I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite

Summary

The Daily Beast Podcast

Episode: "I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite"
Host: Joanna Coles
Guest: Anand Giridharadas
Date: March 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the revelations from the recently released "Epstein files," exploring how Jeffrey Epstein used the same tactics to groom both vulnerable young women and America’s most powerful elite. Philosopher and writer Anand Giridharadas joins Joanna Coles for an in-depth analysis of the underlying culture and systems that enabled Epstein’s influence. Together, they examine the corrosive nature of elite networks, the absence of women at the power table, and the broader implications for American society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parallels in Grooming: From Victims to Power Brokers

Timestamp: 00:00–03:36

• Epstein’s Grooming Tactics: Anand draws a parallel between how Epstein groomed teenage girls and how he manipulated billionaires and power-brokers. Despite occupying different rungs on the power ladder, both groups were subjected to calculated psychological tactics.
• Quote:

  “What’s so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Epstein’s behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum.” – Anand Giridharadas (00:20)

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2. The Elite Network and Epstein’s Role

Timestamp: 03:36–07:35

• Connector as Occupation: Epstein is identified as a “connector,” someone whose social power is generated by cultivating cross-world networks, rather than by virtue of doing something else in the world.

• Shortcut to Power: Even those already powerful (like Mort Zuckerman) sought Epstein’s services to cut through the “friction” of elite processes where their own networks fell short.

• Frictionless Experience: To be elite is to have everyday friction removed. Epstein’s value was in extending this seamlessness to new domains—like school admissions or exclusive events.

• Quotes:

  "There are some people, I would say, probably like Mort Zuckerman, who have a job. ... then there’s a smaller group of people of who Epstein was a perfect example, for whom the cultivation and maintenance of network ties is the job." – Anand Giridharadas (03:36)
  "To be in that rarefied elite is to have friction removed... Epstein did was offer the promise of extending that kind of seamlessness..." – Anand Giridharadas (07:57)

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3. The “Four Pack” and the Cult of Optionality

Timestamp: 12:11–16:25

• Four Pack: In elite New York circles, possessing four homes (Manhattan, Florida, the Hamptons, Aspen) is seen as minimum "hygiene"—for status, for taxes, and for constant mobility.
• Optionality: Life is engineered for maximum flexibility and minimum commitment. The finance term "optionality" becomes a metaphor for relationships, housing, and even sexual exploitation.
• Quote:

  “Optionality... sort of became over the last, I think 10, 15 years, the life aspiration for a lot of these folks." – Anand Giridharadas (14:16)

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4. Elites Untethered from Place or Community

Timestamp: 16:25–24:23

• Elites as “Nowhere People”: Modern super-elites, unlike historical aristocracies, have no rootedness or community. Their lives are in constant motion, untethered from locality or responsibility.
• Community vs. Network: True community involves mutual sacrifice or care; elite networks are transactional relationships maintained for utility.
• Critical Observation:

  “Their loyalties are horizontally to other people in this network, not downward to the people they live among.” – Anand Giridharadas (22:19)

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5. The Loneliness and Unhappiness of the Super-rich

Timestamp: 24:23–27:57

• Isolation of the Elite: Despite immense power and wealth, many are lonely, with superficial or broken family ties.
• Memorable Analogy:

  “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.” – Anand Giridharadas (26:55)

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6. Reading Elite Contempt in Everyday Emails

Timestamp: 29:00–36:50

• Kathy Rummler’s Email: Discussion of a White House counsel’s dehumanizing email about ordinary people—underscoring how those with institutional power may subtly (or not so subtly) hold the populace in contempt.
• Systems and Policy as Downstream Effects: The worldview of these power-brokers directly impacts public policy and the daily reality of ordinary people.
• Notable Quote:

  “The same moral compass that is making a decision about … casualties in a war, and what to recommend to a president... surely can’t be so easily ring-fenced.” – Anand Giridharadas (34:38)

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7. How Epstein Groomed “Up”—The Seduction of the Elite

Timestamp: 37:28–43:55

• Grooming the Powerful: Epstein used the same techniques with the powerful as with the powerless, identifying vulnerabilities (status anxiety, loneliness, desire for stimulation) and exploiting them.
• “Interesting” and “Fun” as Codewords: Epstein’s promises of “interesting people” and “fun weekends” translate, in this world, to intellectual stimulation (interesting) and sexual opportunity (fun).
• Quote:

  “In Epstein language... interesting means brain, and fun means dick.” – Anand Giridharadas (43:55)

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8. The Boredom and Intellectual Starvation of the Super-rich

Timestamp: 44:40–51:22

• Repeat Ideas: Many elite men lead routine, unremarkable lives, starved of new ideas and real stimulation. Epstein’s curated gatherings were, thus, highly appealing.
• Need for Intellectual “Input”: Even figures like Bill Gates were drawn in by this need for stimulation and novelty, not just sex or scandal.

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9. The Value System of the Elite and “Failing Up”

Timestamp: 53:34–61:49

• Figures Like Larry Summers: Example of “failing up”—elites are not penalized for catastrophic mistakes, but rewarded with greater opportunities.
• Arsonist to Firefighter Pipeline: The same people who cause crises are promoted to solve them, highlighting a broken meritocracy.
• Summers’s Relationship with Epstein: Reveals both the normalization of seeking advice from compromised sources and the strange co-dependence within elite circles.

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10. The Absence of “Break-Up” or Dissociation Emails

Timestamp: 63:06–68:17

• No Courage to Sever Ties: A notable absence in Epstein’s correspondence—almost no one denounces or distances themselves, even after the 2018 reporting made his crimes undeniable.

• Networks and the Failure of Courage: In a ‘network society,’ people fear the cascade of exclusion if they speak out against someone entrenched in their world.

• Quote:

  “I have a theory… there’s a total absence of courage if these women were raped and trafficked… their abuse was enabled by the silence and complicity… of much larger number of people.” – Anand Giridharadas (64:33)

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11. The Systemic Corruption Enabling Epstein

Timestamp: 68:50–71:09

• Corrupt to the Core: Virginia Giuffre’s account underscores that the problem isn’t just a single predator, but a whole enabling environment spanning the world’s most powerful echelons.

• Concentric Circles of Enablement: The complicity ranges from active participants to passive bystanders and benefits much of the elite.

• Quote:

  “She is talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people.” – Anand Giridharadas (70:59)

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12. The Mystery of Missing Women**

Timestamp: 71:09–79:48

• No Adult Women at the Table: Giridharadas details his findings from reviewing Epstein’s photo archives—while gatherings are full of girls, at the dinner tables for serious conversation, grown women are essentially missing.
• Men Seeking “Frictionless” Environments: The avoidance of women with opinions is part of a wider rejection of resistance or challenge.
• Quote:

  “The number one fear of men in this world would be a 40-year-old woman with opinions.” – Anand Giridharadas (79:48)

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13. The Problem is Systemic, Not Just Individual

Timestamp: 87:26–91:45

• Epstein as Societal Pathogen: The real lesson is not just about Epstein as a person, but about the failures of all the institutions that welcomed him without question.

• No Immune Response: There was no self-corrective reaction from any elite institution—political, academic, philanthropic.

• Quote:

  “A poisonous kind of malignant person put into the body politic of American life... and like there was no histamine reaction... There were hundreds of meals, there were hundreds of seminars... none of that happened.” – Anand Giridharadas (88:00, 90:43)

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14. Is Another Epstein Out There?

Timestamp: 91:45–94:18

• Not a Conspiracy, But a Culture: While Epstein was unique, the underlying culture enabling such corruption still exists.
• Uncoordinated Silence: The system does not require a conspiracy—collective silence is enough to perpetuate impunity and abuse.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Elite Life:

  “They have services, not community.” – Anand Giridharadas (24:25)

• On Lack of Courage:

  “There is a lack of courage that I think has developed in the age of networks...” – Anand Giridharadas (67:33)

• On Women at the Table:

  “Their whole life would be organized to avoid the problem of a 40-year-old woman with opinions.” – Anand Giridharadas (79:48)

• On Institutional Failure:

  “He’s gone. We are unfortunately, still living under all of the institutions and the types of people and the incentives and structures that … had no problem with him.” – Anand Giridharadas (91:45)

• On Reading as Resistance to Atrophy:

  “Reading is a pretty important way to not die while you’re still living.” – Anand Giridharadas (51:32)

• On Policy Effects:

  "It’s not just a toxic attitude. It shapes your life and it shapes policy. It shapes policy which impacts all of us, which shapes society." – Joanna Coles (35:51)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Parallels between grooming of girls and elite
• 07:57 — Epstein's unique value: removing friction
• 14:16 — The concept of "optionality" in elite life
• 24:25 — The absence of community among elites
• 29:41 — Kathy Rummler’s email as specimen of elite contempt
• 43:55 — Epstein's offers: “interesting” vs “fun”
• 53:34 — Larry Summers: a case study in “failing up”
• 63:06 — The missing "break-up" emails and absence of elite courage
• 71:55 — The absence of adult women at Epstein’s tables
• 88:00 — Epstein as "human salmonella" and institutional failure
• 91:45 — Systemic issues—Epstein as symptom, not cause

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Tone and Closing Reflections

The conversation is irreverent but deeply incisive, with both host and guest blending humor and seriousness to expose the elite world’s failings. There is a palpable sense of outrage, tempered by sharp analysis. The episode ends with Coles and Giridharadas agreeing to return for a deeper dive—particularly into the violence, misogyny, and culture of impunity that the Epstein class embodies and enables.

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For Further Exploration

• Anand Giridharadas' “Epstein class” series on Substack — More essays analyzing the files.
• Virginia Giuffre’s memoir "Nobody’s Girl" — Firsthand account of Epstein’s abuse and its wide-reaching enablers.
• Upcoming Episode Topics: The intersection of Epstein with figures like Deepak Chopra and further exploration into institutional complicity.

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This episode is essential listening (or reading) for anyone trying to understand how the elite’s cultural immunity enabled one of the worst scandals in recent memory—and what that reveals about the society we all inhabit.

Transcript

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 Giuffre's account of being groomed by Ghilaine Maxwell and Epstein. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Epstein's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum.

[Joanna Coles]

I'm Joanna Coles. 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 Girdedas 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. We, 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 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? Anan'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 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

That's a lot of wives.

[Joanna Coles]

Quite a lot of wives.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Even for that world, right?

[Joanna Coles]

Even for that world. And Jeffrey Epstein immediately sort of muscles in and tries to offer help to get Mort Zuckerman's child into Trinity. And I was thinking, why on earth would Mort 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?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 Mort Zuckerman, 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 of who Epstein was a perfect example for whom the cultivation and maintenance of network ties is the job.

[Joanna Coles]

So he's like the sort of middleman, and he's creating connections between people, and that's his value.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 bio. Do you remember this trend?

[Joanna Coles]

Totally.

[Anand Giridharadas]

People would be like, convener, convener, connector, create. Right.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, and Malcolm Gladwell actually wrote a piece about the importance of connectors. And I think the New Yorker, which was very sort of. It went on to. Everybody was talking about it. Everybody. The New Yorker.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Rule one of life. 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 of some other activity, but as the center of his life and what he shows. And of course, he is a convicted pedophile who did it, so that has its own flavor. But there's others who do it who are not convicted pedophiles, who are, 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, successful people, 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. An academic. Most academics, you know, having spent so long studying for that degree, so long, and it's a very kind of cloistered 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, but others who are kind of these network maintainers, their skill is actually maintaining ties to various types of people.

[Joanna Coles]

Right?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 Mort Zuckerman's powerful. Why would he need someone?

[Joanna Coles]

Right. He's already powerful.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 who do you need to get to? You need to get to Woody Allen, 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right, right, right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Becomes valuable to people who are more siloed in particular worlds.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And I've written about this a little bit in our Epstein class series, where I think to be in that rarefied elite is to have friction removed. It's to have friction removed in. Just think about map from, you know, 6:00am to midnight in a typical person's day, lots of friction. You stand in line to get your coffee. You know, you. You try to get a parking spot at the office. There's no spots today, even just like you map it out. And that's life. Your kid is sick. He wouldn't play 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 Teterboro 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 driven, 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 what 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'll 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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 Rummler 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, 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 Oneskin. It was founded by four Brazilian PhD scientists. And OneSkin's products are designed to make your life easier. You can layer them seamlessly, making your skincare routine simple. And with more than 10,000 5 star reviews, people are saying they're seeing smoother, firmer, healthier looking skin. And born from over a decade of longevity research, OneSkin's OSO1 peptide is developed to target the visible signs of aging. For a limited time, try OneSkin and get 15% off using code BEAST at one skin. That's 15% off. OneSkin Co with forward slash beast Again, that's 15% off at OneSkin Co Beast. Use the code Beast and don't forget to tell them we sent you.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. You know, maybe they would expect it to come in a six pack, but they're okay. Maybe there's some kind of new.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Four pack drink.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, 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, so.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right, exactly. Used to be at six, now it's a four.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah. And it's very soon going to be at two. But anyway, sorry.

[Anand Giridharadas]

My son once told me they had a one pack which, which I thought was. That was amazing. Yeah, the four pack. I learned about this when researching my book Winners Take 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. Get your for tax, which then saves you a few percentage of a New York City income tax. Okay, then Hampton's house and house in Aspen are 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.

[Joanna Coles]

And also you can avoid the friction of cold weather and the snow pile ups 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

There's a really important word in this world also, that's the word optionality. Optionality in its origin is a finance term. And so, you know, you think about buying, 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 goes below 22. And buying options gives you optionality. It gives you, you know, and it's 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 seemed 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, 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 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. And so what it was stopping them from committing to things. Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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

[Joanna Coles]

was then the British prime minister, was

[Anand Giridharadas]

it kind of earlier? Was she the prime minister? Right. Going into it, I think.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, she was the prime minister that had to pick up after Brexit and try and organize it.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So she had this line which was very controversial.

[Joanna Coles]

Shit, I better check on that.

[Anand Giridharadas]

There was a lot of prime ministers at that time.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah. Because Boris got dumped and Theresa May had to pick up the pieces and try and get it all.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So she had this line. I don't know if you remember this. It was very controversial at 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Mm.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. 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 see in this Epstein network, London today, Dubai tomorrow, doing a deal with Paris and Korea to invest in a Mexican hedge fund that'll be. 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're 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.

[Joanna Coles]

So you have a connection to the

[Anand Giridharadas]

community 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, cause there's always been an elite, right, that's distinctive about the modern super elite that we see in the Epstein 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. And that house really mattered. And your granddaddy lived in that house and your grand. Right. And the paintings on the wall were like off in that house. And you. There's a certain kind of dog that you went hunting with and it was 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 are, they own land. You can't, you know, land is not very fungible.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah, it's like the Hearst's owning San Simeon, right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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, 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 you look, 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 stripped. 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 bloodletting blood has drained 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.

[Joanna Coles]

The kids get out. The kids leave.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 there has been 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 gonna be in Dubai next week. Where are you? Where are you? And at first I just thought it's kind of an interesting quirk. And then I realized it is because the assumption is not being in place.

[Joanna Coles]

The assumption is 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 Kathy Rummler email, which I know stood out to you, which I want to talk about, but I wondered if there were others.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I think what's. I'll say, what 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 of where are you? Where are you going to be tomorrow? Are you going to be in Athens? I know someone in Athens, you know, seemed like a silly ritual. I started to realize, I think these are the kind of pheromones 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. In this kind of 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 draw blanks. You'd draw blank stairs. I don't think. I don't think people would experience them.

[Joanna Coles]

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 Florida, and basically you're seeing the same.

[Anand Giridharadas]

But I don't think they're forming community even with people that they're doing that with. Right. It's each to each.

[Joanna Coles]

So the community itself is more tenuous.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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, when I. 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 to 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I don't think people. I don't think these people live in that way. In general, they have services, not community. Right.

[Joanna Coles]

They have services. Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 think 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And they actually don't have. These are often not great marriages, as attested by the number of them that often get divorced.

[Joanna Coles]

Well. And then it becomes very expensive to get divorced.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right. Yep. You know, these are often. When my winner'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, asking me for. I mean, I didn't know what advice to give them. How do they, you know, they're gonna inherit this money, but they basically hate their dad. How do they deal with that?

[Joanna Coles]

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 bequeathed to his son, and three of his children are missing from his 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?

[Anand Giridharadas]

Let's just dwell on that for a second. That I don't think there could be a greater definition of life failure. 95 is late enough in the game to call it right.

[Joanna Coles]

And he's had, he's on his fifth life.

[Anand Giridharadas]

He failed at life that many of your children. What was it, Rupert? What was it for the newspapers, by the way? He also broke societies.

[Joanna Coles]

No argument, but I don't have any

[Anand Giridharadas]

expectation that a Rupert Murdoch cares about breaking societies.

[Joanna Coles]

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 undoubted influence, many argue for the worse, over the world, or would you rather have half a 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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?

[Joanna Coles]

I mean, I think your kids are going to be there. I hope you get it. Is 95 what?

[Anand Giridharadas]

What? And it is such a revealing clue to what these people value. But at the end of the day, if you can't even love your family enough to hold them, how do we trust you with, in his case, the minds of one third of Americans who watch FOX News? Just 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?

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

It does. Total failure of a man.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah, total failure of a man. So interesting. So let's get back to the emails. I want to read you one of Kathy Rummler's emails, which you, in fact, pointed out to us. And I'm gonna read it. I'm gonna read it in my voice. Cause I don't know what she sounds like, though. I love doing impressions as regular readers and viewers and listeners.

[Anand Giridharadas]

That won't stop you from doing an impression.

[Joanna Coles]

My favorite one to do is Melania, but I don't know Kathy Rummeler 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. Will observe all of the people who are at least 100 pounds overweight will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation and will then decide, I am 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 for us.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Let's assume that many folks listening to this have no idea who Kathy Rummler is. So it's actually a nice way to do it. But I like you actually reading the quote first. Okay, so now you've heard the quote. I imagine people have reactions to that quote. So now let's tell you who she is.

[Joanna Coles]

Right?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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's someone, the kind of person who has shaped your life. She was Barack Obama's White House counsel. Now, 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. Okay? When decisions are made about all kinds of things, can we torture people or not torture people?

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Is it legal to go to war,

[Anand Giridharadas]

drone 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 Iran without checking with anybody? That's the person, one of the key people advising those decisions.

[Joanna Coles]

And not just any president either. Barack Obama.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Barack Obama, as you know, someone with as much good character who I think has never been caught in his life Even in an 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 connected, closely connected to him. And after, you know, 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 career advice. You've had an illustrious career. I'm sure you've. The people you asked about, she, Kathy Rumler went to Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile, for advice. Obama's gonna maybe nominate me for Attorney General or do you think I should take it? I generally don't go to convicted pedophiles for.

[Joanna Coles]

Hopefully you don't know any.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. She responds about her $2 million signing bonus from some law firm. Just like going from like immigration to.

[Joanna Coles]

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 Rothschilds on his behalf?

[Anand Giridharadas]

I don't actually see that one.

[Joanna Coles]

I think so.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Well, he's trying 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 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. 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 kind of.

[Joanna Coles]

Well and interesting that he's homing in on her insecurity about her home and he's gonna help with it.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. Keys to the kingdom. 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 before she joined it, that 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 right. In that crisis. There are people watching this today who, 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, in the emails, but that's a really good one. You're not. This is not just your drunkle's 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

The same think about someone who is so dehumanizing the people at the rest stop 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 fenced. If that's what you feel to most people in this country, towards most people in this country, by the way, in the most like elite corridor of this country, even though it's a highway rest stop, then surely that way of seeing people, 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 what my point to you is that attitude is not just a toxic attitude.

[Joanna Coles]

It shapes your life and it shapes policy. It shapes policy which impacts all of us, which shapes society.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And I would venture to guess that many people listening to this know that even without hearing the quote or knowing who she is. Cause 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 healthcare 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

You go to work every day at places. It feels like I give everything for this company, but does this company have my back? Right. You see cuts at your kid's 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 epscene files are so helpful is assigning causes to effect. Ah.

[Joanna Coles]

Ah.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 they need their wealth, 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Scariest words in the English language.

[Joanna Coles]

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, he knew.

[Anand Giridharadas]

What era was this?

[Joanna Coles]

This was sort of 2014-15.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right.

[Joanna Coles]

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 see.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Did he know he was a pedophile?

[Joanna Coles]

Yes, he knew he was a pedophile, but he didn't know.

[Anand Giridharadas]

That's an interesting weekend.

[Joanna Coles]

Right, well, but he did. I mean, he knew he'd been convicted in 2008. 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 Epstein 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 Barack, 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, an insult, right?

[Anand Giridharadas]

My people are more interesting than your people.

[Joanna Coles]

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 gonna love him, he's gonna love you kind of thing.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I see behind you on the shelf this book, remarkable book. Nobody's Girl by Virginia Giuffre.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. An amazing book, extraordinary book.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 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 Giuffre's account of being groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Epstein's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum. Virginia Giuffre was a runaway. She had already suffered a whole bunch of abuse and exploitation. She was working at Mar a Lago in the spa. 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. 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. I think one of the things that's hard to, 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 them together. You don't think of grooming as something that is done to a prince Andrew. Right, 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, 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. Brain and fun means dick.

[Joanna Coles]

Interesting.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Let's just 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 some he 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. Really important to stress that that is not what most business people's lives are like.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. They're not getting up and smoking either smoking crack or snorting coke off their coffee.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I didn't know 15 years ago I moved to New York. I didn't know. I've not been here long enough. I've met enough people. Like there is some number of people living this way. Like most people who are 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 mudroom and like chaos. Like they're not snorting coke off the

[Joanna Coles]

table every day and if you do, don't last. Right, Right. Because you can't keep up.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Correct, Correct. So when Jeffrey Epstein and Sorry, and that's partly related to the fun thing, but also have very siloed mental inputs. At some point you're working really. 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah, it's a great.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 guy has 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, but I never hear a new one.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 let 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 like 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. You know, the chance to 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 with these very small lives.

[Joanna Coles]

Right, right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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, But I remember, like, I personally would get. 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 TED being like, wow, Bill Gates. When I get my touch up, Bill Gates was sitting in the front row. They really go like, they really are so starved, even Bill Gates, for ideas. They're sitting there.

[Joanna Coles]

I mean, I think a lot of people are shocked that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Because you like Bill Gates at one point, you're the second richest man in the world, slightly down the list now because he had to get divorced, 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?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 are like, what do you think about this? What is this?

[Joanna Coles]

We get to ask questions, but we get to learn.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right?

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 this guy's 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 gonna return you to the feeling you got in grad school. I'm gonna return you to the feeling when there was like an interesting speaker passing through. I'm gonna return you 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 he 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right? It's very.

[Anand Giridharadas]

To understand the promise of interesting and fun.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Why did he lose? Remind me why he lost.

[Joanna Coles]

Right, right. A little bit like Dr. Oz losing

[Anand Giridharadas]

in Pennsylvania, because during a financial crisis.

[Joanna Coles]

Right, right. During a financial crisis, couldn't remember how many homes. And he had seven homes. And 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

What so much of this could be solved by people remembering the power of reading. Like, this is what reading is for.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Books. Books.

[Anand Giridharadas]

But if you.

[Joanna Coles]

But that requires sitting down, being quiet.

[Anand Giridharadas]

A lot of people are kind of hyperactive. Like, if I could no longer access this technology of books that you have all around you.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. Cause I'm engage them and watch and get. I can feel my atrophy.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, it's a little bit like mental nutrition, isn't it? I always find. 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 distance 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 of 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 poetry project.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And who is she asking the wife who. 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 Summer has served in the Clinton administration and then the Obama and the Clinton. 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. 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 that Culminates Those kind of policies under the Clinton administration are now widely understood by people to have culminated through the 2000s under the Bush presidency, which continued in that direction to culminate in 2008, the financial crisis. So the world now falls apart in between that time. Summers is at Harvard as the president of Harvard, where he taught before. So, 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, it's not a story from the middle, Middle ages. This is a story from like a middle aged man in the 2000s. Then he is rewarded for helping to 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 at when you caused a giant problem, I imagine you were never promoted into running the search for solutions to the problem you had helped cause. I would imagine that that is the least relatable experience ever. But I wanna 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

[Joanna Coles]

problem you caused, you helped to create. Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And so this is arsonist to firefighter pipeline. So now he's under Obama.

[Joanna Coles]

Arsonist. Yeah.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 a big story at the time.

[Joanna Coles]

And was this to make more money? Yes. Right. Because there's always a problem that if you go into education, somehow being, even being the president of Harvard is not enough.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I think about, I feel like I sometimes sound so old fashioned, but like, in what world is that job not enough for you?

[Joanna Coles]

Right, Right. Great question, great question.

[Anand Giridharadas]

What a fucking honor of a job.

[Joanna Coles]

But this is a little bit like Peter Mandelson, right, who was the British businessman 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 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So, I mean, it's, it's. By the way, I just, like, really wish I'd never seen Peter Mandelson's bare legs all the way up.

[Joanna Coles]

You mean when he's wearing his tighty whiteies? Yeah, I was a little kind of.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Yeah. Do you guys not have boxer briefs in the UK or. This hasn't really gone.

[Joanna Coles]

It's not a thing.

[Anand Giridharadas]

If you're watching this in the uk, Boxer briefs.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah. It's not like boxers are not a thing. Like, they are here. Anyway.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Sorry, this is the. Now you should have underwear ads. This would be a perfect segment.

[Joanna Coles]

You could have, like, they may well have underwear ads.

[Anand Giridharadas]

You could do like a break here. And There's.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So think of that, Stu. Right. I think in just those facts alone, before we even get to the relationship with Epstein, before we even get to him trying to come 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 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 very undoubtedly smart guy. So this is not the landed English aristocracy as we were talking about 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. If he had still had that job, he'd be defending Harvard against Donald Trump, let's say. 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 are 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, 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 Winter steak all came out, or 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. I was like, what? Where? Where, Where? Like, oh, where to talk at Harvard. And he just said, and anybody who wants to understand what's happening in the world right now needs to read Winners Take All. I thought Winner's Take 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 to say, let's have a conversation about it, but to no avail.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I found his number in the Epstein files. I've been thinking about. I've been thinking about, should we call him now?

[Joanna Coles]

We could have his number. We should call him. What a brilliant idea.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Should we do it?

[Joanna Coles]

We should call him.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Let's go. Is that illegal?

[Joanna Coles]

No. Why would it be illegal?

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right. Okay.

[Joanna Coles]

Telephone number. Okay, well. Well, we tried. We tried.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Larry, hit us up. Yeah, hit us up.

[Joanna Coles]

Very interesting. And he's probably like, I don't recognize the incoming.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right. I'm not in the network.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah, you're not in the network.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Value of being in the network. I'm not in the network.

[Joanna Coles]

You're not in the network. Well, the other.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I'm sort of the opposite of being in the network.

[Joanna Coles]

Yeah, well, you're poking at the network.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right.

[Joanna Coles]

Although the network is now available for everybody. 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 Ehud Barak on me. I mean, we don't know whether or not there was a whole. I thought a lot about this outside. Yes.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Outside of the.

[Joanna Coles]

Have dinner with Woody Allen.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Outside of the files. Yes, 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 than Jeffrey Epstein.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, less criminal. I'm not going to promise it's noble, but certainly less criminal.

[Anand Giridharadas]

If we went through all your emails, or if you went through all of mine, you'd find 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 the thing we did, thing we said, whatever. Right. I think that would be for most people. So we have 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 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 them 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, nothing.

[Joanna Coles]

That's a great point, actually. Where are they? Right. Where are they?

[Anand Giridharadas]

We have his inbox, right? Like, even after he died, there's a couple people who emailed it after he died being like, haha, you are dead.

[Joanna Coles]

Oh, really?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 even after he's dead. A kind demon. I'm so sorry this happened to him, 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, you know, 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 1,000 acres of land and a stone house that's been in the family 20 years and certain kind of custodial relationships, patrimonial relationships to the people around you, that's not power that can vanish in an instant, right? Governments come and go, intellectual fashions come and go, industries come and go. You're still that guy, right? And you could think about being a wealthy landowner in Uttar Pradesh in India, or you could think about being like all kinds of different versions of that kind of elite in this hyper networked Davos man elite, your wealth is your connections and your the density and breadth of your connections to all these other people. And that means that you can operate on 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 you could conquer with a few keystrokes the market of small towns in China with your thing that's unimaginable for our ancestors. However, that's power of networks in one way. But your downfall can also cascade with similar speed. Getting fired from a job doesn't just mean you're kind of fired in the network.

[Joanna Coles]

Everyone knows stop being useful to people.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 in 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I didn't know Britain was still in Europe.

[Joanna Coles]

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 Peggy Siegel, the renowned publicist who up until then had been, you know, thought of as the queen of the Oscar campaigns, prostating herself to help him get back into polite society.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I mean, I'm gonna quote Virginia Giuffre, who wrote Nobody's Girl Again, this is, I think, an interview she did with 60 Minutes in Australia where she was living. She, 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 and then is, you know, these are not like these Eastern European networks that we sometimes read about. You know, these are some of the most wealthy, powerful people in the world. She's like, I was trafficked to royalties. I was trafficked to, you know, very 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, starting with other people who didn't do it but knew about it and had no problem with it. Starting with other people who sort of knew but didn't poke around. Getting all the way out to people who maybe didn't know about the actual act 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 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 the act because those were not abstract. Those were one body and another body or two bodies and another 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Look at, look at the enablers, the

[Anand Giridharadas]

body politic, let's say look at this corrupt to the core order. I think we owe her and these other survivors that work.

[Joanna Coles]

Okay, so in your series, the Epstein class on Ink on substat, you talk about, 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? I was not expecting, well, the clipboard, which has got people's names or 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Very true.

[Joanna Coles]

Why were there no grown up women at the table?

[Anand Giridharadas]

So I, you know, 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, I should look at those. I'm kind of a text person, so I always focus on written, the written word, but maybe I should look at the photo. So there's, you know, and these incredible people, by the way, who deserve a plug@jmail. You know, these people set up, set up a Gmail inbox lookalike replica of what his email box, his, 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

[Joanna Coles]

to jmail World, well tell people how we find it.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So it's JMail World 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 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 Gmail account, in

[Joanna Coles]

your own Google Photos.

[Anand Giridharadas]

So they've taken all the photos now. It's just extraordinary. So I decided, okay, I'm gonna read the photos next. And thousands of photos. So I started looking through the photos. And 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 as a kind of meaning making process. And the meaning is not if you're. If you're serious about it, you don't know the meaning in advance, right?

[Joanna Coles]

You go in and you're paying attention

[Anand Giridharadas]

and you're kind of open and 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 you know, with something like this, it's really helpful to actually be a little blank. 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 arm around waists and holding them, sitting on laps, whatever. First of all, just like.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, you see the disparity of power, right?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 lapsing, 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.

[Joanna Coles]

And was that one of the. Was that one of the things that Epstein did? He just kept these girls passports?

[Anand Giridharadas]

I mean, certainly for some of them.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Which is almost like definitional.

[Joanna Coles]

And Sonia Virginia Giuffre writes about that.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Yeah. 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 some drawer at home. These are people who keep it on them at all times because you never know where you're gonna go tomorrow.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Okay, that's. That's a good.

[Anand Giridharadas]

These are people whose passport freedom is more central to them than to almost anybody on the planet. Right. They really avail of the passport.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. So doubly ironic that they're with someone who doesn't have access to their passport.

[Anand Giridharadas]

What's the first thing they lock up? Right. It's like how authoritarians. 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 want to 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 mealtime. It was like a table suddenly entered the equation. Often the table had 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're. Even if they have like three ideas. And they're all from Yuval Hariri's Sapiens book.

[Joanna Coles]

Right. Of course, the hero of these people. Everybody's read Harari's books.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 lists of threes.

[Joanna Coles]

I remember those three 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 because I've read the book and the book and the books are good, but the authors

[Anand Giridharadas]

are often smarter than readers like that. So at these tables there's like, there's a lot of people having like 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

But you add food, 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. Ghislaine was in some of them, but it was really striking once you noticed it. And, 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, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and kind of reading the photos, the text, 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 was giving like gross finance guys.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Access to women. It was the whole thing.

[Joanna Coles]

Or nerdy academic guys, all of that.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right. So why suddenly. I don't know. I said to you when we were emailing yesterday, like I. Eating at a table with men and women, but like the company of women is a. I find a. I found a lovely, charming thing. My entire life, like I've never aspired to a table just like evacuated of women. Like, what, what's, 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 a.

[Joanna Coles]

40 might be young. 40 might be young. Right?

[Anand Giridharadas]

Right. I mean, certainly anybody older than that is like not right. But my point is what? These guys don't want friction 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. Stand 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 like 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 gotta 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 in 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 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 to 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, and a lot of time reading books like Nobody's Girl and other testimonies 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 those things. And this notion of resistance I think is an example of a, 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 acting on the world without resistance is child rape. That is the reductio ad absurdum of a powerful man who literally wants no resistance of having. 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 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 analysis. But 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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, blah, you would feel you would push back, wouldn't you? You strike me as someone that doesn't want.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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, 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 does. 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. I do have blind spots. That to me is normal. It's like in parenting, 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.

[Joanna Coles]

Totally.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And to be able to go to your. I go to my 8 year old and 10 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. That was wrong. If you're gonna write that power imbalance and say, I shouldn't have yelled like, 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. They do have a special intolerance for

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And, you know, it's so interesting that we now have. You know, when you think about Virginia Giuffre being 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, who has not a lot in common with Donald Trump politically, but Trump was

[Joanna Coles]

a Democrat for a long time.

[Anand Giridharadas]

What does it tell you when Virginia Giuffre talks about a corrupt to the core. 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 Democratic presidents life and a Republican future. In both cases President's life. What does it tell you that this person was able to go worm his way deep into Harvard, deep into mit, that he was affiliated with 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, go to a little food cart and by chance you get a bad, 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'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 para. 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 pop

[Joanna Coles]

thinking about it and like there was

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 processes that you might imagine would kick in if a fucking monster was passing through these various organs. Literally, like 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 is like this guy's at the table, fuck this. And walked out one time. Have you heard of one such event? I'm just saying you think about.

[Joanna Coles]

No, you do.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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.

[Joanna Coles]

Do you think there is another Epstein out there?

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 that 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 is different. But again, it was like, how many thousand people knew? Or, I don't know, 100? I don't know. Whatever your estimate is, there's lots of assistants, 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. 1,000 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 with power deserve infinite second chances, in

[Joanna Coles]

which rich people get away with all

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 passport's 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.

[Joanna Coles]

And deciding where your kids go to school, everything.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. 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.

[Joanna Coles]

We deserve to know what products you use on your hair.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Wow. This is our second ad break. Yeah. This could be a very lucrative episode.

[Joanna Coles]

It's so good. I know so many people who are just thinking, how do I get my hair like that?

[Anand Giridharadas]

I'm me. I'm going to help you right now. There's a. There is a company called Caracare, 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. Takes about five, seven seconds.

[Joanna Coles]

It's fantastic.

[Anand Giridharadas]

And there we go.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

It's part one.

[Joanna Coles]

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? Very happy to, because we haven'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, that not only does it show us what a corrupt governing body that. 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

It is.

[Joanna Coles]

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. Witness Peter a tear, 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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

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. 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 on the way home in the subway often my wife Priya would have had a very different experience. 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 at 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. I watched and I watched her trying this topic, that topic. And I watched this kind of older man and just kind of seemed bored of her and kind of saying, Priya is one of the most interesting women I've ever spoken to in 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, she told me there was just no way that he could in his mind contemplate the idea that she would have anything interesting to say. And eventually their conversation fizzled. I watched that and they just stopped talking, kind of. He. 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 change. And then you could see this guy realizing that he. He's like the worst archaeologist ever who just had like failed to find any bones. But there are a lot of bones, right?

[Joanna Coles]

But there was a huge dinosaur fossil

[Anand Giridharadas]

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 or 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, 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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.

[Anand Giridharadas]

I want to hear women well.

[Joanna Coles]

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 also talk about that. But you have a new book coming out, too, which I want you to tell people about.

[Anand Giridharadas]

It's coming out in September. It's called man in the Mirror. Some folks will remember what was a kind of, in some ways, a tabloid story in New York City from two and a half years ago, three years ago almost, where Jordan Neely, 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, threw his jacket to the ground, having a kind of, you know, psychiatric crisis. And a young white man named Daniel Penny, who's a former US Marine, out of a desire to kind of restrain him, came up from behind him, put him in a chokehold, dropped him to the ground and held him for five or six minutes, eventually killing him.

[Joanna Coles]

And this was at 2:30 in the

[Anand Giridharadas]

afternoon, 2:30 in the afternoon or by Lafayette. And this case became an American Rorschach test. Very quickly, what did you see? Did you see heroism on the part of Daniel Penney? 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, every kind of theory, notion, fantasy of what is going on, kind of came into this case. And so I spent the last 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 illness. But this is the most reported, embedded street level book I've ever done. This is just like it is not. 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 10 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.

[Joanna Coles]

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 methadone clinic nearby, which I'm sure you know. And. Well, a complicated story. And I had lots of arguments with people about it because as you say, it's a raw sack 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 Attia emails and just these guys that thought they could have conversations like this and none of us would find out.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Yeah, what a world.

[Joanna Coles]

What a world. Happily, we have you as our guide through it.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Well, I'm happy to chat with you. I wish it was under better email circumstances.

[Joanna Coles]

Well, but. But it's revelatory. And, and people have been held to account. Some people have been held.

[Anand Giridharadas]

Maya Angelou says. Right. When people show you who they are, believe them.

[Joanna Coles]

Right.

[Anand Giridharadas]

When the power structure of your world shows you who it is. Like this. This is a rare and historic glimpse. Take the view.

[Joanna Coles]

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 saw 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 his 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 favorite 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 correspondence 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. Please press our subscribe button for extra content. And we really appreciate our Be Beast tier of members because as our first lady would have us all be Beast. So the good news is we have so many Beast Tier members now, there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team, Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus.