Hello everybody. Tom Sykes, the royalist here, and I couldn't be more delighted than the guest I've got for us today. Anand Giridharadas, a Substack pioneer, joined Substack in 2020. You may know him as well from his incredible book, which title, whenever I see it on my bookshelf, I can't help singing the ABBA song that goes with it. And I've actually been seeing it for about the last 20 minutes just because I knew we were talking and I was having another look at it. Anand is...
He worked for, you know, everybody, the New York Times, every kind of... he's written for everyone. And in 2020 he was one of the first people to kind of break off and set up a Substack. And his publication, The Ink, is kind of absolutely required reading if you're interested in democracy, Trump land, inequality, and a little bit of sort of style and fashion and cities and that kind of stuff as well. So, we're absolutely thrilled to have you.
The reason we've got him here today is because he's written the most brilliant piece. I believe actually well under Teles, but I'll say my bit first, which is that I think that it was written a few months ago when the first tranche of the Epstein files came out, and he's now published it on The Ink, which I do urge you, if you're a Substacker, do go, do have a look at The Ink. And certainly this article is actually free, so you don't even need to pay to get it. You can just be a free subscriber to The Ink and you get access to this. And basically he read through the entire tranche of the Epstein files and he's just written this brilliant, brilliant piece about it that I wanted to talk to him about.
Obviously, my interest in this is specifically the kind of Prince Andrew stuff, but just to very... and then I promise I'll let Anand talk. I suppose the thesis of the article is that there's... it's the sort of the transfer of information, the transfer of what he calls kind of secret knowledge, non-common knowledge, you know, privileged information that isn't part of what everybody else knows. Reading the files, it becomes clear that this is the currency of it. And I suppose there were two things that really struck me. One is that Peter Mandelson is today, literally today, being accused of handing market-moving sensitive information to Epstein. And number two, what was revealed in the last dump was Prince Andrew trying to get him involved in this, you know, 'I've got this amazing deal in Afghanistan for like reconstructing Afghanistan.' I mean, were you struck reading the new tranche files? And were you struck by this impression again? And what is the central thesis of what you're talking about?
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been terrific to watch you make the jump from an institutional publication to your own thing, and I think proving a case for it in the UK where Substack, you know, took longer to take off. So congratulations to you for that. You know, I wrote this essay originally in the New York Times a couple months ago and today got permission to republish it for free to everybody and open to all on my Substack, The Ink. So this was obviously before the 3 million files that we got on Friday, and it was when there was thousands and thousands and thousands of emails specifically that had been released a couple months ago. And that was sort of in the thousands, not millions. And so I started reading it and it struck me that, you know, I guess it seemed like a relatively digestible amount. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna read all of these. Like I'm gonna go... there was just like these files, tranche one, tranche two. I'm gonna go through and I'm going to read all of them.
And it's partly, you know, I'm sort of in between books right now. I had the time, to be honest. I mean, since we're, you know, in the Substack world, it's partly because as an independent journalist who's, you know, who is supported by my readers, I now have the time. I mean, the New York Times would never be able to pay me to spend six days reading every single one of those emails, but Substack actually provides an independent journalist... but that's in a weird way. It's almost subsidizing a publication like the New York Times, which is a whole interesting story. But I was like, I'm going to read every single one of these emails. And so I did. A lot of them are duplicates and forwards and different things, but I went through, I read, you know, basically every one of them.
And it seemed to me that, and this is not a shade to my colleagues in journalism, but what a lot of people are asked to do and forced to do in journalism is chase very kind of narrow stories that the rest of the herd is chasing and very short-term stories. So at that moment it seemed to me everybody was trying to figure out, is Donald Trump a pedophile? Like that was the reporting question everybody was after. Obviously you're not going to hear from me any discounting of the importance of that reporting question. That's an incredibly important reporting question. You know, is Donald Trump a sexual predator? Again, no matter how much of that you found out in these emails, there's still quite a bit of that that's already been found and didn't seem to make a difference to a lot of people. But yes, by all means, pursue that story. You know, I think there was reporting like trying to find people in the act was what seemed to me the reporting herd. And again, valuable. However, when I was reading the emails...
Email after email, most of it is not about secret sex with minors in a back room. Just, you know, the way... none of our emails... email is an incredibly boring, banal medium, right? The people with the most glamorous or interesting or criminal lives in the world, their emails are, you know, a mix of all kinds of things. And so when I was looking at these emails, it seemed to me what the media herd was chasing was an important part of the story, but was missing what seemed to me this kind of less acute, more chronic, but giant story, this giant kind of cloud of a story, which is that we were getting this glimpse that ordinary people like us never get of how a group of super elites think, talk, scheme, govern behind our backs.
As you know, and covering, you know, royals in particular, the first thing people do when they come into a little bit of money and power is to buy themselves some privacy, is to buy themselves handlers, is to intimidate people with lawyers, is to get... you know, you and I may use Gmail. They don't use Gmail. They got some servers in their basement that are protecting their email from the stuff that might happen to you and me. Well, as a result, you rarely get these glimpses into how do the people in these worlds... and we're talking here about a super elite, some call it the Epstein class, that is kind of at the intersection of business, high finance, media, academia, science, philanthropy, the arts, family foundations. How do these people actually think? How do they rule? How do they cement and secure their power? And that story is not a sex story. It's not a rape story, except in a certain number of documented cases. For the most part, what those emails show is how a broader class functions.
And the question I started to have is, what does it reveal, the way this broader class functions? Why was this class of people almost universally able and willing to overlook the abuse of children, the rape of children, what has been called Rape Island? Why was people like the chief lawyer of Goldman Sachs or the former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers or any number of other eminent people from prestigious institutions that vet people very carefully... why was it almost the consensus in this super elite that what Jeffrey Epstein did was overlookable?
And the conclusion I came to reading the emails was, if you look at this group of people and you look at their way of looking at the world, you look at what they've done in the last generation to the United States and to a lot of the world... well, of course, of course, this is a group of people whose superpower is looking away from pain and suffering, often pain and suffering they caused. Financial crisis that people in the network caused, wars people in the network, you know, fraudulent wars they forced on us, inequality they turbocharged. So the more I looked at the emails, the more I thought, wow, of course Jeffrey Epstein chose these people to rehabilitate him when he was a convicted sex offender trying to rehabilitate himself in New York. Of course he chose them. These people, if they have any talent, above all, it is plugging their ears when people without power cry for help. They were perfect, perfect mates for him.
Yeah. And Anand is not just a beautiful speaker, he's a beautiful writer. And his book, Winners Take It All, is very much about what he's talking about now. And it has this also this really interesting theme in it of, well, there you go, the subtitle, 'The Elite Charade of Changing the World', of the kind of, you know, the charity-washing almost of the elite and those kind of behaviors. I'm going to read you a little bit of what you've written in this piece because I just think it's fantastic and it's so well put and it's really impossible to put it any better. You say: 'If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse oblige elite, a political elite, or a narrative-making elite. It straddles all of these lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it's a jet, it's a carbon-offset private jet. After all, flying commercial won't get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.'
And then this was a bit that really struck a chord with me: 'Many of the Epstein emails begin with the seemingly banal,' right, 'that the more I read took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry.' In the Epstein class emails, often begin and end with pings of echolocation. And what Anand means by that is that they'll begin, 'Hey, I'm in Davos, where are you? Here, where are you? What are you up to? I've just landed in New York, I'm having dinner with, you know, the head of the FBI or whatever.' And I pulled out one of those examples, which is an email. And as you say, one of the really fascinating things about this is seeing how these people communicate. We never... it's very rare to get a glimpse into the world. Even rarer to get their, you know, their photos and their snaps. But in this email exchange from September the 29th, 2010, Epstein informs Andrew that he is in London. So again, the ping of echolocation asks Andrew what he is doing. Andrew replies that he cannot join for lunch because he's meeting a Saudi prince, but says he will be free later in the day: 'Delighted for you to come here to BP,' which means Buckingham Palace. 'Come with whomever and I'll be free from 1600-ish to 2000.' Epstein responds, 'See you at 4.'
Now, obviously, we don't know whether he went to the meeting or not. A month after Epstein's release from house arrest, the same thing. Andrew writes to him, 'I'm just departing from Scotland. Should be down by 1800. I'll ring when I get down if you can give me a number to ring. Alternatively, we could have a dinner at Buckingham Palace.' Lots of privacy. And then Epstein replies, 'I want private time with you. Should I?' He then adds that he is in London with three women and asks, 'Should I bring them all so as to add some life?' And then Andrew replies, 'Of course, I'm in Geneva until the morning of 22nd, but would be delighted.' You know, so it just goes on and on, doesn't it? Like this almost like, as you put it, the 40,000-foot nomads. You know, it's not good enough to just be at home like the rest of us. 'Where are you?' 'I'm at my desk.' You know, that's...
What I should have said when you invited me to join your show, I should have said, 'Tom, you know, I'm actually meeting with a Saudi prince at that time. I would love to join your show, but I'm unfortunately with a Saudi prince at that hour.' I also love the 'would you love to come to Buckingham Palace? Lots of privacy here.' Lots of privacy except for all the people at Buckingham Palace who leaked to my friend Tom over here, but you know, that's a different story. But actually it's funny, isn't it? Because it's even more than that, it's 'would you like to come to BP?' So it's like this very casual shorthand for the grandest place in the world. It's like the elite, you know, 'we are so elite that we can be offhand and casual even about Buckingham Palace.'
And this is a place, you know, you know this 100 times better than me, but not to be sentimental or grandiose about this, but like I think about the role that Buckingham Palace plays in British culture, right? Like you all allow a lot of your natural resources to be controlled by this one family, and we can have a debate about whether some random family should, you know, own the coastline and all this other stuff, but they do. And I've met so many regular British people, working-class British people whose lives are not easy, and you know, every time they go to the butcher it's a little bit expensive, but who sort of believe in their heart that the royal family cares about them and is sort of stewards of the idea of the country, and therefore, yeah, let them have their palace, whatever, because we get this thing out of it. And then you just think, this guy's literally inviting a convicted pedophile over to BP, right?
You are there at the grocery store unable to afford your groceries, maybe indulging the idea, yeah, it's sort of useful to have these royals who, you know, do something for us, and they're over here just disrespecting you. They're disrespecting you. They're disrespecting your heritage. They don't care about you the way you care about them. And I hate to say it so bluntly, but this is not just true of Andrew or the royals. It's true of this entire class of people who I write about in the essay. This is a group of people who do not care about you. You may read profiles of these, you know, billionaires and think, 'Wow, they're so smart and I want my kids to learn coding to be like them.' We send a lot of admiration and aspiration their way, but they don't care about you at all. They don't respect you at all. They thumb their nose at you, and they take places that are sacred to you, like Buckingham Palace, and you know, they're just like, 'Yeah, why don't we have a pedophile come over because it's great for the privacy.'
Yeah. I think that people in the UK have... there's been a lot of sort of speculation. You know, there's been pieces in the media saying this could bring down the monarchy, blah blah blah blah blah. But I think that actually what's really interesting is how significantly the palace, and by which I mean the king, underestimated the desire for there to be retribution against Andrew. And it was very, very interesting this weekend. Our prime minister, Keir Starmer, said that he believed that Andrew should go to the US and submit to questioning from the house... is it called the oversight committee that's in charge of all this? And this was like a huge change, right? Because there's actually sort of parliamentary convention that they don't talk about the royal family, that they don't refer to the sovereign or his family. Now obviously there's a bit of cover by the fact that Andrew has had the prince title taken away. So, you know, arguably you could say, well, he's not in the same way a member of the royal family anymore, but it's still a massive, massive change.
And I think the point that I was making over the weekend was that it's very hard to imagine the prime minister just woke up in the morning and said, you know what, I'm going to call for Andrew to voluntarily extradite himself to America. It must have been done in consultation with the palace because they just wouldn't go there. Like honestly, if you ask any politician, any civil servant, anything about the royal family, they very quickly make an excuse to, you know, make their excuses and leave because they just don't want to go there. They don't want to talk about it. It's so true. And so for years, all we ever heard when politicians were asked, you know, should Andrew do this? Should Andrew... should the police investigate? All we ever heard was, 'That's a matter for Buckingham Palace. That's a matter for the royal family.' But I definitely get a sense that they are waking up in a large part thanks to Prince William, you know, who has this very young, digital-savvy kind of team who are very much across, you know, the new independent media. They're across Substack and YouTube and social media in a way that the king absolutely isn't.
Like the newspapers are a joke this weekend in the UK. They're full of stories saying the king has done such a great job by cutting Andrew out of the royal family. You know, he may have saved the monarchy. I mean, you know, it's a complete, it's a complete, it's a ridiculous kind of end version of what actually happened. I mean, Charles tried to the last minute not to take his title off Andrew and only finally did it when he was forced to because his son insisted that he couldn't leave him with this, you know, with this disaster for him to deal with. So I think there's a real awareness, particularly in William, of exactly what you're saying, that they cannot be seen anymore to be turning a blind eye to this. And I do wonder if we're going to get a statement at some point this week from the palace saying that, you know, Andrew needs to cooperate with the authorities from the palace rather than from a politician. But that's getting slightly off the point.
I should say if King Charles wants to come on The Ink and talk about it, I'll have you on as a guest interviewer. We'll do it together. You know, if... Look, I think what's interesting is this idea of a kind of ruling class. It takes... it's different in different places. It has different shapes. It spans, you know, monarchs and elected officials, and if you look at this kind of Epstein class, you know, business elites and academic elites and philanthropic elites, right? By the way, there's people on the left, a lot of people on the left implicated in this, a lot of people on the right implicated in this, a lot of nonpartisan people, there's people who believe deeply in God, there's people who are crusaders against the idea of religion. Like there's a... it's a diverse group. But one of the things I wanted to argue is that this diversity masks a deeper solidarity that I think many of us fail to realize.
So when you're describing what you're describing, what it makes me think is these people are all on the same team. Even if out they may be fighting on news channels about this tax cut or that tax cut. They may be in different political parties. They may support different candidates. You had Steve Bannon here. You had Larry Summers, a Democrat. Steve Bannon, obviously the strategist for Donald Trump and Republican. But in these emails, they're not fighting the way they do on cable. That's something they do for us to watch. That's like the World Wrestling Federation. The emails show how they actually relate to each other, which is meetups, dinners, and more significantly, information barter.
What these people are doing all day long is trading what financiers call edge, proprietary intel, which is anything from, 'Did you... I met this Saudi sovereign wealth fund official, what was your takeaway from him? What did you learn? Anyone stand out?' This kind of thing. They're constantly looking for that kind of information and they care so much about the capacity of other people in that super elite to help them in that way, give them the edge that allows them to make money, get jobs, you know, get trade edge with other people, that they don't care at the end of the day. So my point is these people have solidarity with each other. Unfortunately, those of us outside the palace, so to speak, do not have solidarity with each other.
Unfortunately, those of us outside the palace gates are fighting with each other in every society around the world right now. And these algorithms are poisoning us to think even more that we are each other's problem, right? That we are each other's enemy. And what these emails show is that the super elites have each other's backs no matter what. The question is, are we going to actually be able to develop our own solidarity to stand up for ourselves with any of the passion that these super elites stand up for each other? Because if not, we're cooked.
Yeah. And I'm going to read you a bit more of your own writing. This is what Anand says in the piece: 'How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close?' That I'm wondering if 'Mr. Epstein' is a hangover from the New York Times editing because they always call everyone Mr. This is sad.
If anybody, if anybody deserved to be stripped of his Mister...
Yeah. 'How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner and that's it. You bring what financiers call edge, proprietary insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a conference, a counterintuitive prediction about AI, a snippet of conversation with a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow's news. What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody instant-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private bilateral social media for people who can't or won't post. An archipelago of single-subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.'
This combination of what you call thirst and swagger, I'm so struck by. It's just the most perfect description of the emails that Andrew sends Epstein about Afghanistan. Now these emails are being sent in like... literally while Afghanistan is being torn apart and he's trying to make a deal, you know, to make a few bucks out of the reconstruction of Helmand. And, you know, he says in the email to Epstein that he would be very interested in any comments or ideas about the information that he has, that his proprietary... he says confidential brief about investment opportunities in Afghanistan, asks who else he could ask and says, 'Oh, I've already asked the Gates Foundation and they're not interested because they don't do any work in Afghanistan.' I mean, it's so... it's so disgusting. You also, like, it's so... I mean, you would think that the British royal family would have read enough history at Eton or whatever to realize, like, maybe not to try to make more money from Afghanistan or any other former colony. Like they had their chance to make money from all these places. They had a very good run, a quarter of the world's surface or whatever it was.
What? And then the modern way of making money for him is like through some alliance between a pedophile and then the Gates Foundation, like a software company founder philanthropy. It is such a perfect, frankly, distillation of how the old becomes new again. And you basically have in a way this like neocolonial impulse, but it's now, I guess, a royal acting sort of privately through an American philanthropist. Like that would be the idea, right? Again, you're sitting there trying to pay your groceries and hope you can get your kids into a decent college or whatever. And these people are just playing on a different level. And at some level they are playing on this level in this way because you let them, because we let them. We create the permission structure of impunity in which they operate.
That's the point that I want to make. These fortunes, these American billionaire fortunes that are often weaving in and out of Epstein's life, right? We enable those fortunes through the antitrust policies we have. Through the tax policies we have or don't have, through the regulatory policies we have, through the labor policies we have. We allow these fortunes to get so big. We allow our justice system to function such that someone like Jeffrey Epstein can get a slap on the wrist, frankly, for the barbarism he engaged in against so many women. And America's jails are filled with people who like sold a little bit of marijuana. Certain people in this country serving life sentences for a few times dealing drugs.
And a Jeffrey Epstein can get off the way he did. This is all... and I mean this is a hopeful and optimistic point, although it may not sound like this. We create the rules of the road of our societies. The British royal family exists at some level, as you were alluding to earlier, by the permission structure of pressure, care, support, lack of support that is out there. The American billionaire class exists in the form it does because of the permission structure of public opinion and support, admiration versus criticism. Right? These elites do not live in a vacuum and they wouldn't be as powerful as they are in any configuration of the world. Their power very much depends on how we think about them.
The sense of grace we're willing to give them. And at some deep level, I think many of us do not give ourselves the grace that we give these super elites. We are harder on ourselves than we are on people like Andrew and people like Bill Gates and people like Jeffrey Epstein himself. And at some level we got to wake up and say there are other ways to configure a society. I think in the United States we need a giant reckoning about our billionaires. Why they have the influence they do over every area of life. Why Bill Gates, who was messing around in these emails, why he has been allowed to lord over education. This man is not a sage in education. Most school children could teach Bill Gates some things about how to conduct a life. Why is Bill Gates rewriting the curriculum of America's students? The average American student should be educating Bill Gates about how to live.
Why do you have in Britain, and again, I'm sorry this is an impolitic question, but why do you have this family whose claim is that they were born descendants of some other people who gets to control these resources, who gets to, you know, have whatever nominal parliamentary functions, but they're not trivial. They're not nothing. Why? And all these palaces and this easy life while you're grinding out your hard life. Why? Why do we tolerate it?
So I want to ask you two further questions and I think you're absolutely right and I think there is an acute understanding in the next generation that certainly the two-tier justice system, which is, you know, very much like... look, I have repeatedly made the point that there is very clearly prima facie evidence that Andrew was involved in sex trafficking in this latest... It's been very obvious for a long while, but in this latest tranche of emails, it's very clear because he says, 'I'm sending somebody over from Russia or something to come and have dinner with you.' Andrew replies, 'Oh, will she have a message from you?' Which is quite clearly some form of code. And then he replies, 'She's clever, 26, beautiful, and trustworthy.' You know, that's not the kind of information that you need to know about somebody's goddaughter that you're meeting for dinner, right? I mean, it's like, you know, so it's clearly a plan to bring this girl over so that he can have sex with her. And, you know...
