The Attia Files examines Dr. Peter Attia’s 2014–2019 ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including seven meetings at his Manhattan home—discussing biomarkers, gabapentin, and Epstein’s "leg issue"—while dodging child abuse reporting laws despite his MD from Johns Hopkins. His cryptic Twitter remarks ("Pussy is low carb," "Jeffrey Epstein withdrawal") and unredacted emails suggest deeper familiarity than claimed. Meanwhile, CBS News’ Barry Weiss defends Attia amid backlash, hiring controversial figures like RFK Jr.’s Pell and vaccine misinformation advocate Mark Hyman, while Epstein’s pre-2008 network—including UK Labour insider Baron Peter Mandelson—reveals unchecked influence, financial entanglements, and potential legal complicity. The episode critiques how elite wellness industries exploit unregulated practices, masking systemic accountability with speculative narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Let's Be Clear00:15:02
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Conspirituality 295, the Attia Files.
We know from the reporting of Julie Brown at the Miami Herald and many others that at the center of Jeffrey Epstein's operation were potentially over 1,000 children and women victims of trafficking and sexual abuse.
It's not clear how deeply Peter Attia was enmeshed in Epstein's core activities, but we do know he belonged to an important tier of his operation, the influencer celebrity intelligentsia set that legitimized Epstein as a sophisticate across a wide range of disciplines.
So today we revisit the story of Peter Atia, starting with Derek running down Atia's response to his 1700-plus appearances in the files.
Julian will explore how the free press to CBS News pipeline is processing the news.
And I'm going to offer an analysis of the Epstein class pecking order using Hannah Arendt's onion layer model of totalitarianism.
Well, guys, let's take a moment at the beginning here to cheer for the freedom warriors.
Despite basically every company that endorsed Peter Attia dropping him after his name appeared over 1,700 times in the Epstein files, as you flagged, Barry Weiss has kept him on as a CBS news expert, citing her fear of caving to cancel culture as the reason.
As reported in the LA Times, Barry Weiss is said to be opposed to cutting Attia, according to two people familiar with her thinking.
As founder of the digital news site, The Free Press, and as an opinion writer, Weiss spoke out against so-called cancel culture and does not want to be seen as reacting to the Epstein frenzy.
It's really incredible that a moral panic around cancellation has helped to completely eliminate the notion of accountability or whatever was left of it.
Like the right wing is all for revenge, but like accountability is now unknown.
Well, let's be fair because a global child sex trafficking ring is definitely just a frenzy.
Well, you're right.
As Barry Weiss considers it.
Yeah, you want to keep things in perspective.
I know we're going to discuss the media more in segment two.
So let's just go over the basics here to begin.
We actually just covered longevity guru Peter Atia a few months back on episode 285.
Let me be clear because some people got pissed about that.
He is not in the Brian Johnson, I'm going to live forever or Dave Asprey.
His whole thing is live really well until you just drop dead, basically.
So I want to, you know, to be clear on what his exact lane in health is.
But if you're interested in his history and our contentions with his longevity science, that link is in the show notes.
I'll also preface this by saying that our focus on Atia and soon it seems Deepak Chopra in no way means that we shouldn't be talking about Donald Trump being mentioned over 30,000 times in the Epstein files or the fact that DOJ has still not published 3.5 million of those files or the six main characters who have been redacted everywhere that's getting a lot of news.
So there's a lot of other stuff happening.
We're just going to pull it back today to look at these files through the lens of Atia.
I'm going to go over some of their exchanges, including replies from Atia's non-apology on Twitter on February 2nd.
So first, Atia claims he was introduced to Epstein in 2014 through a prominent female healthcare leader while fundraising for scientific research.
For the next five years, he met with Epstein on approximately seven or eight occasions at his New York City home regarding research studies and to meet others.
While Epstein was first convicted as a sex offender for child prostitution in 2008, Atia claims that he never knew about the child part.
All right.
At least not until 2018.
What was his excuse?
He says he, quote, had little exposure to prominent people, and that level of access was novel to me.
Everything about him, Epstein, seemed excessive and exclusive, including the fact that he lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727, and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics.
Which, of course, meant I couldn't Google the guy.
I was dazzled.
Dazzled.
Couldn't believe it.
Right away, you have a doctor who never finished his residency, instead choosing to charge six figures to help ultra-wealthy people age better.
And he's just starstruck.
Seven years after his conviction, Atia writes to Epstein, you know, the biggest problem with becoming friends with you?
The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can't tell a soul.
Oh, God, come on.
Atia claims this has to do with a supposed rich man's code of honor.
I guess some eyes wide shut shit, where you don't talk about who you meet in private settings that had nothing to do with the child stuff.
Yeah, but there's this whole history of Epstein being given these glowing kind of fawning reviews, like the New York piece, New York Magazine piece in 2002, where it's like international man of mystery.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There isn't really, there's no code around that.
He was, he, he, everybody knew who he was and what he represented.
There's nothing top secret about him being super wealthy and having a lavish lifestyle and famous friends.
Damn it.
No, I know, but there are things that they kept secrets about.
Atia?
Well, the comments getting the most traction have been Atia saying that Pussy is low carb, that he goes into Jeffrey Epstein withdrawal when he doesn't see him, and a note about a fresh shipment, which he says was Metformin.
I'll actually take him at his word on that, but I have to point out that Atia claims he was not Epstein's doctor, but quote, I answered general medical questions and recommended other providers to him.
I do not take him at his word because nobody puts eating pussy is low carb in an email without some kind of easy in-person familiarity on the subject.
I met Metforman, so let me be clear.
I just met the Metformin one, not the other one.
Sorry.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, I mean, let's just zero in on that because we know a ton from the birthday books and the emails about like frat boy sex humor being Epstein's native tongue and the sort of like permission structure by which everybody's, you know, communicating with each other and probably the key way he indicated to his clients and his toadies what they might have access to.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, all over these email exchanges, there's this nod and wink style of banter, which is characteristic of the boys' club attitude in which women and girls are reduced to only being sex objects, possessions, conquests.
It comes across to me like these men who wanted the financial opportunities and self-importance of being led into an exclusive jet set saw Epstein's sick little jokes in this vein, perhaps as evidence of intimacy with him that they had to mirror back, rather than rejecting or critiquing or setting a boundary around that ugly stuff.
They're all too willing to play along.
And, you know, it's hard to believe that they wouldn't have been aware of his criminal history.
Well, there's also the question of the layers of involvement.
And that's what I'll get to in the third segment.
Speaking specifically about Atia's claim that he was not his medical doctor, that's where a glaring problem emerges to me because a number of emails are ensuring that Epstein received biomarker kits that Atia was mailing him.
In one 2016 email, Epstein asks for an explanation of test results, and Atiya says they should take time to go over the full set of those results.
Other topics they discuss includes gabapentin and nerve blockers for back pain, statins, MRIs, Clamid, which is for women's fertility, but is used to boost testosterone and sperm production in men.
You have blood draws, metformin, and an in-person examination of Epstein's, quote, leg issue.
This is quite a list of topics to discuss with someone who is not your patient.
And in person, I think, is key because seven or eight trips to the Manhattan townhouse, and he really sees nothing.
He sees nothing.
Nothing, no red flags at all.
Absolutely.
But you got to remember, consultants get paid the best, right?
The casualness, I think, is emblematic of the elitism.
And if you're just swinging by the townhouse at the behest of the Lord of the Manor, we can't know for sure, but it's hard to believe that the outrageous life he cannot talk about doesn't include a suspiciously young parade of women that others have reported witnessing going in and out, right?
Right.
Well, the women, obviously, a big part of this, but I want to drill back and focus on the medical aspect because it gets to the heart of the problem with wellness culture that we've discussed for years on this podcast.
Influencers want so badly to be seen as medical and scientific experts without the responsibility of living up to their code of ethics.
In the U.S., there are mandatory reporting laws if physicians suspect child abuse or neglect.
When Atia claims he's not acting as a doctor, that law just goes out the window.
And what's worse is that he went to medical school and he knows this.
He was even named resident of the year at Johns Hopkins before he quit the program.
Why he chose that path, we'll never really know because he went into the corporate world at McKinsey and Sapphire Energy before he opened his longevity clinic in 2014.
Bigger point, he gets to play loose with both laws and mores by using that MD on his handle, but skirting the responsibilities actual board-certified physicians have to abide by.
Dr. Jen Gunter wrote a passionate article for her substack in which she does not hold back on her disgust of Atia, and I've linked to it in the show notes.
In it, she writes, I have long had a discomfort with the concept of longevity as a medical specialty.
I think it stems from the fact that longevity as a cultural movement has an uncomfortable history of attracting extreme ideas, obscene wealth, and awful people.
Early longevity efforts overlapped openly with eugenics, promoting health, vitality, and extended life for those deemed biologically fit while ignoring or excluding others.
Shorter lifespans for the poor were attributed to weakness rather than social and environmental factors, and wealth was seen as a marker of biological or moral superiority.
The modern version of longevity also largely ignores well-known factors that shorten lifespan and affect quality of life, such as poverty, violence against women, and environmental hazards, and instead frames longevity as a reward for discipline, which is a code for wealth.
I think Dr. Gunter absolutely nails that, like no notes.
And yeah, it brings up a lot of thoughts.
I've got some of them coming up.
Well, her last sentiment, the code for wealth, that's exactly what Atiya admits when he says he was overwhelmed by the access to both wealth and influence that Epstein afforded him.
And that's just not how a doctor should act, no matter how much that doctor wants to claim he's not playing doctor.
He was obviously being paid to offer medical advice.
You don't get to skirt around that.
Dr. Gunter also notes that public health and community health experts are actually people who deal with longevity, and we should add gerontologists to that list.
I saw one flashby on social media defending her profession as a gerontologist.
I apologize for not writing down this woman's name when I saw it, but I do remember what she said in the thread, and it was brilliant.
The only anti-aging protocol is death.
You know, Dr. Gunter and others also make the point that as much as Atiyah is enamored with Epstein's wealth, he's also being used for legitimacy and networking.
Like as a master fixer and networker, Epstein really did use a lot of his contacts as toadies or social leverage with other contacts, which in Atia's case, you know, might look like, oh, you know, you've got a health problem.
I got this guy.
Let me introduce you.
And through that exchange, both Epstein and the Tody are exposed to larger circles of influence.
One other aspect of this debacle that keeps coming up is the absolute dedication some people have to Atiyah.
And this observation is not limited to him.
I've personally been thinking about the parasocial bonds that some people have with certain figures in the media or wellness or across the board, really.
Atia admitted as such with Epstein.
Some humans have long been enamored with wealth and power.
That to me is how we even have a President Trump.
But when we criticized Atia 10 episodes ago, we received some comments from people who couldn't believe we were actually critiquing him.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't be criticized for anything we do.
We absolutely should.
But I'm in this case talking about the blind devotion to someone because you happen to like that person and sometimes at the extremes affording them a near godlike status.
And I can only think that this psychological mechanism that makes some people believe others can't do any wrong is rooted in this sort of religious impulse that we have.
The very concept of infallibility is itself a problem.
Religions pretend that certain men are perfect and beyond reproach.
And that likely primes us to then apply this to people we form these parasocial bonds with.
And to use a word we cover often here, toxic, if that were to ever be an issue, to me, it's with holding up someone with such unreflective regard.
Yeah, there's that charismatic sort of cognitive and emotional phenomenon here, I think, that translates across religion and conspiracism and pseudoscience, which we talk about every week and politics too, which is that those self-enhancing claims that are accepted from the charismatic figure who's speaking to your personal problems and helping you to feel better creates a double sense of specialness, but then also defense of insecurity.
Like I know something that all the normies don't, but if you push me on it, I don't really have any convincing evidence.
Parasocial Bonds and Branding00:05:53
So I'm just going to get mad at you.
Yeah, I think the idealization is super thick.
I think there's a religious element in there.
I mean, it's like, how do you even describe the power, the godlike power of Jeffrey Epstein?
But I think another element involved in the parasocial bond is like self-identification, because most of the charismatic influencers we know rely on the branding of their personhood more than their content, which can be pseudoscientific and unoriginal all at once.
So when your brand is yourself, I think followers not only fantasize about the power of your guiding wisdom and see themselves safe in your protection, they also identify with you.
They want to be you.
Like when they do your morning protocol with your products, they might be imagining what it would be like to have your wealthy, independent, powerful, vital life.
So if Atia is attacked or called to account in that scenario, it's going to feel personal.
If the identification is very strong, attacking the charismatic exposes the possibility that the follower has neglected or abdicated their own sense of self.
Like when the idol's clay feet are broken, you totter as well.
Well, speaking of, I've really been enjoying your wake up with me videos lately.
Get me through my morning.
I've always wondered about your moisturizer routine.
Well, as we've already hinted at, you have to stoop pretty low to have standards worse than wellness supplement companies.
But freshly wintered CBS News editor Barry Weiss said, hold my mojito and just limboed her way right under that bar.
What am I talking about?
Both AG1 and David Protein Bars, with whom Peter Atia reportedly had lucrative contracts in exchange for adding his prestige as their scientific consultant, have become, shall we say, more distant from him in the immediate fallout over the latest launch of Epstein files.
AG1 announced that he was no longer an advisor to the company, and David Protein had a slightly different announcement saying Dr. Peter Attia has stepped down from his role.
Both companies, however, removed his name and photo from the expert sections of their websites.
But don't be too sad for them.
They've both still got the prestige of Andrew Huberman's endorsement.
Yeah, I mean, when pseudoscience companies have to fire brand ambassadors, not over their pseudoscience, but because the charismatic glow that covers over the pseudoscience cracks apart.
I do want to be fair.
David Protein isn't really pseudoscience.
They're sort of the in the just eat a lot of protein camp.
Yeah.
Okay.
AG1 is absolutely pseudoscience.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So it turns out that just two days before Peter Attia's email exchanges with Epstein became public knowledge, Barry Weiss had announced a new slate of paid contributing experts at CBS News.
And both Attia and Andrew Huberman were on that list.
And Mark Hyman.
Weiss has had a pretty rocky start at her new job after her substack-based company, the Free Press, was acquired by Paramount CBS for $150 million.
That deal, it seems, was in line with the reshaping of CBS after the huge merger between their parent company Paramount and Skydance, FCC approval of which appears to have hinged on CBS paying Trump a $16 million settlement over the frivolous lawsuit about how a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited.
I love the settlement stuff because, I mean, just that sentence alone makes me think that it's like if you just brought like a briefcase full of cash into the Oval Office and you just stuck it in his hand, he'd say, all right, okay, go on.
I love that Colbert is out, but Atia stays.
That's just incredible.
Right.
Perfect.
Perfect barometer.
In her January 28th address to staff gathered for a town hall-style meeting at the CBS Broadcast Center, the LA Times characterized Barry Weiss as reaching out to those unimpressed with her performance so far, like her complete lack of experience with broadcast news, combined with her aversion to annoying the Trump administration.
And this was on full display in her last-minute polling of an already widely promoted 60 Minutes episode on the abuses at the Seacott prison in El Salvador, where ICE had sent detainees without due process.
She claimed it was due to a lack of adequate reporting, despite it having been researched for months and approved by the standards department.
She made a case for appealing to a younger audience, emphasizing greater digital reach and switching to a streaming mentality to keep pace with competitors.
Yeah, they didn't get the statements from Christine Noam that would have made it a well-rounded report.
Yeah, about Seacott.
It's just unbelievable.
Weiss had also, along the same lines, touted the recent appearance of former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch on The Morning Show as something to be proud of with regard to fostering conversations from a wider range of viewpoints on the network.
She promised the staff that she would earn their trust and also argued that CBS News, as part of the mainstream media, had to earn back the trust of the public, which I found ironic, if predictable, given the role she's played in sowing distrust and reputable journalism over the course of her career so far.
Yeah, it's such a deep irony because so much of our future now hinges on whether we have and believe we have access to reliable information.
And it really seems that installing Weiss at the top of that pyramid, like as the final boss of reactionary bias, just hacks away at whatever's left of democracy expressing itself in mass media.
Functional Medicine Misconceptions00:03:17
Yeah.
And one of her first classic unpopulist statements when she first got installed in that role was to say, we're going to report the fucking news.
Like she's riding in on a white horse.
But that's the story now.
The Maverick Outsiders have taken over the institutions.
The trend is visible in her list of 19 new paid contributors, which includes RFK Jr. Pell, as you chimed in there, Derek, and fellow vaccine misinformation peddler, Mark Hyman.
He's, in case you don't remember, that functional medicine doctor who founded the same type of membership-based high-end concierge diagnostics company that Atia is involved in.
Functional medicine is basically a brand name for what I call medicine plus, which means you pay for all your regular prescriptions, plus the off-label ones with limited evidence and a bunch of unregulated supplements and pseudoscience treatments to boot, all in the name of holistic cutting-edge preventative health.
The fact that Hyman and Atia and Huberman are the three only medical experts on that list tells you a lot about Bray Weiss's understanding of medical science.
Now, Hyman and Atia, as it turns out, are also contributors to the free press.
So at least she's consistent, I guess.
Julian, I just clocked something.
You guys have probably made this clear a thousand times and it's gone over my head.
So functional medicine does use evidence-based care, but it uses it as a Trojan horse for wellness products because wellness products have a higher profit margin or something.
A little bit.
Yes, sometimes.
So the thing about functional medicine is it's not its own field.
It's a sort of certificate you can put on top of whatever else you do.
The problem is you can be a legitimate dermatologist or dentist or physician and do the program, but you can also be a wellness coach and do the program.
So in a sense, the term has no actual meaning.
Like my old dentist in LA was very into functional medicine, but she was a dentist and she got a little woo.
But in her actual practice, it didn't affect what she was doing at all.
But if you're a wellness coach and you say, I'm like, Will Cole, you know, is a chiropractor, but he positions himself as a sort of physician because he has a functional medicine certificate, but his only actual training is in chiropractic.
So it's a very loose term that everyone can sort of exploit in whatever ways they want to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty deceptive.
Yeah.
And then the products and services that I was just listing are not covered by insurance for the moment, right?
Right.
Well, that's what I covered on Saturday's brief, if anyone wants to check that out, because that could change very soon.
So wait a minute.
They're expanding insurance company for bullshit, but not people.
Am I getting that right?
Yep.
Yes.
Yeah.
So just briefly, my Saturday brief on the West Virginia State House is trying to mandate that supplements are covered by insurance.
Now that is up to the insurance board of the state, but that will have national effects if it goes in.
And then the actual House of Representatives, the federal house, is trying to get homeopathy to be completely exempt from any sort of regulations whatsoever.
And that's definitely, they're both Maha-influenced bills that are going on right now.
Insight Into Epstein's Influence00:11:42
Yeah.
But yeah, nothing about socialized medicine to your point, Matthew.
Nothing about actually helping people afford insurance.
It's kind of perfect.
Like you give the accommodation to the productivity, to the industry, but not to the people.
Like that's what it's for.
That's what we're doing here.
Okay.
Yeah.
Supplement companies get a place at the table.
It's called equity and inclusion, right?
Well, they're persons actually under the Constitution.
Exactly.
And they have free speech to disseminate whatever pseudoscience they like.
Exactly.
With someone like Hyman, the whole concierge, like elective and exhaustive blood work service is also this thing in spades.
Barry also remains consistent in her inclusion of anti-woke historian Niall Ferguson, often criticized for revisionist views on colonialism on that list, as well as conservative think tank fellow, University of Austin visiting professor, and contrarian anti-woke podcaster Coleman Hughes, alongside former Trump NSA and Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who has defended the president's disclosure of highly classified information with Russian officials in 2017.
The same guy has called critical race theory a form of racism.
And during his tenure, he ignored policy procedures involving officers under investigation for sexual assault.
Speaking of which, removing Peter Attia from this list of contributors due to his presence in the Epstein files is something that Barry, again, according to the LA Times, and we've flagged this already, sees as going along with cancel culture.
So he stays.
Interesting thing, though, it turns out that Barry and her wife Nellie Bowles are also in the Epstein files.
With Jeffrey asking Nellie, when are you and your babe back in New York City?
She had met him for an interview and they talked about her new romance.
And he also asked, how did it go introducing your partner to your mom?
In this case, capitalism may well have the last laugh, though, because insiders at CBS News say they doubt that Atia will appear on the air because segments about health typically come with sponsors attached and they will probably object to being associated with a friend of Epstein's.
You know, two things stand out for me that give insight into how the Epstein class operates.
And I'll just qualify this by saying this is based on, you know, I would say a good amount of research and scrolling around in Jmail, which if you haven't seen is an incredible tool for being able to access all of the DOJ files as though it was a Gmail folder.
But I'd also have to say that anybody out there right now who's making really strong definitive statements after they say something like, I've been through all of these files, I got to say, you have to really ask yourself, have they had the time to do that?
Because one of the things that I've noticed, I don't know if you saw this, guys, but like if you try to track down in the number of returns that you get on a particular search word, you know, you'll come back.
Like with yoga, it's over a thousand.
But there are a thousand emails there.
But maybe, what, 40% of them are reply threads.
So there's duplications.
There are lost threads and broken threads.
It's actually can be very difficult to put the timeline together.
So anyway, I'm just saying, anybody making claims about like how well they've researched this stuff, they have had to have spent a full-time week looking into this stuff.
And so I think it's going to take a while for a lot of things to become really clear.
A full-time week looking into maybe just one exactly.
Yeah, that's a great distinction.
Right.
So anyway, just two things.
And I think that this is sort of going to be open on my desktop for the rest of the year.
And bit by bit, I'll try to figure things out.
But two things that really stand out so far with regard to our beat and that give a little bit of insight into how the Epstein class operates are that first of all,
you know the extent to which epstein played a kind of cult leaderish pseudotherapeutic role in the lives of the powerful and what that says about his charisma and the neediness of that whole lot and then secondly coming back to a tia and longevity i'll get to this at the end why epstein seems like a peak client for longevity treatments and wellness products and the longevity protocols that as dr gunter points out are tinged with eugenics,
like not to mention meditation tips from Deepak Chopra, and that's another episode, maybe next week.
So Atia at one point says to Epstein that he goes into withdrawal if he doesn't see him.
Now, I've had some very close friends, and I can't imagine describing my fondness for them in those terms.
Like it would make sense in speaking to a lover or about a lover or to a drug dealer.
Occasionally, I've run into people who are so charismatic that they just hold court wherever they go.
Like everyone wants to be around them at the cafe and you might say, oh, I need my fix of so-and-so or whatever.
Now, in that email, he is writing to Epstein's assistant, Leslie Groff, and maybe it's meant to be a jokey way to describe for her that he's really into her boss.
And so maybe she'll keep that in mind when juggling the schedule of conference calls and private yoga and trafficked sex massages every afternoon.
But then there's a more haunting comment that comes from Baron Peter Mandelson, who's not in the wellness sphere, but I think the emotions involved here are really salient.
He's the senior British new labor figure who acted as one of Tony Blair's austerity officers.
He's been an MP, an EU trade commissioner.
Later on, he was business secretary.
And then I think now he still is a life peer in the House of Lords, although he might have resigned recently, I think.
And as best pal to Jeffrey Epstein, as he described himself in the early 2000s, they had a close and constant relationship.
Now, that was before the Acosta deal in 2008.
And I would just, you know, for listeners who are still kind of foggy on the timeline here, keep 2008 in mind, because in every discussion of how people are interacting with Epstein, that's really the dividing line before and after their, you know, potential awareness of him, you know, being convicted of child sex trafficking.
After 2008, everybody should have known what this guy was up to.
Now, after that, emails in which Epstein helps Mandelson network and gives him political advice and in which they chat fiscal policy also show poorly explained financial transfers and benefits.
Now, we don't know if they're payments, if they're gifts, or they're financial assistance, but the money is coming from Epstein during periods when Mandelson held senior public roles.
Now, the Brits are about to investigate him, actually, because they're worried he was passing Epstein insider training info or state secrets.
Mandelson has denied anything like that, and he says he doesn't recall any improper payments of like $75,000 at a time from Epstein.
So the Met police have launched a criminal probe, but he hasn't been charged.
Now, the comment that Mandelson makes, this is all preamble to this, is, you are the only person who knows everything about me.
Don't go away.
Now, this is in May of 2009 when Epstein is under house arrest in Florida.
And here's the thing about the files, just another bit of, you know, guidance for anybody who wants to go and look at this stuff and why this dump of documents is going to catch fire with speculation and baking, just like the Q-drops.
There is so much missing information, like beyond the redactions, many of which are just enraging after the DOJ announces that the case is dead.
But in Mandelson's case, this plaintive evocative tribute could refer to anything.
It could refer to his being gay.
It could refer to them participating in illegal sex.
Or, you know, as will come up in a bit, it could refer to confiding in Epstein his desire for the prime ministership, which was always unlikely, but they spoke about it.
Now, the statement that he makes, you know, you know everything about me, comes in a thread of seven emails over three days in which it appears that Mandelson and Epstein are discussing whether Mandelson should wait for an unnamed person in London, and Epstein is saying he should come to New York, maybe for the same meeting.
And then there are brief exchanges arranging a phone call.
It appears that between the sixth and the seventh email, which is where Mandelson makes his plea, don't go away, Epstein has secured Mandelson's phone number.
And then there's about two hours between that email and the don't go away email.
And so it appears to me that you are the only person who knows everything about me comes after a phone call, maybe a long one.
And of course, we're never going to hear any of that, right?
Now, whatever that statement is referring to, it is intimate way beyond financier and minister.
And it lines up with the extensive reporting from Julie Brown and others about the constant role of empathetic ear that Epstein played, often offering therapeutic advice or even romantic tips.
He played confidant to post-White House Clinton, to Les Wexner.
He advised Bannon on public scrutiny and reputation, probably not on wardrobe, though.
And he offered supportive listening for Woody Allen and life change advice for Ehud Barak, who was transitioning out of the Knesset.
Now, six months later, Epstein is emailing with Mandelson about the possibility of his succeeding Gordon Brown as labor leader in PM.
And there's a famous email in which Epstein is giving him very direct advice in a way that any government would see as meddling.
But I want to point out something else.
Quote, this is Epstein writing, my advice is to take a breath and deal with it upfront.
Tell Gordon the whole truth.
And he goes on to talk about how his position is untenable.
You in capital letters are super strong.
Tell the truth.
And then a few months later, Mandelson writes back, he cannot take the truth.
He needs five years of therapy, which is a little interesting as in, you know, well, if he had someone as caregiving as you to talk to, maybe, you know, he could work this out.
Now, a little later, Epstein says in his thread, quote, let's not dwell on him.
I am only interested in how this plays out for you.
So the prior reporting, as I said, emphasizes this highly personalized and sometimes intimate pseudo-therapeutic caregiving attention.
And so one thing that's become clear for me is that the emotional and affective bonds in the network with all the focus turned towards the center are really, really strong.
And we're familiar with this from cult structures where the center or the top is endlessly mystified, but everyone wants to get close to it.
And the leader is able to flip between playing the therapist with a mark to abusing women and girls.
Yeah, it's incredible.
It makes me think of what I said earlier about the Nellie Bowles email, right?
Like, oh, by the way, how did it go with introducing your parents to your new lesbian lover?
Cult Structures and Mystification00:07:40
And it's like this all seems to weave together this intimacy, the sense of very quickly becoming a confidant, the sense of getting people to open up.
And it's opening up both about their emotional and career and intimate lives.
But it's also the opening up piece around like, oh, let's banter about our like perverse sort of sexual proclivities that you're not supposed to talk about what we do because we're bad boys on the inside, right?
So what I find very interesting is that even just starting to read the files shows this huge spectrum of involvement of various figures from regular business meetings to fixers procuring trafficked girls for oligarchs.
And it reminds me of Hannah Arendt's onion metaphor for totalitarianism in her famous book, Origins of Totalitarianism.
And it's this spectrum is the thing that makes the file such an epistemological crisis, I think, because the layers determine the difference between guilt by action or guilt by association.
And then within that layer of guilt by association, how many people aided and abetted and laundered because their contact came after or extended beyond the Acosta sentence in 2008.
Like this seems to be that, as I said before, the acceptability threshold folks are establishing.
Like you can waive off association before 2008, but not after.
So Hannah Arendt says that in every totalitarian organization, there's an outer layer of bureaucracy.
Like this is the largest group by numbers, and it's mundane business contacts, it's mainstream media, it's civil society.
It's all of the things that firstly look familiar to the rest of the world or boring, but secondly are how the organization maintains plausibility and respectability.
Some of that tier will migrate to the inner layers with more tighter contracts of benefits and compromat, but other people will stay on the outside ring or layer, you know, indefinitely.
The other key insight from Arendt is that each layer has two sides to it.
There's an inward facing and an outward facing layer.
If you are outward facing in the outer layer, you're not really trying to get further in.
So the emails in which Elon presents as a dork trying to find the party has, they have the vibe of the guy who is trying to jump layers.
So he's in the inward facing layer.
But this Baroque spectrum of access and secrets means that players can shift between layers, but there are veils of obscurity between them.
Like everybody is set up to never exactly know what's going on upstairs or to pass the buck if they find out.
And often people on the outside will have scant information on the core.
Now, with this email dump, we get the entire onion flattened all at once, right?
There are no layers in the dump.
And so skilled researchers are going to have to take months to recreate the map of layers.
And in the meantime, I think a tsunami of online researchers will build their own like onion hybrids.
Yeah, these metaphors are really, really well applicable to this situation.
I don't know about you guys or listeners, but my Instagram feed is suddenly filled with two types of pretty melted reactions.
First is left of center people who are kind of allies of ours in terms of critiquing MAGA and Maha, but they're saying that they owe the conspiracy theorists an apology because it was all true, right?
Or maybe Pizzagate and QAnon were manufactured by Epstein and company as a way to distract from what they were really doing.
And then there are the accounts popping up that are just straight up resurrecting and recirculating satanic panic, Pizzagate, QAnon content about adrenochrome, frazzle drip child sacrifice, how the powers that be have always been worshiping Baal and enacting pedophilic rituals.
Yeah, so you sent me one of those in Slack and literally somebody has reposted Geraldo Rivera from what, 1985 or something like that, interviewing, well, interviewing in quotes five kids sitting in the front row of his show in the studio to get them to disclose their satanic ritual abuse details.
And it's like people are finding a, I don't know, like the archive of truth or something like that.
And so the cultural amnesia around, oh, there was this thing called the satanic panic is so incredibly thick.
You know, it's like, it's not like we know everything about it, but we know a lot.
And you don't want to post Geraldo Rivera as somebody who knew the truth about Jeffrey Epstein in 1985.
It's a big reminder for how many people, you know, on any given topic like this that requires some study, it's new information.
They need a 101 or something.
And yeah, and we're and the three of us are at such, well, I'll just speak for myself.
I feel like I'm at such a disadvantage at trying always to sort of reimagine myself back at the start of something so that whatever we communicate here or on social media about this doesn't come off as dismissive or school army, or you've got the you're, you're the hall monitor or something like that.
But like, but it's, that's really hard when you're watching people post Geraldo Rivera right yeah, yeah.
And get getting a kid to say well, these terrible things happened to me and oh yes, they were dressed up in capes and then, and then the babies and blah blah blah, yeah.
So it looks like we're in for a fresh wave of all of this.
I'm not happy about it at all.
It's it's coattailing on the latest Epstein files because, as you were saying Matthew, you can connect the dots any number of different ways, through 3 million emails and phone tip line allegations and text messages and financial records and photos and videos and internal FBI documents, where they're saying oh, maybe it's this or maybe it's that true to form with who's in charge of our institutions right now.
This dump is perhaps the most intoxicating invitation to do your own research that we've seen in the last six years.
Yeah and, and I I just want to add something, which is that there's there's a premise behind how we're talking about this.
Uh you, you might disagree with this Julian, but like that, that in time, the researchers will figure it out, or that it will be possible for the reconstruction of the onion to happen, or something like that.
But I think what is on the horizon or it's here, it's overshadowing everybody is the accountability crisis, the fact that, even when people, when things are sorted out, nothing happens, nobody is punished right, it's.
It's like getting people to, you know respect, some kind of investigative process that, over and over and over again, yields no accountability right, I mean.
And so I think I leave open in my heart the fact that there's going to be a lot of people, once they hear that the DOJ is not going to investigate this any further, they feel compelled to take it into their own hands and do what they can.
And yeah, I think that's the way it's going to go.
Teaching Yoga in the Service Industry00:10:04
And you have the other side of that coin, which is the, what was it, 14,000 cases during the satanic panic where people were in some cases jailed and in some cases went through some of the longest and most expensive trials in American history.
Right.
Where at the end of it all, there was not a single case that had any corroborating physical evidence that, you know, at the end of the, it's like, it seems like no one is being held accountable, but they're not being held accountable for a completely wild set of fantastical allegations.
Meanwhile, actual horrific abuse is happening in much more ordinary and ugly ways.
Very ordinary, very, very common.
So the last thing I want to say is a little bit galaxy brained, but it's about why Jeffrey Epstein might have been so interested in yoga.
As I said, like a thousand returns on that search in J Mail.
And I think if you gathered up all of the naive, selfish, individualistic, smug, self-certain incentives just lurking in the discourse and marketing of for-profit wellness and you boiled them down into an essential oil, like that would have been Epstein's favorite scent.
Like he was the perfect client.
You know, he wants optimization so that he can optimize his domination of others and maybe sort of keep some sort of peace of mind as he does it.
Did you guys see the search for yoga in the files and how many of the emails were about scheduling private yoga sessions with women?
I spent a few hours looking at yoga last week just purely out of curiosity.
First, a lot of them were actually his assistants just telling him they were going to yoga and that was just a schedule.
So, you know, there's probably a few hundred that we can say were on that.
In terms of the private yoga, I actually looked up some of the studios that he was going for and the teachers.
And, you know, it just seems like I don't know if there's anything nefarious.
Living in New York during that time, private yoga was very important.
So I can't really tell there, but I did find it interesting that I was looking through his credit card receipts because they're in there too.
And two of the places where he spent a lot of money were Equinox, which was my main place of employment in New York and Los Angeles, and at Atmananda, which is where I trained to be a yoga instructor.
And I don't want to make my own corkboard here, but what really jumped out at me was he spent $3,800 in two days at Atmananda.
I don't know how you do that at a yoga studio, but I do know, I do know that when I was in teacher training, the owner of that studio was arrested for sexually assaulting one of the students who was in the program with me.
Yeah, that's not a cork board, Derek.
And I know there was massage services at that studio.
It was in a different location at the time.
So that really was kind of a gut punch to me, thinking that I, most of the receipts were from when I just moved to Los Angeles, but knowing that he could have been in some of my classes really just kind of, you know, gives me that feel.
I mean, you never know.
You see hundreds of people every week, but it's, it's just really disturbed me.
It kind of made me have to turn off my computer and walk around outside for a little while after that.
Well, you know, whatever private yoga he's getting, some of some of the women's names are redacted.
It might be that some of them are survivors and their identities are being protected.
And they, you know, were recruited into the belly of the beast as service workers.
But what I wanted to say is that I think the service industry might have pointed them in the direction of rich people to kind of begin with.
And I had this memory, you know, from my own years of teaching, because when I was a yoga gig worker, and despite my politics, I was on the lookout for lucrative clientele.
And when I scored a teaching job at the Yorkville Athletic Club in the heart of Toronto's wealthiest district, you know, this is like a club with, I don't know, like poofy towels and all of that stuff.
I knew the real money would be made through private lessons with the wealthy and often bored clientele there.
Now, I wasn't, I don't think I was serving anybody who was any more criminal than a wealth hoarder, you know, as far as I'm aware of.
I needed money like everyone else.
I'm not ashamed of this.
The club was there to find my labor and match it with whatever the client wanted.
But, you know, I was a white cis male and was not likely to have been harassed.
And so I wasn't.
And maybe that contributed to the time that it took me to reflect on what it meant that I had some interesting knowledge that would comfort rich people and that poor people couldn't afford.
It was, and then there was the cognitive dissonance of sort of associating that with spirituality.
There was some weird thing about finishing the private yoga session and then, I don't know, being handed the poofy towel and the specialized hand products or something like that.
And so, so, you know, now all of the coolest yoga teachers I know are much more aware of that pattern, that sort of kind of service that the industry has at times performed.
And they're, you know, they're making different choices.
I know people who are teaching in healthcare settings, you know, rehab centers, domestic violence shelters, poor neighborhoods.
Yorkville still exists, right?
Oh, yeah.
That's good.
I mean, one of the biggest complaints I've heard in my decades of yoga was how hard it is to get good paying gigs while teaching yoga, you know, and from my experiences, like at Equinox, so many of my students and private clients were doctors on their break from the emergency room.
They were definitely not bored.
So, you know, I think it's a balance finding good pay in a very difficult industry for people who need that sort of work, I think is very important too.
Yeah, I don't think that Yorkville would ever go out of business because it's like surrounded by zillion dollar condos and stuff like that.
But I have no idea what they're paying people or what the yoga program is.
This is like years and years and years ago.
Yeah, it also makes me think about having, you know, all of us have been in this industry for a long time, the vulnerability of the kind of self-employed entrepreneurial gig where there is this carrot that seems to be dangling out there, this sort of mythic sense of like you can become the provider, whatever the service is that you're offering in this kind of wellness world to wealthy and famous people.
And somehow that is evidence of being really good at what you're doing, of having a kind of charisma that they appreciate, but then you're also coattailing on their charisma and that makes you able to charge more money.
But then I think, especially for women, I've thought this again and again over the last 30 years, who end up in a position where they are dependent on the patron and the patron then has them at a disadvantage where it's like, you know, they have to be sort of at their beck and call.
They're getting paid much better than they could be paid for anything else anywhere.
And then what, like, where does that leave you in terms of the boundaries and the vulnerability to exploitation?
I'm remembering, too, that in training programs when discussing, you know, taking private clients, if this ever came up, maybe not in a formal class, but maybe around the lunch table or whatever.
You know, so who pays for private lessons?
And are there very wealthy people who do that?
If people are sort of whispering about that.
There was this rationalization that came up, which was, you know, they're very powerful people in the world.
They really need to do yoga.
And if they do, maybe, maybe they will become better capitalists, right?
Maybe they will, maybe they will turn to the light.
Maybe they will recognize how we change the world.
This is how we change the world.
And wow, holy shit.
That's an amazing thing to remember.
That's a really unfortunate mindset.
I mean, to me, one of the things that I loved about my circles was that yoga was just something that everyone could benefit from in some capacity.
And if that just means stretching your hamstrings, that's wonderful.
I will say, though, I am very glad that my one interview to be Diddy's trainer did not come through.
And that was partly because they told me that if at 2 a.m. he wanted a training session, I have to come out.
I was like, nope.
So that is a bullet I definitely dodged.
Was it implied, though, that if you came out at 2 in the morning, you'd get like $1,000 or something like that in your hand?
I would have been an actual full-time employee of him.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
On coal.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Well, Derek, you know, you have repeatedly described this kind of, hey, I just did yoga in New Jersey and we were like normal guys and we never, it wasn't a big deal and there wasn't a lot of spiritual claptrap.
But I think Julian and I were in a bit of a different zone.
No, I was in it.
But when I got hired at Equinox, I was, I was then for most of my career around, like I said, a lot of doctors, a lot of company employees, people who just wanted stress relief and to feel good more than anything else.
So early in my career, I was around a lot of that shit.
And thankfully, I didn't have to spend a lot of time in it.
But I think it also gives me a different perspective in terms of like people who can make a sustainable living working in fitness broadly rather than this very sort of almost precious spiritual practice that some of those studios that I started in portrayed it as.