knew he'd been convicted in 2008.

Yeah. He didn't know that the stuff was still going on at an industrial level. But he'd really gone for a finance conversation. But he said that what he was impressed by was how well-researched was. And then there was a point where it became clear that he was unlikely to give his money to Epstein, at which point Epstein said, you know, here's the thing, I know you like spending time with interesting people. I know who you hang out with and he rattled off a list and he said, but I hang out with more interesting people. I'd like to get you in a room with Erhard Barak because

you guys would get on and you really need to meet Woody Allen because even though he's got that weird thing, he's a very smart guy and you guys would get on. So the sort of flattery and adjacency of putting you with someone who's, you know, famous in their world. And insult, right? My people are more interesting than your people. Well, totally. But thinking about how people, particularly in New York, or at least that's where I've lived, so it's my lived experience, but that sense of baiting, of you put the bait down.

And goodness knows, I've done it. We've got so-and-so coming for dinner. Would you like to come kind of thing. So he's baiting him with that. And when that doesn't work, he leans over to him a bit later in the conversation. And he says, look, can I be honest with you? Can I be honest, Jeffrey Epstein asking this? He says, you seem a bit depressed. I think I could help you with your depression. Why don't you come out to the ranch in New Mexico with me? And we'll just have fun. We'll have fun.

You look like a man who's not really having fun right now. And he said the thing was he was a bit depressed. And Jeffrey Epstein was manipulative enough to see this to use it against him. And even though he wasn't going to give his money to Jeffrey Epstein, and he figured that out quite quickly, he was impressed by the level of grooming and manipulation, even though he could see it. And it's that sense of he felt he was being seduced, even though he knew what was going on. And I was curious to ask you about that, because you see that in the emails, right? You see the sort of the throwing down of information, the casual, so-and-so's coming for dinner, you should come, you're going to love him, he's going to love you kind of thing. I see behind you on the shelf this book, a remarkable book, Nobody's Girl, by Virginia Jufre. Right, an amazing book.

Extraordinary book. I recommend anybody who's interested in this conversation, please read that book. This is an inside account of what it was like to be one of Epstein's victims in this kind of time. period. What's, what went through my head as you were describing that encounter with a rich and powerful person is how strangely similar it is in certain ways to Virginia Juffre's account of being groomed by Julian Maxwell and Epstein. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, F-seen's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum. Virginia Jufre was a runaway. She had already suffered a whole bunch of abuse and exploitation.

She was working at Mar-a-Lago in the spa. No, zero power and clout, which is why he was able to bring her in, you know, 14, 15 years old, rape, abuse, traffic her. the person you're describing from a conventional power analysis is the opposite. Right. Rich, powerful, lots of clout, no physical danger, right? Epstein probably didn't have anything on him. And yet the basic moves of pulling people in, figuring out their vulnerability. He, I think one of the things that's hard to wrap your head around with him is he was grooming very powerful people

and grooming very powerless people at the same time and then putting that. together. You don't think of grooming as something that is done to a Prince Andrew, right? Grooming we don't associate with like very powerful people. But in a certain way, you just tilt your head slightly. Like what your friend was going through was a kind of high-end grooming. It was a grooming that he was able to get out of. He wasn't ensnared the same way someone like Virginia was. But this, Epstein's way of moving through the world was kind of omnidirectional grooming. and he was able to calibrate it to, are you a former cabinet secretary

or are you a 14-year-old runaway girl? And he had different methods for each and then he's able to put them together. I want to point out two things you said there that I think are really important and interesting and show up in the emails again and again. Two words. Interesting and fun.

Okay. So interesting, in Epstein language, in the kind of patois of Epstein land, interesting means brain and fun means dick interesting

just to make those are the two promises and the two things that he is offering to these guys often sometimes to some guys I would say he was offering one to somebody was only offering the other

and to many he offered both right so let's just break this down for a second so the interesting thing is interestingness offer is I think probably the bigger part of the funnel for a lot of people because it's easier conversation than the second one is about the fact that a lot of business guys and again folks at home who are not in these worlds may not realize

you may watch industry on TV or you may watch succession you it's really important to stress that that is not what most business people's lives are like right they're not getting up and smoking either smoking crack or snorting coke off their coffee tables. I didn't know when 15 years ago I moved to New York, I didn't know. I've not been here long enough. I've met enough people. There is some number of people living this way.

Like most people who are a senior in finance, like go to bed early, wake up super early to do like weird exercise routines, have like special doctors that prescribe like special protein shakes, like have several kids, have like harried lives, like bicycles and scooters in their mud. mudroom and like chaos. They're not snorting coke off the table every day. And if you do, you don't last. Right. Right? Because you can't keep up. Correct. Correct. So when Jeffrey Epstein, and sorry, that's partly the related to the fun thing, but also have very siloed mental inputs. At some point, you're working,

these guys work really hard, right? This is one of the only countries where people work harder the more money they make, work longer hours, the more money they make. which is not historically how it worked. Makes no sense, right? But people do. Yeah, it's a great. So you're working 80 hours. Right.

You're making a lot of money, you have the four-pack, whatever. I can tell you these guys' lives are not interesting. Their intellectual inputs are not interesting. They say, like, every private equity guys are the same four or five ideas at a dinner and, you know, isn't Zoran dangerous because it'll just drive people away.

Like, it's not even an interesting. There's so many critiques you could make of Zoran. Right. But I never hear a new one. Right. Zoran could probably generate more interesting critiques of Zoran than these guys. Like, they just don't have a lot of interesting new stuff coming in. They don't a lot of people tell them the truth.

Often it's guys in marriages, I will observe that I don't think the marriage is itself a source of intellectual exchange and grappling. I think these are guys who are not interested in what their wives think a lot of the time. And their wives are often managing, like, a very large number of kids and lots of chaos and are not necessarily in a place where they're like offering that back. And my observation is they're often the CEO of the household, running the household to support the man, usually man, not always. But in many, many cases. Yes.

Who's then bringing home and also needs to lead as frictionless a life as he can. Like everything is geared to making sure daddy is fine. And I'm not saying this to malign how boring they are. It's important to underline this. Because if your picture is like finance people on the show industry, then you don't understand why interesting, the chance of meet interesting people is exciting. If you understand the reality of these people's lives,

Ehud Barak, which is kind of, like, Ehud Barak's kind of like an interesting, these people really live these very small lives. Right, right. And so like the promise of interesting people, right? I remember going to the TED conference. And, you know, the TED conference is fine. I gave a couple TED talks.

Like it helped me reach more people. with my ideas when I was younger, great. But I remember, like, I personally would get more every time I, like, get the Sunday New York Times and somehow my kids are occupied, if I get, like, three hours with it, I have learned way more things. I can just feel than I would in, like, four days of a TED conference.

It's just like, it's very light gruel, right? But I remember these guys at the tent would be like, wow. Bill Gates, when I get my touch up, Bill Gates was sitting in the front row. They really go, like, they really, like, are so starved. Even Bill Gates for ideas. They're sitting there. I mean, I think a lot of people are shocked that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, because you like your Bill Gates at one point, you're the second richest man in the world,

you know, slightly down the list now because he had to get divorce, which is a real issue, how much is it going to cost to get divorced? But why did Bill Gates have to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein? I think it's this, it's these kind of routineized lives, very, very boring, as I would argue. And so the interestingness thing is like the promise of this kind of intellectual crackle that sometimes when I meet these guys and they find out what I do or they get to know me, they're actually so envious of like my exposure to all kinds of new thoughts all the time. That I get to go talk to people, that I get to do what you do, get to go, right, we get to just call anybody we want. And they're like, what do you think about this? What is this?

It gets to learn. We get to ask questions. But we get to learn, right? Right. And like, if I'm empathetic about it, like, most people don't really get the chance that you and I do to, like, keep learning forever, calling people, like, right? And so there's guys making $20 million a year in New York who just like they stopped learning a while ago.

And they don't like it, but they're in their thing. And so the promise of interesting is I'm going to return you to the feeling you got in grad school. I'm going to return to the feeling when there was like an interesting speaker passing through. I'm going to return to the feeling of when you used to read books that were not like, you know, business class 30,000 foot books. And then the fun promise in that in that word, why don't you come have fun, right? That's just sex. That's what he's saying there. And what he's, that is obviously for a smaller group of people who we had more trust in and who, you know, he was presumably groomed to a point of not feeling there was a risk.

there. But that's what fun means. You know, and, you know, fun, cute girls, there's different words he used. But again, I think you have to understand how boring most people in business are. Right. It's very interesting point. And I have noticed in my own lived experience that people who have all these houses, and I've come across lots of them. And of course, there was that wonderful line by John McCain when he was asked during the election when he was running in, whenever it was 2008, how many homes do you have? And he didn't know, right? Why did he lose?

Remind me why he lost? Right, right. A little bit like Dr. Oz losing the Pennsylvania because he... During a financial crisis? Right, right. During a financial crisis. I couldn't remember how many homes and he had seven homes, but it was like seven or eight. Wow.

But that sense in which, no matter how many homes you have, you need to import the interesting people. So you go for weekends, you go. to kind of jazz hands and provide interesting input. But it's not enough to be wealthy and have lots of homes. You need incoming, right? You need incoming ideas. You need incoming people. You need new.

So much of this could be solved by people remembering the power of reading. This is what reading is for. Right. Books. But if you... But that requires sitting down being quiet. people are kind of hyperactive. Like, if I could no longer access this technology of books that you have all around you,

right. I think I would probably have to, I guess, invite people to my house to spend weekends to give me exposure to new ideas and go to weird conferences. Like, reading, I don't know, like, reading is a pretty important way to not die while you're still living, like, to refresh yourself with ideas, to not just kind of end up, like, babbling your like family, like, truisms that you were raised by to, like, go beyond your own childhood. And, like, I don't know. Like, if I don't read for, like, a few weeks because I'm engaged in and I'm watching, I can feel my atrophy.

Well, it's a little bit like mental nutritionist, isn't it? I always find, and I take your point about the times, I find it with, you know, certain magazines that come in, if you can make two hours to sit down and actually read them, you just feel like you've had a really good mental meal. and because of the attention span being destroyed by sort of endless scrolling, I think it's harder to sit down and create the discipline to do that. But let's talk also. So Bill Gates is hanging out there.

The one I'm very sort of fascinated by is Larry Summers, Larry Summers, who is lauded by almost anybody in finance. As the smartest guy around, you must talk to Larry Summers. It's all about Larry Summers. I've met Larry Summers behind the scenes at conferences and things. And he seems, you know, he seems perfectly intelligent, whatever. And yet he, the former president of Harvard, a former chief treasury secretary, is asking Jeffrey Epstein how to bed his intern in London,

while his wife's poetry project is being financed by Jeffrey Epstein, who is writing funny asides about the poetry projects to other people, because he obviously couldn't be less interested in the project. And who is she asking the wife, who Larry is running around behind, who is the wife asking Larry Summer, Jeffrey Epstein for help connecting with? Woody Allen. Just to complete the loop of that story. Again, it's a little bit similar to the Kathy Rumler story,

but I think even more powerful, right? So, as you say, Larry Susser. summer is served in the Clinton administration and then the Obama. So in the Clinton, this is, this story really has it all. So in the Clinton administration, he was someone who really pushed for, remember this is Democrats, pushed for financial deregulation, you know, anytime there was kind of a debate within the Democratic Party between more controls and less he was a guy saying, let's take it out, In general, there may have been some exceptions.

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records. That culminates, that, you know, those kind of policies under the Clinton administration are now widely understood by people

to have, you know, culminated through the 2000s under the Bush presidency, which continued in that direction, to culminate in 2008, the financial crisis. Right. Right.

So the world now falls apart. In between that time, Summers is at Harvard as the president of Harvard, where he taught, before. So he does this deregulation stuff for Clinton. Now he's a president of Harvard. He makes comments about the kind of natural aptitude and inferiority of women like in the 2000s. This is not a story from the middle ages. This is a story from like a middle aged man in the 2000s.

Then he is rewarded for helping to, you know, create the context for the financial crisis by becoming under Obama, one of the chief economic architects of the Obama administration. Now, again, I just want to pause on this because it's really important. I would imagine most people watching this have failed at something. And maybe you've even failed at a big thing. And I imagine what never happened in your life is that when you failed it, when you like caused a giant problem, I imagine you were never promoted into running the search for solutions

to the problem you had helped cause. Right. I would imagine that that is the least relatable experience ever. But I want to say in this world that we're talking about, that is actually exactly what happens. The person brought in is you are promoted into being the solution to the problem you cause. You help to create. Right.

So this is arsonist to firefighter pipeline. So now he's under Obama. Arsonist to firefighter. Yeah. So he's now watering the fire that he helped cause. and by the way, while he was at Harvard, I think the Times first reported this story, maybe, he was found to be moonlighting for a hedge fund

or some kind of financial institution while at Harvard. And it was such a, it was a big story at the time. And was this to make more money? Yeah. Right, because there's always a problem that if you go into education somehow, even being the president of Harvard is not enough. I think about, I feel like I sometimes say,

so old-fashioned. But like in what world is that job not enough for you? Right, right. Great question. Great question. What a what a fucking honor of a job. But but this is a little bit like Peter Mandelson, right, who was the British business minister who was in the emails is found sending confidential information to Jeffrey Epstein. It has taken money according to the emails from Jeffrey Epstein. And you're like, in what world is this? this not enough, can you not keep the news that the British Prime Minister is going to be leaving the following day to yourself? You are a British government minister, and you're sending it to a man who you've been advising, don't worry about the sex stuff, we would never have charged you in the

UK, it'll all go away. So, I mean, it's, by the way, I just like really wish I'd never seen Peter Mandelson's bare legs all the way up. You mean when he's wearing his tighty whiteys? Yeah, I was a little kind of. Yeah. Do you guys not have boxer briefs in the UK? UK or hasn't really gone? It's not a thing like it is here. Boxer briefs.

Yeah, it's not like it's boxes are not a thing like they are here. Anyway. Sorry, we this is the now you should have underwear ads. This would be a perfect segment you could have like a- We may well have underwear ads actually. You could do like a break here and do like a- Yeah, on YouTube I don't know. But let's come back to this sense of Larry Summers is head of Harvard.

He said that women don't have the same aptitude as men for science and math. And it turns out that he's moonlighting for a financial institution because he wants more money and more power, presumably, and more status. So think of that, think, in just those facts alone, before we even get to the relationship with Epstein, before we even get to him trying to get advice from a convicted pedophile about how to sleep with one of his mentees, we have a perfect picture of our modern elite. So a couple features to stand out, just in the story we've told about him. One, it's an elite that really prizes brain. I think he was tenured at 27 years old. He's a undoubtedly smart guy. So this is not the landed English aristocracy as we were talking about for 200 years ago,

where it didn't matter if you're particularly smart or not. You were the keeper of that land and custodian of that tradition. No, these are, like to get into this elite, intelligence is actually important. So he's very smart. He's credentialed in the kind of meritocracy. he is someone who, you know, the intrinsic value of shaping education for all the world, which you do if you run Harvard, shaping ideas for all the world, defending, you know, if he had so had that job, he'd be defending Harvard against, you know, Donald Trump, let's say.

But those are the kinds of things people in that job do. in the Clinton to Obama story, this notion of failing up in impunity that no matter how much you hurt the common good, there will always be better jobs for you, rewards for having hurt it. And you just have a picture of, let's make it not about Larry Summers.

Let's make it about, what you were really seeing there is an incentive system, is a structure, He is just a person who got through those sieves, but what he is revealing of is the sieves, is what is weeded out and what isn't, helping to cause giant social problems, not weeded out. Right. You know, whereas like, I think calling out rich and powerful people, that does get you weeded out. So you start to see the kind of world that, produces elites like him.

And it was the same world that produces a lot of other people in this circle. I will say, Larry, I once started to get several years ago, right after Winterstake All came out, maybe the year after it came out. I got like several text messages in a short

burst of time, like three or four messages, and they were like, Larry Summers just plugged your book. It's like, well, where, where? where, like, oh, we're to talk at Harvard. And he just said, anybody who wants to understand what's happening in the world right now needs to read Winterstake All. Winterstake All is an evisceration of everything he stands for.

So I guess there was like a little bit of a self-awareness in that moment in 2018 or 2019 of like maybe this is the world that me and my friends have wrought. And maybe someone is explaining that back. And even he, but, you know, I tried to reach out to him and say, let's have a conversation about it. But to no avail. Well, Larry, if you happen to be watching, or Mrs. Summers, if you happen to be watching, and you want to know more, reach out. I found his number in the Epstein Faza.

I've been thinking about, should I've been thinking about, should we call him? We should call him. What a brilliant idea. Should you do it? We should call him. Is that illegal? No, why would it be illegal?

Right, okay. Okay. Well, we tried. We tried. Larry hit us up. Yeah. Hit us up. Very interesting.

Probably like I don't recognize the incoming. Right. I'm not in the network. Yeah. You're not in the network. You're not in the network. You're not in the network. You're not in the network.

I'm sort of the opposite of being in the network. Yeah, well, you're poking at the network. Although the network is now available for everybody to see, right? That's what's interesting about it too. And I mean, the thing that we don't see, and I wonder if there are lots of emails from Larry Summers to his wife or to friends going, oh my God, I've got to have dinner with Jeffrey Epstein again because he's financing my wife's poetry. project. He's such a bull. Or I find him so tedious. He's always trying to force

Erhard Barak on me. I mean, we don't know whether or not. There was a whole circle of emails outside. I cannot have dinner with Woody Allen again. Outside of the files, yes. Okay. But here's the thing, right? I actually am obsessed with the following. And I don't think people have picked up on this enough. If we somehow got access to like all of your emails historically, you've lived a, I would imagine an infinitely more noble and less criminal life of Jeffrey Epstein. Well, less criminal. I'm not going to promise it's noble, but certainly less criminal. If we went through all your emails, or if you went through all of mine, you'd find,

we have thousands and thousands, you'd find a certain number of emails where people were mad at us, people thought we'd failed morally in a certain way, people felt betrayed by something, people didn't like a thing we did, the thing we said, whatever, right? I think that would be for most people. So we have like all of Epstein's emails, right? Or not all, but a lot. Everyone is talking about what's in there. Here's what's not in there.

We have all these emails. We have all these people emailing about everything. There's no breakup emails. There's no emails when people found out more. Isn't 2018, we have those emails too. There's no one saying, fuck, I didn't know, but I read this story now. You are despicable. Never call me again.

Not one email that I've seen. We don't have people, we don't have women who, were associates of him saying, wow, I didn't know this before or I didn't know the extent of it, but now I'm finding out you are garbage. Like, we have no angry emails. You know, breakup emails, with nothing. That's a great point, actually. Where are they? Right. We have, we have his inbox. Right. Like, even after he died, there's a couple people who emailed that after he died being like, ha ha, you are dead. Oh, really? A couple people. I don't think they knew him. Right. There's one person who wrote, a woman who wrote a, maybe after he's arrested, maybe and after he's

dead a kind email. I'm so sorry this happened to me. But just I really want to like underline for people in any normal person's inbox just through the ups and downs of life and leaving jobs and firing people. There's some people who don't like you. This guy, these people were so afraid and I have a theory of why that there's no such emails. And my theory of why in this Epstein class series we have, the first installment we did was about courage and the total absence of courage. If these women were raped and trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell and a small number of other people, but their abuse was enabled by the silence and complicity and overlooking and

looking away of much larger number of people. And I don't think you get the former without the latter. And I think a lot of what happened in this network has to do with the way courage dissipates, evaporates in an age of networks like ours. Where, again, going back to that old example, if your power consists of a thousand acres of land and a stonehouse that's been in the family 20 years and certain kind of custodial, like, relationships, patrimonial relationships of the people around you, like, that's, That's not power that can vanish in an instant. Right. Governments come and go. Intellectual fashions come and go.

Industries come and go. Like, you're still that guy, right? And you could think about being a wealthy, you know, landowner in Uttar Pradesh in India. Or you could think about being like, you know, all kinds of different versions of that kind of elite. In this hyper-networked Davos man elite, your wealth is your connections. And you're the density and breadth of your connections to all these other people. And that means that you can operate in a global scale that like our ancestors would have found breathtaking, right? You can sit.

We're in the interactive company corporation building. You could have an idea sitting in this building for, you know, small towns in China really need this thing. And like you could get a few people together and make that in this building. And like you could conquer with a few keystrokes the market of small towns in China. What do you think? Like that's unimaginable for our ancestors. However, that's power of networks in one way. But your downfall can also cascade with similar speed, right?

Getting fired from a job doesn't just mean you're kind of fired in the network, right? Everyone knows. Stop being useful to people. And so there is a lack of courage that I think has developed in the age of networks, hyper-connected networks. And so when I look at that inbox, even after people got to know, even after Julie Brown's heroic reporting 2018, where no one could say they didn't know after that, even after he died, that people didn't have the bravery to break up with him.

That's very interesting. And also, in fact, what you see is the opposite. You have people reaching out. I mean, Peter Mandelson, after the first time he was found guilty, saying this would never have happened in Europe, I stand by you, I am proud to call you my friend. I didn't know Britain was still in Europe. Well, it was then. It was then.

It was then. But that sense of people actually coming to his aid and saying, this is all about managing your reputation. And, you know, Peggy Siegel, they're a renowned publicist who up until then have been, you know, thought of as the queen of the Oscar campaigns, prostating herself to help him get back into polite society. I mean, I'm going to quote Virginia.

Jeffrey, who wrote Nobody's Girl again, this is, I think, an interview she did with 60 Minutes in Australia, where she was living. She said, you know, this was not a normal human trafficking situation. This is not like a shady guy at the mall who grabs a girl. These are not like these Eastern European networks that we sometimes read about. These are some of the most wealthy, powerful people in the world. She was like, I was trafficked to royalty. I was trafficked to, you know, very rich people, prime ministers, all of that. And then she used a phrase.

She said, this is that world. It's corrupt. It's corrupt to the core. When she says this is corrupt to the core, she is not ring fencing her analysis to what occurred in the massage room. She rightly is understanding from her own deepest, most barbaric lived experience. and she's now no longer with us. She is understanding what happened in the massage room as enabled by many concentric circles of enablement.

Starting with people who did the act, studying with other people who didn't do it but knew about it, and I don't problem with it, starting with other people who sort of knew but didn't poke around. Getting all the way out to people maybe didn't know about the actual acts, but knew enough to not hang out with those people to raise more questions.

But when she describes a world order that is kind of corrupt to the core, She is not talking about the rape of one girl by one man. She is talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And no, if you don't want to listen to me, fine. But I would urge people listening to this to take seriously someone who has more reason than any of us to be focused on the actual sex crimes she was a victim of. Because those were not abstract. Those were one body and another body or two bodies and a body.

other body and her body was the one being violated and moved around. But if she is telling us, don't just stop at what one body did to another body. Look at the enable the body politic, let's say. Look at this corrupt to the core order. I think we owe her and these are the survivors that work. Okay. So in your series, the Epstein class on ink on substact, you talk about how there are just women are missing, grown up women are missing.

There are lots of girls floating around. And having talked to people who hung out at Epstein's house, you know, these sort of one person described it as sort of gallery girls, you know, dressed in black, they've got long hair, they're very pretty, some of them have a clipboard, they're sort of floating around. It's kind of, you know, like what are they doing? The clipboard I was not expecting. Well, the clipboard, which has got people's names on,

maybe what they like or this person only drinks, you know, bone broth or whatever. Because Epstein was very good at sort of paying attention to people's specific. needs to your point. Why were the no grown-up women at the table? So I had spent so much time with the emails, which is what a lot of what we've been talking about is from since November when the first big tranche came out. So I was several months reading the emails. And at some point it occurred to me that, you know, there was other types of files released.

I should look at those. I'm kind of a text person, so I always focus on the written word, but maybe I should look at the photos. So there's, you know, and these incredible people, by the way, who deserve a plug at J-mail. You know, these people set up, set up a Gmail inbox look-alike replica of what his email box, all his Google products would have looked like by kind of populating these files, which are basically these scanned PDFs.

They have digitized it all and like put it into his, so you can just kind of go to jmail. We'll tell people how we find it. So it's jmail. And you can, it looks like a Gmail box, except it's his Gmail box. Right. And then if you search someone's name, it'd be like you're searching his inbox. It's heroic, heroic work. I think they take donations.

So you should, you should support them. But then they also broadened it so you can go to, you know, J photos or whatever, the same way you would in your own, in your own Gmail thing. Right, in your own Google photos. So they've taken all the photos. And now it's, it's just extraordinary. So I decided, okay, I'm going to read the photos next. and thousands of photos.

So I start looking through the photos. And, you know, it takes sometimes, and I like to sometimes do this work where you just immerse yourself in a sea of something and you don't know what it is. And, you know, I think of writing is a kind of meaning-making process and the meaning is not, if you're serious about it, you don't know the meaning in advance.

Right. We go in and you're paying attention and you're kind of open. And you're making connections. Right. I mean, you can also do the other thing where you just like know your idea and you're going in to look for something. But with something like this, it's really helpful to actually be a little blank.

I'm like, what am I seeing? So obviously, it's a sex crimes investigation. So there's women and girls all over these pictures. They're generally redacted. So there's kind of these black squares. And then the men are not redacted. So there's this kind of thing of all these redacted women and girls. And all you see is like, you know, some of these gross men's armors around waists

and holding them sitting on laps, whatever. First of all, just like. Well, you see the disparity. power, right? So starkly. And you know, you and I both live in New York. We know, if not the actual guys, like we know this kind of guy. And like these guys are so deluded into thinking that the women are enjoying themselves as much as they are. Like the guys are just, the guys have the smiles of men who think that this is uncoerced lopsitting. Right. That this woman is enjoying your company rather than she doesn't have access to her passport anymore. These are guys who don't

recognize the difference between a hug or a sideways hug that is from like flirtation or curiosity versus like I don't have access to my passport and I'm afraid I might be killed. So those are really different vibes from a woman that you should be able to pick up on but a lot of these guys can't do that. And was that one of the things that Epstein did, he just kept these girls' passports? I mean, certainly for some of them. Right. which is almost like definition.

And so many Virginia Dufreyre writes about that. Again, just think about that for a second. Like, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, these are men who even separate and apart from their kind of sexual behavior, value, these are, like, most of us keep our passport in like some drawer at home. Like these are people who keep it on them at all times because you never know where you're going to go tomorrow. Right, okay, that's a good.

These are people who's like passport freedom. Mm-hmm. is more central to them than to almost anybody on the planet. They really avail of the passport. Right, so doubly ironic that they're with someone who doesn't have access to their passport. What's the first thing they lock up, right? It's like how authoritarian's the first thing they ban is speech.

Like they understand which thing to ban first, right? Or association. It's like the passport men knew that the first thing you wanna tie down is the passport of someone you have as a victim like this, because they understand the freedom that a passport entails. So you have this, you know, these men who are just like with this kind of grin of delusion, not realizing that these women are not actually enjoying themselves as much as they might be, you know, seeming to.

And I kept looking through the photos. And then I just started to notice this, like, weird thing. And I had no framework for it at first. I was just noticing that in a small subset of these photos, it was meal time. It was like a table. Suddenly entered the equation. Often the table had, you know, some drinks on it, often red wine, often food, plates,

hors d'oeuvres. And suddenly in these pictures, something dramatically changed. So there was kind of, and going back to that word, interesting, these guys really pride themselves on being like real intellectuals, even if they have like three ideas and they were all from Yuval Hariri's Sapiens book. Right, of course, the hero of these people. Everybody's read Harare's books. They love his ideas.

They got three of them from his book. However many there are in his book, they have three. They always have the lists of three. I remember those books sweeping through Silicon Valley, and every time I talk to someone there, they were like, oh my God, you have to read Sapiens. And it was like, actually, I did some of this at school. I mean, which is not too good because I've read the book

and the books are good. The authors are often smarter than the readers like that. So at these tables, there's a lot of people having a focused, intense conversation. You can tell it's like, it's like probably like you and I look right now, having like a real intense conversation. And something really strange happens in the photos, which is the women and girls are gone. They are everywhere in this photo archive. It's a sex crimes investigation.

Right. But you add a table, you put food on it, you put wine on it, and you have like intellectual, intense conversation around it. No women and girls generally. Gilein was in some of them. But it was really striking ones. You noticed it. And I would say not particularly typical of anything that I've, you know, of some of these worlds

that we're talking about. Like very weird. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it and kind of reading the photos of the and having read all the emails, thinking about, not all the emails since, but having read all of the initial tranche in November, what does this mean? What are we seeing here when we see this? Why are women and girls so central in this world? This whole thing was about giving people access to women and girls. It was giving, like, gross finance guys. Right. Access to women. It was the whole thing. Or nerdy academic guys. All of that, right?

So why suddenly, I don't know, I said to you when we were emailing yesterday. Like, I'm eating at a table with men and women, but like the company of women is a, I find a lovely charming thing my entire life. Like I've never aspired to a table just like evacuated of women. What's the deal? And I think the more I thought about it and put it together with everything else,

it just seemed to me that the number one fear of men in this world would be like a 40 year old woman with opinions. Like their whole life would be organized to avoid the problem of 40-year-old women. And I think 40 might be young. 40 might be young, right? I mean, certainly anybody older than that is like not, right?

But my point is what these guys don't want friction. Mm-hmm. As we talked about, they don't want pushback. They don't want to have to argue. They don't want resistance in any form. And I think in that piece, which we called Never Eat with Women, they associate friction and resistance with all kinds of disparate things that may seem disparate to you. But I think in their mind are all just different flavors of resistance that they don't want to have to deal with.

Stay in an airport line is one of them. Right. I think a strong woman with opinions is another. A 15-year-old girl or a really grateful, like 23-year-old. Estonian model who just got to America two weeks ago whose passport is in the safe, those women are okay because my guess is those women are probably not going to tell you your idea is full of shit because they're probably afraid for their lives if they do. So they're giving a vibe that is probably like friction-free for you.

I think these same guys, you got to remember, it's the same guys who with the same, like stubby thumbs are tapping an email about girls in one minute, about antitrust regulation and another, about their private jet flight later that afternoon. It's the same guys, right? We know this from the emails. And I think women are resistance. I think regulators are resistance. Definitely.

The government trying to regulate what you want to do is resistance. I think, you know, the idea of having to justify yourself intellectually is resistance. And again, you want to be careful. Part of what we've tried to do in the Epstein class series is an inherently dangerous and fraught thing that I've tried to be very careful with, but I want to do it anyway, which is there's a school of thought that would say

you got like really barbaric pedophilia at the heart of this. Like, don't connect that to anything else. Like, that is its own circle of hell, its own barbarism. Like, don't draw lines from it to anything else because, you know, and I think there's truth of that. Like, it is its own barbarism.

Like, you don't want to compare. It's just like its own thing, right? It's the kind of Godwin's law thing about the Holocaust. Like, you don't want to make comparisons to things lightly. Having spent a lot of time in these files, a lot of time in the photos, a lot of times in the emails, I and a lot of time reading books like Nobody's Girl and Other Testimony of Survivors, I think it's actually essential to make the connection between the extreme illegal and depraved behavior at the core and other behaviors, including behaviors of people who would never do those things, who didn't do this.

things. Right. And this notion of resistance, I think, is an example of a behavior that in its most extreme form at the core is like, for a small number of these guys, let's say, or whatever number of these guys, the desire for resistance-free, you know, acting on the world without resistance is child rape. That is the reductio-at absurdum of a powerful man who literally wants no resistance, of having, you know, raping a 15-year-old girl provided to you by Jeffrey Epstein is that, but I don't think you can end the analysis there. I think a lot of these guys, in part because those guys were also emailing about all this other stuff.

But in general, this group of people around him, around Epstein, also didn't want resistance in all the other forms. The link is these are people who don't like the idea of being told no, who are not told no. And some of them are not told no in the bedroom or the massage room on Rape Island. Some of them have never been to Rape Island. I have no connection to that. But just don't like being told no when they're running their company and want to, you know, acquire another company.

These are people who expect impunity. These are people who take any kind of resistance to their projects and their ends very seriously and very personally. And again, I want to be clear that you have to be careful in this and But, you know, part of what we've done in this series is insist on not siloing the sex crimes, understanding the sex crimes as something that never would have happened without so many structures of belief, values, incentives, ideas of what is normal and not normal. This is a group of men, a subset of whom were criminal and engaged in criminal behavior, most of whom were probably not. who nonetheless expect to operate on our society without the slightest bit of resistance. Okay, so I'm going to push back on one thing, and I think it's a very interesting analysis. And in terms of the Epstein network, it makes total sense.

I bet if you hand in your manuscript to your editor and they come back and say, no, no, no, no, we're not doing it like this, or blah, blah, you would feel, you would push back. wouldn't you? You strike me as someone that doesn't want someone. On individual points maybe, but no, no. And this is really important. There are some writers like that.

I'm not like that. I crave editing because I have a sense of my limitations, right? I crave editing. When I was coming up, now I really use my actual editors. My first couple books, right? Think about how cumbersome this.

My first couple books, I gave the word doc of those books to like 20 to 25 people. before like final submission and got like all kinds of people to read them and they all very generously made changes and I incorporated like 25 people's edits of my book into my book.

I have no insecurity about not getting to act on the world through my book. Like that book is my words, it's my darling, it's what I've been spending years on. I welcome the friction. I think normal people understand their own limitations. I don't know everything.

everything. I do have blind spots. That to me is normal. You know, it's like in parenting, right? The worst parent is not the parent who doesn't know how to do a certain thing. The worst parent is the one who can't admit that they don't know certain things. Right? And to be able to go to your, I go to my eight-year-old and ten-year-old every now and then I said, I got really angry about that thing yesterday. I shouldn't have gotten that angry, right? It's not the not getting angry part that you should try to aspire to as a parent. As long as you can the next day be like, that was wrong. If you're going to write that power imbalance and say,

I shouldn't have yelled like that. That wasn't right. Your kids are going to be okay. So it's the expectation of no one else knows anything. I am like the grand wizard of how the world should be. I think we all have egos, but I do think people in this group are special. in this way. And they do have a special intolerance for being questioned. And a special entitlement. And I think Jeffrey, I mean, you know, reading them, I love your

terminology of the Grand Wizard. He felt like the Grand Wizard at the center of this. And the people that he collected around him gave him special powers. And, you know, it's so interesting that we now have, you know, when you think about Virginia Jufre being at in the spa at Mar-a-Lago and that's how she is brought into his world. And you think about the fact that the American president now is someone who was close friends with this guy. You think about former president Bill Clinton was not a lot in common with Donald Trump politically. But Trump was a Democrat for a long time.

What does it tell you when Virginia Joufrey talks about a corrupt to the or what does it tell you that this person, we've been talking about a lot of individuals here, naming individual names, which is useful. But what does it tell you about our society that this person was able to worm his way into a Democratic president's life and a Republican future in both cases, president's life?

What does it tell you that this person's life? What does it tell you that this person was able to go warm his way deep into Harvard, deep into MIT, that he was affiliated of people from Google, the Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs? I mean, at some point, you start going down the list. This is just like the major institutions of the American establishment and power elite. And, you know, if you right now were to go downstairs and go to a little food cart, and by chance you get a bad kebab or bad hot dog, and it's got a little bacteria in it, your body has a whole bunch of processes for getting that out, interdicting it, noticing it. It's incredible.

Your body just knows, like, that's not supposed to be in here, and your body will get it out very fast, hopefully. that kind of reaction did not happen here this was a this is almost like a perfect parent this was like human salmonella right

Jeffrey Epstein right a poisonous kind of malignant person put into the body politic of American life here he's passing through Harvard here he's passing through Google

here he's passing through the Gates Foundation right all the organs of the American power thinking about it. And like there was no, there was just no histamine reaction. There was no vomiting. There was no nausea.

There was no diarrhea. I'm sorry. But like none of the, none of the processes that you might imagine would, would kick in if a fucking monster was passing through these various organs. Literally, look, it's the dog that didn't bark.

Like, none of that happened. None of that happened. Have you heard, you know a lot of people? Have you heard of one dinner in New York? that blew up where he was at the table, maybe Peggy Siegel or someone. Have you heard of one dinner where someone was like, this guy is at the table?

Fuck this and walked out. One time. Have you heard of one such event? I'm just saying, you think about it. There were hundreds of meals. There were hundreds of seminars at Harvard. Just think about it. What we're left with.

Forget him. Think about the organs to go back to that metaphor, not the bad piece of food. The bad piece of food is just a test. Think of all the organs that we have now found out lack the capacity to notice, to react to, and to expunge this vileness.

We've learned so much about our heart, our lungs, our stomach, our guts. That's what we've learned about through this. We have learned about the system. He's gone. We are unfortunately still living under all of the institutions and even the types of people and the incentives and structures that almost universally had no problem with him.

Do you think there is another Epstein out there? Sure. I don't know that it would, when you say another Epstein, I mean, are there powerful men with these kind of behaviors? Sure. The level of connectedness and the level of cultivate, like he was singular, you know, I think partly because most people who are so careful to collect people in this way, I think the combination of that with this like utter recklessness in other areas is a little bit of a unique fingerprint

that he had. But sure, there, you know, I mean, it's a little bit like, when the Weinstein thing came out, which was different. But again, it was like, how many thousand people knew? I don't know, whatever your estimate is, there's lots of assistance, there's lots of lawyers, there's lots of people signing NDAs, there's lots of settlement. I mean, at some point you start adding it all up.

It's thousands of people, right? How do we keep achieving, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist. So it's really important to say, like, this is not a conspiracy, in the sense that this is uncoordinated behavior. That's what's so scary. This is uncoordinated silence in a way that resembles coordination.

You would think you could only get this level of like all these institutions not having a problem through a massive act of coordination. But it turns out you can get that same kind of coordinated like result uncoordinatedly if you share a culture in which impunity is valued, in which people. people with power deserve infinite second chances. In which rich people get away with all sorts of things. In which women are not valued in general and certainly valued less if they are younger and have less money and maybe their passports locked away somewhere.

This story, it's really important to not, I think. And again, that's why we call it the Epstein class, not the Epstein man or the Epstein, whatever. Like, this story is a map. of our governing elite. These are the institutions that are financing your mortgage, shaping what kind of education your kids get, deciding what kind of food you eat, you know, I mean, everything.

And deciding where your kids go to school. Everything. And it seems to me you deserve to know, as a person out there, the kinds of attitudes, the kinds of values, the kinds of contempt for you. the kinds of, I guess, fantasy of their own omnipotence and sense of your utter disposability that a lot of people in this world have. We deserve to know what products you use on your hair.

Wow. This is our second ad break of, yeah, this could be a very lucrative episode. It's so good. I know so many people who are just thinking, how do I get my hair like that? I'm going to help you right now. There is a company called Caracare. It makes a wax stick.

Normally wax you got to put your hands in, but I don't like that. It's a little wax stick. It looks like a deodorant stick, except it's wax. Yeah. Roll it in there, shape it up. It takes about five, seven seconds.

It's fantastic. And there we go. It's so interesting talking to you. I long for you to come back. Because I feel like we barely uncovered what's in there, too. It's part one. I mean, it's really, honestly, It's part one. I want you to come back in two weeks and can we do part two?

I'm very happy to. Because we hadn't really talked about what the Epstein files tell us about Donald Trump. And I would love to delve into characters like Leon Black. And again, this sort of sense of the violence underneath it all too. I mean, I think that's one of the really alarming things that comes out of this. Not that not only does it show us what a corrupt governing body that we have, but also the violence and the violence against women and the conversations, one of the things I found most shocking that I would love you to come back on and sort of debrief on is the language around

women, the way men talk about women. It's just so, it's violent and it's depressing. It is. And it explains a lot. It explains a lot about how hard things can be for women in a culture that still feels. I mean, the sort of whining conversations that the men have about Me Too and the sort of puerile and juvenile conversations, they have witnessed Peter Atier. And actually Deepak Chopra and these people that we've held up as spiritual leaders are really alarming. But I feel like it's a different conversation. It is. But I will say, you know, I think, you know, like you, I've known people who are kind of adjacent to that world or intersected with it. And one experience I had, when we first moved to New York, my wife and I, Priya,

we would sometimes go to an event or go to a dinner or a party. And there'd be some of these types of people. And I would have a decent enough time. And on the way home and the subway, often my wife. wife Priya would have had a very different experience. Nothing, nothing toxic or abusive, just in this kind of harassment realm, but more the feeling that no men there were interested in anything a woman had to say. And having, I did not have that experience in any of these dinners, but I often sat on the

D-Train heading back to Brooklyn with Priya and realized there was like a different, there was like a different experience of that night that a lot of the women there would have had, which is not, and I started to see it and recognize it. I mean, you know, actually we talked about this the other day. Priya was sitting a few weeks ago, a few months ago. We were at a kind of, it was a fundraising dinner, and Priya sat next to one of the preeminent scholars in the world on, you know, literature, literature scholars.

And I watched, I couldn't hear the conversation, but I watched. And I watched her trying this topic, that topic. And I watched this kind of older man just kind of seem bored of her and kind of seeing, you know. Priya is one of the most interesting women. I've ever spoken to my life. I stole her from her boyfriend for a reason. And to watch this older man, who, by the way, teaches, he teaches, he teaches 20-year-olds, including presumably a large number of women.

And she just told me out there was just no way. that he could in his mind contemplate the idea that she would have any interesting to say. And eventually their conversation fizzled. I watched that, and they just stopped talking. And then someone else, I think, across or something, said to Priya something about her book, The Art of Gathering, which was an amazing book.

And he was like, your book changed. And then you could see this guy, realizing that he's like the worst archaeologist ever who just had, like, failed to find any bones, but there were a lot of bones. Right. But there was a huge dinosaur fossil sitting right there. You know, but in his patriarchal view of the world,

he just couldn't contemplate that, again, woman in her low 40s could have anything to tell him. Presumably, he would have wished she was half her age, or maybe if she was some very senior colleague of his that he would have been, you know, cowed by her the president of his university or something, all of which is to say is these behaviors, sometimes, as in the Epstein case, culminate in the extreme acts of, you know, criminality that we're talking about.

But they're occurring every day, all day. And I remember being at those dinners and just the base layer of some of these guys who just basically do not think of women as full people. Well, it's interesting. I went to a dinner last week. I think a lot of women feel it's because of the approach of the Trump government to DEI, that they're now being silenced or not heard. And I went to a dinner last week, which was all women, very senior women, several of whom were extremely well known, all of whom were saying they didn't feel they had a platform, they couldn't say things that they wanted to say, that they would be penalized for saying them, and that nobody wants to hear women. anymore. Anyway, they definitely want to hear you. I want to hear women. Well, and I don't feel silenced happily because we have the Daily Beast platform. But it's an absolute joy to talk to you. And I really enjoyed your book, Winners Take All. And we should we should also talk about that. But you have a new book coming out too, which I want you to tell people about.

It's coming out in September. It's called Man in the Mirror. it is some folks will remember you know what was a kind of in some ways a tabloid story in New York city from from two and a half years ago three years ago almost where Jordan Neely a young black homeless man who struggled with mental illness was on a subway train uptown F train and began sort of acting out and saying he was hungry and wanted food, was ready to die, ready to go back to prison, through his jacket to the ground, having a kind of, you know, psychiatric crisis. And a young white man named Daniel Penny was a former U.S. Marine,

out of a desire to kind of restrain him, came up from behind him, put his, put him in a chokehold, dropped him to the ground, and held him for five or six minutes, eventually killing him. And this was at 2.30 in the afternoon? 2.30 in the afternoon. Boy, Lafayette. And this case became an American Roershack test very quickly. What did you see?

Did you see heroism on the part of Daniel Penny? Did you see white vigilantism? Did you see a city run amok? did you see, you know, authoritarianism descending in America and Trump's, you know, paramilitaries? Like every kind of theory, notion, fantasy of what is going on kind of came into this case. And so I spent the last, you know, few years going deep not just into this case, but into this city and the question of our cities and fear and safety and danger and people trying to figure out very difficult questions of homelessness and mental. tell on us, but this is the most reported, embedded street-level book I've ever done. This is just like, it is not a, you've heard a lot of my opinions today.

It's not an opinion book. It's a deeply reported human story of people on all sides of these questions, living with some of the hardest problems our country faces. And it's a kind of immersive narrative of like eight or ten people kind of living through these questions in New York. And I think ultimately it's a book about, it's a portrait of this age, and it's a portrait of an age of division and it's a portrait of people struggling for humanity against tremendous odds. Well, it sounds fascinating. I live above the subway station actually where it took place,

so I'm particularly interested to read it. And there's a lot of homelessness and mental illness right around that subway station because there's a Method and clinic nearby, which I'm sure you know. And, well, a complicated story. And I had to be a complicated story. And I had to lots of arguments with people about it because, as you say, it's a raw suck test for what people think. Anyway, it's out in September. So we'll have you back to talk about that. But we will have you back in two weeks to talk more about the Epstein files and what they reveal. And I would love to go into the Deepak Chopra emails and the Peter Ateer emails and just these guys that thought they could have conversations like this and none of us would find out. Yeah.

What a world. What a world. Happily, we have you as our guide through it. I'm happy to chat with you. I wish it was under better email circumstances. Well, but it's revelatory and people have been held to account. Some people have been held to account. My Angela says, right, when people show you who they are, believe them.

Right. When the power structure of your world shows you who it is like this, this is a rare and historic glimpse, take the view. I love Anand's observation that women were missing from these conversations. There were girls, girls everywhere, but there were no women at the table with these guys because they don't care about women's ideas. I found the conversation really fascinating. And the thing I love is that Anand sort of comes from a very privileged world.

He went to Sidwell Friends. He went to the universities of Michigan and to Harvard. He worked at the New York Times. So he's been inside these institutions, and it's not, as he says, like it is in television dramas. People don't behave like that. That's television. That's drama. And what I loved was he's just insights into how the rich live slightly divorced from communities.

They travel. They feel very comfortable on their private plane wherever they're going high above it all, high above the rest of us. And I thought it was, well, we'll be back for more, right? We'll be back for more. But tell us what your favourite part of the conversation was and what questions I should have asked him so I can ask him next time.

And I'm so excited to recommend a new podcast called The Royalist by the Daily Beast's very own Tom Sykes. He is unparalleled in his reporting and his fearlessness about the royal family. He's got unbelievable connections and he's unafraid to tell us things that a lot of royal correspondents in the UK simply cannot tell us. So check it out, The Royalist, wherever you get your podcasts and, well, strap yourself in because he's got some scoops. And if you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to share this with a friend.

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