True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 509: Jeffrey's BBB
Aired: 2025-12-15
Duration: 01:13:17


=== Would I Be Found? (01:28) ===

[00:01:05]  Hello.
[00:01:06]  Hello.
[00:01:08]  Let's just all take a deep breath out together.
[00:01:11]  You know, I think I would have died in the ice age.
[00:01:15]  Probably.
[00:01:16]  I'd be one of those skeletons they find.
[00:01:19]  You know?
[00:01:19]  Because it was too cold.
[00:01:21]  Just like, like, there's like, they find like whatever, not calcified, but like fossilized like footprints.
[00:01:27]  But like, there's just one skeleton like 10 minutes into the walk that like they took for like whatever several years trying to cross continents.
[00:01:35]  That would have been me.
[00:01:36]  So you're saying you would immediately fall?
[00:01:38]  Because like, yeah, not able to resist.
[00:01:41]  Just go literally extremely gently into the night.
[00:01:47]  You know how like in Everest, there's all those bodies that sort of like, you know, kind of dot the trail going up.
[00:01:52]  Yeah.
[00:01:52]  Mine would have been like right outside the tourist, like barely like right outside like where you get your backpack.
[00:01:59]  I would have been like, believe me, I can't, I can't, I can't go.
[00:02:03]  I had too cold.
[00:02:05]  I think I could do it.
[00:02:06]  I like the cold.
[00:02:07]  You think you could do Everest?
[00:02:09]  No, but I think that, I mean, perhaps with training.
[00:02:12]  But I mean, with enough training, you can do a lot of things.
[00:02:16]  Facts.
[00:02:17]  But it is facts, but it's perfect.
[00:02:21]  10,000 hours.
[00:02:23]  But I had a really nice walk this morning that was bracing in the cold.
[00:02:28]  And I was like, it feels good.
[00:02:30]  Yeah.
[00:02:31]  And I don't mind the cold.
[00:02:33]  I just layer up.

=== Cruise Confessions (14:01) ===

[00:02:34]  Yeah.
[00:02:35]  Yeah.
[00:02:35]  And I'm all cozy on the inside.
[00:02:37]  I don't like wearing long johns.
[00:02:39]  And so I only do that rarely.
[00:02:42]  Yeah.
[00:02:43]  I got a different situation going on.
[00:02:45]  It's just, I feel, I find them uncomfortable.
[00:02:48]  But anyways, enough about that.
[00:02:50]  My name is Brace.
[00:02:52]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:53]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[00:02:55]  There he is.
[00:02:56]  And this is Truanon.
[00:02:57]  Hello, everybody.
[00:02:58]  Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:03:00]  Today we are taking a, I'm struggling to remember which is Swedish stuff and which just exists in sort of the.
[00:03:09]  We're taking an Arctic cruise.
[00:03:11]  There we go.
[00:03:12]  We're taking an Arctic cruise up to Sveden.
[00:03:15]  Yeah, and stopping up over there up in the north.
[00:03:18]  Up in the north.
[00:03:19]  And then we're kind of going down through whatever they got going down in the middle.
[00:03:24]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:03:25]  Like, we kind of know what they got going on in the top of the Arctic, but are there guys like, is it like Australia where like in the middle, they're just like, nah, we're not, we're not going anywhere.
[00:03:33]  I don't think I would ever go on an Arctic cruise.
[00:03:36]  It does sound to me.
[00:03:38]  Mostly about the cruise and not the Arctic part.
[00:03:40]  The Arctic part, though, doesn't help.
[00:03:42]  You know what I mean?
[00:03:43]  I think it would be majestic.
[00:03:45]  Oh, surely.
[00:03:47]  Surely.
[00:03:48]  Surely seeing those sheets of ice.
[00:03:51]  But Liz, perhaps you could just get a job on an icebreaker or something.
[00:03:56]  And then not only do you get to see the sites, you could just be in them as well.
[00:03:59]  No, but that's not.
[00:04:00]  No, the whole thing is like you're cruising by it.
[00:04:03]  That's true.
[00:04:04]  You're not sort of like in it.
[00:04:06]  I just, yeah.
[00:04:08]  No, I think it would be quite beautiful.
[00:04:10]  I think it would cause you to like it would cause a lot of pondering about one's existence in the universe.
[00:04:17]  I've often thought that if this podcast goes on for another like five or ten episodes, we should sort of move it to a cruise.
[00:04:27]  Like we should all just like take permanent cabins on a cruise.
[00:04:30]  Like those little Weezer cruise.
[00:04:32]  Or yeah, or just switch rock band-centric cruises.
[00:04:35]  Yeah.
[00:04:35]  We'll do a True Non cruise.
[00:04:37]  Here's a little.
[00:04:39]  Oh my God.
[00:04:41]  We just have like all of our like random guests.
[00:04:44]  Just like, like, yeah, you can meet.
[00:04:46]  No, it would have to be fans.
[00:04:47]  That's how cruises work.
[00:04:48]  No, no, but like that as like as entertainment or whatever.
[00:04:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:53]  Like, you know, you can make like Marlon juggle or something.
[00:04:59]  Or like, you know, you can just see if they have talents or whatever.
[00:05:02]  Maybe someone can do dog tricks.
[00:05:03]  Sure.
[00:05:04]  I will say one of my greatest enemies, Dan, saw Robo from Black Flags penis on a cruise outside of Sweden.
[00:05:15]  I'm not even making this up at a urinal, and he said it was a foot long.
[00:05:21]  Wait, wait, hold on.
[00:05:24]  Why was he on a cruise?
[00:05:25]  Was he working in?
[00:05:26]  No, what would they have him do?
[00:05:29]  Every galley slave?
[00:05:31]  Yeah, Rinka was the only galley slave they had on a Swedish cruise.
[00:05:35]  No, playing music.
[00:05:37]  Do you know about how terrible it is actually for people who play and perform on cruises?
[00:05:42]  It is fucking rough and the pay is terrible and the accommodations and everything.
[00:05:49]  It's tough to be a working musician.
[00:05:52]  That was during, because that was peak rock cruise era.
[00:05:55]  And that was, so this was like, they had like a, I don't remember who played, but I was, I guess, Black Flag or some band that Robo was playing in, not the real Black Flag, but played.
[00:06:06]  And some band Rinkau was in.
[00:06:08]  I don't know which it was.
[00:06:10]  But yeah, I guess.
[00:06:11]  Wait, so yeah, he was in a band that was playing.
[00:06:13]  He was on a band that was playing on a cruise.
[00:06:15]  That's what I just said.
[00:06:15]  And you made fun of me.
[00:06:16]  No, I didn't make fun of you.
[00:06:19]  I didn't make fun of you.
[00:06:21]  Roll the tape back.
[00:06:23]  Why was he on a cruise?
[00:06:24]  Was he working in?
[00:06:25]  No, you.
[00:06:27]  What would they have him do?
[00:06:30]  Yeah, Rinka was the only galley slave they had on a Swedish cruise.
[00:06:35]  It's me nodding my head.
[00:06:36]  I'm not making fun of you.
[00:06:37]  Wait, you just made it seem absurd that I would suggest that he would play on a cruise.
[00:06:41]  I know, but I'm thinking like he's playing in like a Hawaiian kind of band that plays at dinner time every night.
[00:06:46]  Oh, my God.
[00:06:48]  Which actually would have been a correct use of his talent.
[00:06:50]  That is not at all what I was trying to say.
[00:06:52]  Which don't exist.
[00:06:55]  But we're talking about Sweden.
[00:06:57]  We're talking about Sweden.
[00:06:58]  We're talking about Sweden, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:07:00]  And we are talking about Jeffrey Epstein and his Swedish connections.
[00:07:04]  Because listen, Jeffrey Epstein, as we've learned, as we talk about this episode a little bit, had a lot of connections with various European governments, but also with Euro royalties.
[00:07:16]  And this is actually something I was thinking.
[00:07:17]  I was like, if you're like in the Italian short-ass royal family, because famously, Vittorio had like, he was like five-foot.
[00:07:26]  He was, I think, legal dwarf, perhaps.
[00:07:30]  He was short, even for a time period when most people were pretty short.
[00:07:33]  And if you're like in like the, or like the bourbons, you got to be like, we don't have any Epstein connections yet.
[00:07:40]  Like, maybe people might get mad at us for all the other stuff or the Mussolini bullshit, but like, we're good on that.
[00:07:45]  Epstein only kind of stayed with like, frankly, the white royals, the British royal family, Norwegian royal family, the Swedish royal family.
[00:07:52]  That we know of.
[00:07:53]  That we know of.
[00:07:56]  Let's get Max V. Carlson on the phone.
[00:08:11]  What hundred true non-fans?
[00:08:14]  We are present in Jack and Gavel Goat.
[00:08:18]  Now we are studying in Cramforce with our special guest.
[00:08:26]  Oh, special guest.
[00:08:27]  Special guest, Max Carlson.
[00:08:30]  Max, welcome to program it.
[00:08:34]  Taxnella, the Külovomir.
[00:08:36]  Yeah, yeah, well, of course.
[00:08:38]  Of course.
[00:08:38]  But we should switch to English to make this a little bit easier for our audience to understand.
[00:08:44]  They are not all polyglots, even if they are all polyamorous, which will lead to an increase in STDs and unfortunately, guarantee that there is no future generations of Truanon listeners because many of you will go insane.
[00:08:57]  Like it's rumored Adolf Hitler with syphilis or perhaps Al Capone where your nose will fall off.
[00:09:03]  Max, welcome to the show.
[00:09:04]  This is Max Carlsson, investigative journalist with The Express, which is, of course, as we say in Swedish, Expressen.
[00:09:13]  And we are here to talk about a number of things related to Jeffrey Epstein's Swedish connections.
[00:09:23]  Thank you so much.
[00:09:24]  I'm really happy to be here.
[00:09:26]  So you've been looking into this.
[00:09:28]  A lot of this stuff, some of this stuff we've known for a little bit, but with the new document release that came out from the House committee and a big dump of all of his emails, a bunch of SVDs have showed up.
[00:09:46]  Can you walk us through a little bit of that?
[00:09:49]  Yeah, so for years, it seems that Epstein's had these kinds of Swedish connections to both famous individuals and rich people from Sweden.
[00:10:02]  And it seems that he had a special tooth for the Swedes, that he knew a lot of Swedes.
[00:10:09]  And there are a lot of Swedish people in the original leaked black book.
[00:10:13]  That's also how I got on this beat from the start.
[00:10:17]  I saw a lot of Swedish phone numbers and wanted to call them up and ask them how they knew old Jeff.
[00:10:24]  Wait, so you did?
[00:10:24]  Who'd you call?
[00:10:25]  I called neighbors.
[00:10:27]  I called elite Swedes in New York City and business leaders that Jeffrey invested, he invested money in their companies and so on.
[00:10:37]  There was also a few models that were Swedes as well, which of course rings a bell in connection with Epstein.
[00:10:45]  And there were a lot of diplomats.
[00:10:47]  There were a lot of like these kinds of so Sweden loves to be seen as a humanitarian power in the world.
[00:10:55]  We have a lot of famous diplomats and it seems that Epstein knew a lot of them.
[00:11:00]  Yeah, you know, it's funny.
[00:11:02]  I think I sent this to you yesterday, but he gets an email in 2007 from Lisa Svensson for the atforeignministry.se email address and say, I would be happy to see you in the house of Sweden in Washington.
[00:11:18]  Would you like to come to the inauguration of the Water and Environment April 11th?
[00:11:21]  I assume some sort of minister.
[00:11:24]  A cool dinner with ICE from Sweden, etc.
[00:11:26]  And then Jeffrey Epstein just replies with, Can I sleep over?
[00:11:31]  And I didn't realize that he was this close to actually like Sweden diplomats, like diplomats.
[00:11:35]  I mean, and this is also in the midst of the investigation in 2007 in Florida.
[00:11:39]  But I think the biggest sort of bombshell that has come out lately, I guess, would be his connections to Princess Sophia.
[00:11:48]  Now, as far as I understand, you guys have a monarchy.
[00:11:53]  However, it's also just descended from a French guy they just found at one point.
[00:11:58]  That's absolutely right.
[00:12:00]  So the monarchy in Sweden is much more of a symbol.
[00:12:05]  They still get money, though.
[00:12:06]  They're still incredibly rich and they get hundreds of millions of kroners from the Swedish state.
[00:12:12]  But they don't have any political power, even though the king is still like head of state officially in Sweden.
[00:12:19]  And he was actually, our king was actually cousin with the late queen of Britain, Queen Elizabeth.
[00:12:27]  They were actually cousins, as everyone in Europe is.
[00:12:33]  But yeah, so the bombshell story is that Epstein met Princess Sofia several times.
[00:12:41]  This was during her model and yoga teacher career in New York.
[00:12:46]  Wait, sorry.
[00:12:50]  Is she like the daughter of the king?
[00:12:52]  No, she married into the royal family.
[00:12:55]  And she was a beauty queen as well, but also a reality show contestant before this, before she found her way to the prince.
[00:13:04]  And there's actually an Epstein-connected story to that as well.
[00:13:08]  The one that takes credit for turning her into a princess or turning her at least into princess material is none other than, of course, close Epstein friend Barbru, which we'll be talking a lot about this episode.
[00:13:22]  So what, so I'm assuming, because unfortunately, I've not been focused on the Swedish stuff, although you and I have corresponded over the years about it.
[00:13:31]  The Princess Sophia stuff was not known until this recent release of emails.
[00:13:36]  It's true that it wasn't known that he had met Sofia.
[00:13:40]  I had suspicions.
[00:13:41]  So there has been stories about him being obsessed with Swedish royalty as well as Norwegian royalty.
[00:13:48]  And we know that he met the royal princess there, the crown princess met there.
[00:13:53]  And we also know that Princess Sofia was very, very close with this Epstein ally, this Swedish madame Barbro.
[00:14:03]  So there has been suspicions.
[00:14:05]  But the new thing is that she actually confirms it herself.
[00:14:08]  She says that she was invited to the island and her friends also say that they met with Epstein several times in New York in an office and they also went to a movie premiere and I don't know which one yet but it would be so Epstein.
[00:14:26]  It's got to be a Woody Allen movie.
[00:14:27]  Yeah.
[00:14:28]  Absolutely.
[00:14:29]  And so it seems that Epstein took the princess to the premiere.
[00:14:33]  Wow.
[00:14:33]  What has the reaction in Sweden been?
[00:14:36]  Hysterical, I would say.
[00:14:37]  This is the first time that a lot of the mainstream press has caught up with Epstein's Swedish connections.
[00:14:45]  There has been a lot of reporting from me and my colleagues and others throughout the years, but this is the first time we're actually seeing big momentum and soon, I believe, even political momentum behind this in Sweden.
[00:14:59]  There's a huge push to like people want more information and people want more stories about this as well.
[00:15:07]  So for the first time, I'm also feeling the heat from like the competition in this, which is a great feeling because this has been a lost story in Swedish media, even though the connections are so many and so real.
[00:15:20]  And that there are several Swedish victims of Epstein that have never had their stories told, that still are waiting for answers and that are not so lucky in that they have some kind of defenders.
[00:15:36]  In Sweden, there is no one.
[00:15:38]  So the girls that met Epstein in the Swedish girls that met Epstein are very much alone here in Sweden.
[00:15:45]  And that's what also we're trying to change with this reporting.
[00:15:48]  So wait, no, I want to talk about that for a second.
[00:15:51]  The Swedish victims of Epstein.
[00:15:53]  I am, except for one that you and I have talked about, I wasn't familiar with there being a bunch of them.
[00:15:57]  So fill me in a little what's going on there.
[00:16:00]  I can actually say that me and my colleagues have met girls throughout the years who was introduced to Epstein and that he actually preyed on.
[00:16:08]  And they are victims of his sex crimes as well.
[00:16:12]  A lot of them are truly afraid of speaking out.
[00:16:16]  One of the main reasons for that being that they in some way own a part of or their whole career to people they met during this time or even through Epstein and Barbaro.
[00:16:27]  So this goes deep and there are so many stories to tell.

=== Barbara's Ruthless Network (04:47) ===

[00:16:36]  So Barbara, this is the name we've been circling around a little bit here.
[00:16:40]  And we actually, Liz, I think we talked about Barbara like four years ago is probably the last time.
[00:16:46]  Who is Barbro Enbaum?
[00:16:48]  Barbara is truly a character.
[00:16:52]  She graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1967.
[00:16:57]  And right after that, she went to Wall Street.
[00:17:00]  Her ambition was to become the first successful female investor on Wall Street, trying to armbow her way up in this male-dominated space.
[00:17:13]  She was really ruthless in that ambition and climbed throughout investment banks, through investment firms, and also a lot of medical companies.
[00:17:23]  She's an early on like life science adapter, another thing she shares in common with Jeffrey Epstein, the interest for that.
[00:17:32]  And so she lived in both New York and Stockholm for years, for decades, and got to know him through these elite circles in New York.
[00:17:45]  And also was really good at getting investments from rich old guys.
[00:17:51]  And her tenure with Epstein was in play with that.
[00:17:57]  It was the same.
[00:17:58]  She was getting money from Epstein.
[00:17:59]  So Barbara was a ruthless, still is a ruthless person that tries to connect people, that tries to be a strong leader, that tries to and also has a social, political, somewhat feminist view of her mission to connect young girls with powerful men to make them more successful in business.
[00:18:27]  So she is famous for parties where she says that every girl has to wear a skirt and nothing on their legs, and then they're going to have champagne and mingle with older gentlemen.
[00:18:40]  These kinds of parties, she's been hosting these kinds of parties in Stockholm and New York for decades.
[00:18:47]  Has there been any kind of like renewed scrutiny of her since all this came out?
[00:18:53]  She actually lost a job on a board for the first time.
[00:18:57]  This is the first time she's ever met repercussions for her deep ties with Epstein throughout the years.
[00:19:03]  She was On a board for a gala for teachers in Sweden, where they give awards to like the teacher of the year and stuff.
[00:19:13]  And she was actually kicked from that board and they fully removed themselves from her.
[00:19:19]  And so right now she's feeling for the first time feeling heat for this.
[00:19:26]  And what has developed like throughout these years is that we found out that her whole shtick of these, like empowering these young women has much more been a racket to send young, pretty girls to powerful men like Epstein.
[00:19:43]  And also saying that girls has to do more to become successful.
[00:19:48]  And when pushing back, when these sometimes very young women have pushed back, she says, if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
[00:19:58]  Yeah, I mean, what's confusing to me, and listen, call me old-fashioned, right?
[00:20:03]  But what's confusing to me is her whole shtick is kind of like a proto-girl boss thing where she's, or like, yeah, I would say, I guess proto, because it doesn't have the same nuances as girl bossing.
[00:20:17]  But her whole thing was like, I can roll with the boys, but also has this weird sort of feminist aspect.
[00:20:24]  But I guess feminism in this case is like, I'm going to like basically do yacht parties and like semi-pimping in order to, I don't know, what, get girls jobs or maybe make some more connections for myself.
[00:20:38]  Yeah, so it has to do with getting the girls jobs and also like getting the like they have to be grateful to Barbara for that.
[00:20:47]  They have they have their like whole lives, they own their whole lives to her and all their career, but she's also getting funding for her own project.
[00:20:54]  She's getting funding for travel expenses, for this, and she gets a lot of media attention as well.
[00:21:04]  Just hosting this network of the network is called Barbara's Best and Brightest Beer Bia Beer, the Triple Bees.
[00:21:14]  And she's selling this as like an elite squad of highly professional and super sexy young women.

=== Barbara's Best and Brightest (08:55) ===

[00:21:23]  And she wants to be known for that.
[00:21:27]  She wants to be known for that.
[00:21:29]  This is her legacy.
[00:21:30]  She actually got an hour on this on Swedish national radio to talk about this in 2017, where she talked about how proud she was of her girls.
[00:21:42]  And then we see when the facade fell, when the dam broke, and we saw how she talked about Epstein and how he funded this whole network, she just said that she never knew anything.
[00:22:01]  And we know that's false.
[00:22:02]  We know that's bullshit.
[00:22:05]  One of the best examples of Epstein's money being at play here is that he paid for in full the award called Female Economist of the Year in Sweden.
[00:22:17]  So they trotted out this award as something to give to the academic overachievers, the super ones, the supernova economist at the Stockholm School of Economics, which is in itself an elite school, a super prestigious school.
[00:22:37]  And all of the funding comes from Epstein.
[00:22:39]  And Barbara always said, maintained that there's a jury selection, they choose over academic merits and so on.
[00:22:48]  And then we see how they are really chosen.
[00:22:51]  Barbara sends a picture of the girl to Jeffrey Epstein, which replies, yeah, she can come over for two days in New York.
[00:22:57]  I'll pay everything.
[00:22:59]  That's it.
[00:23:00]  That's the whole thing.
[00:23:02]  The whole thing was him having final say over who gets this award and then him being thanked as best male support by Barbro.
[00:23:12]  Well, and wait, sorry, he was also getting them flown over to him as well.
[00:23:17]  So to be able to win the award, they had to meet Mr. B, Mr. Billionaire, and that was Epstein.
[00:23:24]  God.
[00:23:25]  So he actually had groups of these girls over from the Stockholm School of Economics, sometimes as many as 15 at the same time, that had champagne with him in the Manhattan Manor and always with Barbara present at first.
[00:23:43]  But then they would come back and he would invite some of them back.
[00:23:46]  And that's when he also preyed on several of these girls.
[00:23:50]  So you've talked to women that he prayed on that were that were part of this.
[00:23:56]  Yes, I have.
[00:23:57]  And that think that Epstein destroyed their lives.
[00:24:01]  Wow.
[00:24:02]  And there's, and it's interesting because Barbara is sort of treated, it seems like, as kind of just like a colorful Swedish figure, like maybe a bit old-fashioned and eccentric.
[00:24:13]  And really, ladies and gentlemen, I mean, if you are anywhere now next to iPad right now, you got to iPad Barbaro Anbaum because she is a, she is an extraordinary looking woman.
[00:24:28]  I mean that in a not complimentary sense, just an objective sense.
[00:24:33]  And it's funny because I feel like she's sort of treated like this like creature a little bit like, oh, look at this sort of strange lady.
[00:24:39]  But like, I mean, really, it's difficult to suss out whether there's anything legitimate going on here at all, as opposed to the entire thing being sort of this like factory to send pretty and smart Swedish girls over to Jeffrey Epstein because one of the things, and we see this too from the Yahoo emails, I was looking at him last night.
[00:25:02]  You know, because he's talking to other people and like getting pictures of other girls sent to him by people.
[00:25:07]  And one of the things he complains about is someone's dumb.
[00:25:11]  You know, he doesn't like, which God knows what Jeffrey Epstein's metrics for dumb were, because except for people he was giving money to, there aren't a lot of sort of glowing reviews of his own intelligence.
[00:25:22]  And it's clear that he sort of, he wants girls with beauty and brains basically sent to him.
[00:25:30]  And then, I don't, you know, to abuse them.
[00:25:34]  Is there like, do you think that there's going to be like a criminal investigation over it?
[00:25:38]  Because one thing, like, there was some, I mean, there was, there was some blowback on college campuses for like Epstein's involvement with like, for instance, Joy Ito at MIT Media Lab.
[00:25:47]  Obviously, we just saw the great scholar and sage, Hilarious Summers, gracefully exit from Harvard.
[00:25:56]  Is the Sweden School for Economics like facing any blowback from this?
[00:25:59]  Because as far as I know, I think actually from your reporting, it was Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:26:04]  He was listed as the donor and they changed it to Mr. B.
[00:26:06]  No, after the arrest in 2008.
[00:26:09]  So they knew this guy was a sex criminal.
[00:26:12]  They sought to hide that fact.
[00:26:13]  And that's like very similar to basically what Joy Ito was doing with hiding where the money was coming from after Jeffrey Epstein's reputation took a hit.
[00:26:22]  So the Stockholm School of Economics took in Epstein's money through Barbaro up until 2017.
[00:26:29]  So this is, of course, we know that this is for such a long time, even after he was arrested and had his first sweetheart deal and ordain in Florida.
[00:26:44]  So the Stockholm School of Economics is feeling some heat, but they're trying to pin it all on Barbara.
[00:26:49]  They're trying to say, we didn't know.
[00:26:51]  We didn't meet him.
[00:26:53]  She ran it all.
[00:26:56]  And that's not entirely true.
[00:26:58]  Barbara had her own office at the school and the Stockholm School of Economics have never been transparent with what they knew, how the money even got there.
[00:27:08]  Was it through like some kind of slush fund or where was the money sent and how it got to Handels to the Stockholm School of Economics called Handels?
[00:27:18]  They are not transparent with what they know and they're trying to pin it on this crazy lady, Barbaro, instead of taking full responsibility.
[00:27:26]  They have actually never formally apologized for even taking his money.
[00:27:31]  They've said that they're sorry if someone was hurt.
[00:27:34]  And when I reported for the first time that we've met Swedish survivors of Epstein's abuse, they put out a very shallow statement, but not in any way taking full responsibility for it.
[00:27:50]  And this is, I would say that this also has to do with Barbaro never being properly confronted with this and never facing truly the heat from us and from politicians and from the police as well.
[00:28:06]  There's no Swedish criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:28:09]  Why do you think they stopped in 2017?
[00:28:12]  It was going so well for them for so long.
[00:28:14]  Truly.
[00:28:15]  So they actually got a question first from Reuters in 2015, and that's when the new headmaster from the Stockholm School of Economics felt some alarm going off in his head.
[00:28:26]  So they tried to put the Female Economist of the Year award and BABB and network, tried to put some distance between them, the school and the network, but they still wanted to have the award and they still were trying to investigate who Epstein was at this time.
[00:28:48]  It wasn't until a Swedish paper in 2017 asked the same questions that Reuter asked two years earlier that they finally put it on ice and stopped the whole thing.
[00:29:00]  Right now it says on the website for that award that it has technical difficulties and it's been that's been the case for years.
[00:29:09]  And yeah, right now there's also like right now I believe there's some kind of panic at the Stockholm School of Economics.
[00:29:15]  They just put out a new press release yesterday about the new info and the new stories that me and my colleagues have published about this, about the extent of Barbara's and Epstein's relationship going even further.
[00:29:30]  She writes to him when the criminal investigation is ongoing in Florida and sends love.
[00:29:39]  And she sends emails where she says, now there's a lot of young girls in queue enjoying BABB and soon you will meet them and all of us BABB girls can attest to your character.
[00:29:50]  And she says she just praises him endlessly throughout the years, all up until 2017, and I'm sure they had, I'm sure they talked even after that, even though we don't have those emails right now.
[00:30:06]  I'm curious.
[00:30:07]  You mentioned that she was really interested in I don't know how you put it life sciences, life extension kind of like some I'm assuming genetic biotech, all of that kind of stuff that we know.

=== Barbara's Testimony (15:11) ===

[00:30:19]  Jeffrey was, of course, himself.
[00:30:21]  He thought himself quite, quite intelligent with all of that, although I think his correspondence leaves some, you know, we've got some questions there about what actually he did understand, about just basic science, can you?
[00:30:39]  I'm curious because I do think there is this kind of?
[00:30:45]  You know, people think of Sweden and there's a kind of eugenic history there a little bit, You know, people often praise people who are very into, let's say, eugenics and master race ideas often praise the Sveeds for their superior genetics.
[00:31:07]  And I'm curious about what is going on with that relationship between her and Epstein.
[00:31:12]  Yeah, so Swedish eugenics has a long history here.
[00:31:17]  We actually had a state center for eugenics that inspired Nazi Germany.
[00:31:23]  So we have that going for us in history as well.
[00:31:28]  And so Barbara had a side venture.
[00:31:30]  She was not just sending girls to meet Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:31:35]  She actually ran a yearly conference, a top-level yearly conference called the Swedish American Life Science Summit, SALS.
[00:31:44]  And she invited top politicians, top business leaders within this.
[00:31:51]  They also had an after-party every year where the girls met these kinds of men on boats in Stockholm.
[00:31:58]  And Jeffrey Epstein actually went to one of these conferences in Stockholm, which is a bombshell revelation in that we only know of a handful times where he actually went here and spent time in Sweden.
[00:32:15]  And so he was very interested in investing in that as well.
[00:32:22]  And he got the invitation list beforehand by Barbara every year so that Epstein knew if there was someone he wanted to meet at those conferences as well.
[00:32:36]  I'm curious, because I know that you've spoken with Barbara before.
[00:32:41]  I believe it was you who got the quote where she's like, ah, what Epstein wasn't doing that wasn't trafficking.
[00:32:48]  You seem to have, you know, not to read too much into it.
[00:32:51]  Obviously, you Northern Europeans are very famously taciturn and emotionless, but it seems like you may not have the fondest feelings towards Barbara after your conversations.
[00:33:01]  What did she say that makes you feel that way?
[00:33:04]  Well, for me, the most important thing is, of course, I want her answers about this whole thing.
[00:33:12]  I want her to not just say that she doesn't remember, I want her to be able to explain how this whole operation came about and also to face the consequences when there are Swedish victims.
[00:33:28]  When she curated girls in this manner for Jeffrey Epstein, there has to I feel that there has there's a responsibility on me as a reporter to ask her about that.
[00:33:42]  And if I don't get answers, I will keep looking for them and I'll keep trying to get them from her.
[00:33:49]  I've spoken to Barbara many times throughout the years.
[00:33:51]  And as you said, she doesn't see it as trafficking if a young girl is having champagne on a private jet.
[00:34:00]  But it's also that she's downplaying these experiences of the girls that met Epstein.
[00:34:06]  And she's not taking it seriously enough.
[00:34:08]  Yeah, I mean, there's a quote where she's like, yeah, it's not like they were bonked on the head and like taken to a brothel in the Bronx or whatever.
[00:34:17]  Yeah, she literally says it's not that they were drugged and brought in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a brothel.
[00:34:26]  Yeah.
[00:34:26]  That's, of course, one way of looking at it.
[00:34:28]  But we know that every single time she's actually answered questions about her relationship with Epstein, some of those answers have been lies.
[00:34:38]  Before these emails got out, she said, oh, I didn't know him that well.
[00:34:43]  When the emails came out, she says, well, I knew him, but I didn't know anything about the crimes.
[00:34:47]  When the emails show that she knew about the crimes and even tried to say that they were political accusations against Epstein, she's trying to say, well, nobody got harmed.
[00:34:57]  And when the girls say, well, we did, and there are several of them that say we actually got harmed, she says that they're just agitators and that they're making it up.
[00:35:09]  Do you think that there will be any fallout for her in this?
[00:35:12]  I mean, like, what's her place in Swedish society right now?
[00:35:15]  Like, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, this sort of was not picked up on by a lot of mainstream Swedish media until quite recently.
[00:35:23]  You know, it's hard for me as a foreigner to really judge what her place is in society.
[00:35:28]  Like, I can't tell if she's like sort of seen as an eccentric sort of rich person, but it does seem like she's fairly well connected.
[00:35:35]  And certainly that some of her triple B's are well connected.
[00:35:38]  And with the Princess Sophia connection, you know, you mentioned that they were maybe she, she was Princess Sophia?
[00:35:47]  Yeah, so they were very close, Barbara and Princess Sopia.
[00:35:50]  And Barbara and Sophia has described their relationship as a mentorship, where Barbara turned this reality contestant underwear model into a princess.
[00:36:06]  And we know for a fact that Sophia was a part of Baby B as well for many years.
[00:36:13]  We don't know if it was Barbara who introduced them, but it seems like it from these emails.
[00:36:21]  Well, we'd be remiss not to talk about another Swedish model who has a deep connection to Jeffrey Epstein, a longtime fixture of this show and, you know, appeared at Ghelane's trial.
[00:36:36]  And really, I would say was in terms of adults at least, next to Ghelane, actually probably above Ghulane in some ways, the love of Jeffrey Epstein's life.
[00:36:47]  And that would be Eva Dubin, who is a, of course, Swedish model now married to Glenn Dubin.
[00:36:55]  God knows how that marriage is going.
[00:36:58]  And as we found out from a recent release, Liz, I might be mistaken here, but didn't it kind of seem like Epstein was maybe too timing on Ghelane with Eva?
[00:37:09]  Yeah, I mean, it seemed like, are you talking about from her testimony?
[00:37:13]  From her testimony, from some of the emails, but her conversation with Todd Blanche.
[00:37:19]  Yeah.
[00:37:20]  Yeah.
[00:37:21]  Oh, yeah, that's what it was.
[00:37:21]  It was Ghelane's cover with Todd.
[00:37:24]  She was talking to Todd Blanche, and she kind of painted it as like he kept going back to Eva while she, you know, they were kind of maybe trying to figure, or she was trying to kind of maybe figure something out with Jeffrey.
[00:37:39]  She kind of painted it a bit one-sided.
[00:37:41]  So first of all, crazy you found that picture of Jeffrey Epstein at Eurovision.
[00:37:46]  Yeah, so this is the first time that we actually know of a time where he was in Sweden.
[00:37:53]  So this is such a crazy story.
[00:37:56]  Eva was the host of the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest, the Swedish version of it, not the Eurovision, but the Swedish branch of it.
[00:38:07]  Like the trials before you get to full Eurovision?
[00:38:11]  Exactly.
[00:38:12]  And so all of the countries have their own.
[00:38:15]  And in Sweden, it's called Melodie Festivalen, the Festival of Melodies.
[00:38:22]  And so she hosted that in Malmö in southern Sweden in 1985.
[00:38:29]  And when I was researching her and her connections to Jeffrey Epstein, I was at an archive watching this old TV broadcast of the show.
[00:38:41]  And the camera pans over a disco floor, like some people dancing and there's music in the background.
[00:38:50]  We see a few Swedish celebrities, household names in Sweden.
[00:38:55]  And in between them is just Jeffrey Epstein sitting there, just listening to the music, tapping his hand on his leg, trying to feel the rhythm of it.
[00:39:06]  And I can't believe it when I see it.
[00:39:09]  And it's just a few frames.
[00:39:10]  It's just for a few seconds that he's there.
[00:39:14]  But that means that he heard a few classic Eurovision Swedish bangers as well.
[00:39:21]  I'm going to send you the name of the song that won, if you wanted to play it, because you'll know that he heard it there.
[00:39:30]  God, can I tell you?
[00:39:31]  It really is like pedophile Forskamp.
[00:39:34]  Yeah.
[00:39:35]  Or even an even more pedophile Zelig.
[00:39:41]  It's fascinating because they got together in something like 1981, right?
[00:39:45]  1982.
[00:39:46]  And they were, it's a little unclear exactly when the relationship ended, but like lasted maybe almost a decade, like to 1990, 1991.
[00:39:58]  You sent me yesterday a Swedish tabloid article, which I was unable to read because of the language being Swedish, but that says that they were at one point engaged to be married, which I would, frankly, 10 years, I would hope so.
[00:40:16]  But I never was really unable to understand exactly what happened there with the ending of their marriage.
[00:40:22]  So this is also very interesting because there is a lot of Swedish tabloid coverage of Eva.
[00:40:31]  At this time, she wasn't Dubin yet.
[00:40:33]  She was Eva Anderschon.
[00:40:35]  And her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:40:38]  So she won the Miss Sweden Award in 1980.
[00:40:41]  And that's when she flew to New York.
[00:40:45]  And the story goes that she had a common friend with Epstein who introduced them over tea.
[00:40:53]  So it might have been a British person, but they were introduced over tea.
[00:40:57]  And Epstein became incredibly fond of her.
[00:41:00]  And they started a relationship soon after that.
[00:41:03]  He paid for her medical school when she was trained to become a surgeon.
[00:41:11]  And she studied both in Stockholm and in the US.
[00:41:16]  And when she studied in Stockholm, there are several pieces where she describes her first boyfriend, Jeff, that it was so hard meeting him only every third weeks and that she wanted him to come over the summer to spend the summer in Sweden.
[00:41:30]  And then she starts talking about her fiancé, Jeff.
[00:41:33]  And the article I sent you describes an interview with her dad, Eva's dad, who is so happy about them finally being engaged and that he's looking forward to the wedding.
[00:41:47]  And he describes them as truly deeply in love during this period of time.
[00:41:53]  And It seems that they held on to very close feelings even almost up until Epstein's death in 2019.
[00:42:04]  Through these recent emails, we also found out their nicknames for each other.
[00:42:08]  Iava's nickname for Jeff was Turtle.
[00:42:12]  And Jeffrey Epstein's nickname for Iava was El Skling, which in Swedish means lover or honey.
[00:42:20]  Interesting.
[00:42:22]  Yeah, it's their relationship to me is so weird because, you know, even after they break up, Epstein remains quite close to Eva and her future husband and then eventual husband, Glenn Dubin, who's like a bit hedge fund guy who came actually recently out of retirement, I believe, to donate to Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral campaign here.
[00:42:48]  And, you know, I don't, listen, I'm an open-minded, I'm probably one of the most open-minded people on earth.
[00:42:54]  In fact, I might be the most open-minded person in human history.
[00:42:58]  Maybe even more open-minded, they said, than God.
[00:43:01]  However, I do find it odd that like, hey, this guy that I was with for 10 years that like paid for everything and, you know, you know, put me through school and made me become a surgeon, he's actually just still going to be our like really good friend.
[00:43:17]  And in fact, there was some strange sort of report.
[00:43:21]  I think it might have been in the Daily Beast.
[00:43:23]  Might be wrong on this, that Epstein was going to be the godfather to one of the kids.
[00:43:28]  That there was even rumors that he might marry one of the kids for some sort of financial arrangement.
[00:43:34]  I mean, it's just, it's a strange thing for the ex-boy.
[00:43:37]  I'm not one of those people who's like, you got to stop talking to your ex-boyfriend or whatever all the time, but this is a little bit of a different situation.
[00:43:44]  I can actually confirm that he was the godfather of Selena, the daughter of Glenn and Eva.
[00:43:50]  There are Swedish reports, reports in Swedish about that, and that I've been able to confirm as well, speaking to Swedish people in New York and describing Jeffrey Epstein's very close relationship to the Dubin family all throughout the years.
[00:44:08]  He went to parties there.
[00:44:10]  He arranged dinners at their house when he had different network dinners.
[00:44:16]  And his social life and Eva Dubin's social life were at times hard to tell apart.
[00:44:25]  Yeah, what did you learn from talking to people that knew them?
[00:44:27]  Like, I mean, their relationship to me has always struck me as one that maybe did not end in its physicality necessarily when they both went their separate ways with other partners.
[00:44:38]  And certainly from Ghillain's interview, there are highly suggestions of that.
[00:44:43]  And, you know, something that has always sort of stuck in my craw is the testimony from Epstein's butler, who when he was speaking to, I believe it was the Palm Beach Police Department, although maybe it was, he gave a testimony in 2007, I think,
[00:45:00]  that he met a young girl that was traveling with the Dubins, who was sitting, I believe, in a kitchen in Palm Beach and seemed very sort of out of sorts and afraid and sort of shaking.
[00:45:15]  And she claimed that she'd just been to the island and her passport had been taken from her.
[00:45:20]  So this is a story that has been, I've been focusing on this story for years, trying to find out who this girl was and if she even existed.

=== Swedish Girls and Global Scouting (12:14) ===

[00:45:31]  And now we're following the trail that, so we know that the Dubin family had Swedish nannies because they wanted the kids to learn Swedish properly.
[00:45:43]  The Dubin family kids spent time in Sweden during their summers.
[00:45:48]  They even still own property in Sweden, very beautiful beach properties in Sweden.
[00:45:56]  And so what we're hearing and what we're following now is that this girl that is described could be one of those nannies.
[00:46:05]  It could be one of those Swedish girls that worked very, very closely with the Dubin family and that was hired to do a job and then met a totally different one in reality as well.
[00:46:21]  And we know that there are people out there that still has a lot of info that is very important, of course.
[00:46:30]  And me and my colleagues are trying to get a hold of it.
[00:46:33]  But that is both the working theory and what we're seeing right now.
[00:46:38]  When trying to see this bigger puzzle with a million pieces, some of the pieces are in Swedish.
[00:46:45]  And that's where I think me and my colleagues are trying to do the job of getting them to fit in the bigger picture and the American reporting as well.
[00:46:54]  And so here, of course, the language barrier plays a huge role because there is so many under-reported stories about Epstein that explains the bigger picture that are in Swedish.
[00:47:04]  So we're trying to translate and trying to be some kind of conduit for this, but there is still so much about it.
[00:47:14]  And he met so many Swedish girls.
[00:47:16]  Epstein met so many Swedish girls.
[00:47:19]  Yeah, I mean, one thing that I thought was interesting was that Lisa Svenson email that I mentioned earlier.
[00:47:25]  I mean, what was his relationship with Swedish diplomats or with the Swedish government?
[00:47:30]  Because as we know, like, I mean, something we've gained a lot of insight from in recent months is actually how extensive Epstein's network in Europe was.
[00:47:40]  We had somewhat of an idea, mostly, however, from like leaked schedules and things like that.
[00:47:46]  I mean, Epstein had so closely been associated with the Clinton Global Initiative and like, you know, these sort of American-based liberal, you know, sort of internationalist NGOs or whatever.
[00:47:59]  But now, especially with a lot of the Norwegian stuff and some of his connections in Austria, just Germany, all over the country, or excuse me, all over the continent.
[00:48:10]  You know, was he up to the same thing in Sweden?
[00:48:14]  It seems that he was.
[00:48:15]  And he, Lisa is a case of actually a Bia Bibia girl that he met through Barbro.
[00:48:24]  So she's another one of, she's another connection to Bebe Bia and Barbara.
[00:48:28]  She's another Barbro girl?
[00:48:30]  She is.
[00:48:31]  She was for many years a proud member of Bebe Bia.
[00:48:36]  She's another one of them.
[00:48:37]  And he met, so he kept on, he kept meeting several of these women throughout the years as well, separate from Barbro, like just having direct conversations and booking trips and travels for them.
[00:48:51]  And also like nights where they could, if a Swedish girl in BBB wanted to stay in New York for a few weeks or something, he would arrange an apartment on 66th Street.
[00:49:06]  In the apartment complex there.
[00:49:08]  He would also arrange visas and help out with model visas for women as well.
[00:49:17]  And his diplomatic ties in Sweden is still something that is a bit in the dark.
[00:49:24]  There are stories about him actually traveling to Norway with Bill Clinton, but then driving over the border into Sweden during the start of the millennia.
[00:49:35]  And he also knew a lot of diplomats, Swedish diplomats in New York.
[00:49:42]  He knew the sons of everyone and partied with like sons of famous Swedish diplomats.
[00:49:49]  And it seems that he had an extensive network even there.
[00:49:52]  Interesting.
[00:49:53]  Yeah.
[00:49:54]  I mean, has there, but what is, what does, what does Lisa Svensson do now?
[00:49:58]  She's actually still in the diplomatic core.
[00:50:01]  And now she has another assignment, but she was actually in Africa for a few years.
[00:50:08]  And she was Sweden's official sea ambassador for a few years, where she actually got Ghillene on a UN panel.
[00:50:18]  Oh, of course.
[00:50:20]  Ghelane's deep interests in the sea.
[00:50:24]  It is, you know.
[00:50:24]  The Terra Mar project.
[00:50:26]  Yes.
[00:50:26]  It is.
[00:50:27]  Yeah.
[00:50:28]  Ghillaine's sort of her Hemingway turn after Epstein left her.
[00:50:32]  She had no one to turn to but the vastness of the sea.
[00:50:36]  You know, there's an interesting tidbit, too, that, you know, one thing that has just really, I've been curious about for years is the rumors of Kimball Musk dating a girl that lived at the East 66th Street apartments that was possibly introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein, but who lived in one of Jeffrey Epstein's apartments there.
[00:50:55]  So an associate of his.
[00:50:58]  And there is a business insider article that says that Selena Dubin was briefly named as a beneficiary of the same trust as the woman who dated Kimball Musk.
[00:51:10]  And that comes from an article talking about how, yeah, Epstein had briefly considered marrying Selena Dubin so she could inherit his money.
[00:51:19]  And I'm always, I wonder, I just wonder if Kimball maybe dated a Swedish woman that was there.
[00:51:25]  That could absolutely be the case.
[00:51:28]  And I know of, we're talking over 20 different Swedish women that throughout the years have stayed at 66th Street, and some of them for a few weeks, some of them lived there longer.
[00:51:40]  There was even, I've spoken with several of them.
[00:51:46]  It seems that Epstein also had an interest in Swedish culture.
[00:51:54]  This is a weird tidbit, but he actually had a lot of Swedish songs on his Spotify playlists, which are like Swedish pop songs.
[00:52:02]  And it has to be someone that had introduced him to these bands that no one outside of Sweden knows about.
[00:52:09]  But he has a lot of dance pop and also Eurovision songs and very weird Swedish bangers on there with Swedish titles that are very hard to pronounce for anyone that's not Swedish.
[00:52:26]  It also seems that some of them are children's songs or kids' songs in Swedish, which could also be because he knew at least three kids that spoke Swedish, the Dubin kids.
[00:52:38]  Right.
[00:52:39]  He got that first taste of Eurovision and then couldn't, you know, once you get that hit, the Swedish.
[00:52:47]  I think I'm about to say the most unverified rumor-ass thing ever, but I think one of the Dubin's kids married like Kissinger granddaughter or something or Christinger grandson.
[00:53:05]  There's like some, I'm like, it's like a memory from a few years ago.
[00:53:08]  That's, we probably shouldn't even put that in, but why not?
[00:53:11]  Why not?
[00:53:12]  There is some kind of, I don't know, maybe it wasn't a Dubin kid, so I might just be misremembering.
[00:53:15]  I just remember someone told me about a nuptial a few years ago that was very striking and involved two the children of two Epstein associates.
[00:53:24]  But I'm just repeating totally unverified rumors that I'm not even remembering correctly, but why not?
[00:53:29]  Whatever.
[00:53:29]  It's a podcast.
[00:53:30]  We're not journalists here.
[00:53:32]  But just to put it in context as well, like the Barbara relationship stuff and the scouting and her scouting, that it's so similar to when Ghelane's scouting was described in Florida when she went around shopping malls and high school parking lots looking for girls of Epstein's type.
[00:53:53]  So there are emails that we can see now where Barbara describes going around Sweden and seeing a girl that looks like someone that's Jeff's type and just immediately writing him an email and saying, oh, I met this beautiful girl in a church in Gotland.
[00:54:10]  I went to Gothenburg and I saw this girl and I think you should talk.
[00:54:14]  I can send the girl if you just pay for the ticket and you can meet her in Paris if you don't want him to come to New York.
[00:54:23]  So that's also a thing where a lot of the Swedish girls met him halfway in the Paris apartment.
[00:54:28]  So this is not just Barbara hanging around with like the rich powerful guy she wanted money from.
[00:54:34]  She absolutely participated in the scouting of girls that were young in his type from Sweden.
[00:54:42]  I mean, yeah, the emails we get kind of like, especially this like latest Yahoo release.
[00:54:48]  I mean, we get like a clear picture of how people, I mean, not from everyone, because the Jean-Luc Brunel stuff is still sort of, they clearly had some other methods of communication there too that are sort of hinted at in some of their communications in the leaked emails.
[00:55:01]  But with Barbara, it seems very similar.
[00:55:03]  There's all these sort of other names that are in there.
[00:55:06]  Some of them are sort of Cyrillic female names that are just sending him pictures of women and being like, do you like?
[00:55:13]  Or like, would you like to meet her?
[00:55:14]  Or like, we can send her out to you.
[00:55:17]  And sort of what's striking to me is like, it seems very clear that Barbara was just feeding young Swedish women to probably one of the most notorious sort of sex criminals of the 21st century.
[00:55:30]  And I'm just curious, do you think that there will be some sort of official inquest or something like that there?
[00:55:36]  I mean, this is obviously, as you can see, like transformed into quite a big subject in the US.
[00:55:40]  And obviously, that's because it's the way the political winds are blowing.
[00:55:45]  And I'm curious if you can see anything else like that happening in Sweden.
[00:55:50]  I think that as always, when there's a wind in the US, it's at least a breeze here.
[00:55:57]  We're a few years behind.
[00:55:59]  We're lagging a few years behind in our politics and stuff, and the culture.
[00:56:04]  But almost everything that's happening in the US happens in Sweden two years later.
[00:56:10]  So I hope that we can see a bit more of that as well here with the political and social pressure about this.
[00:56:18]  Barbara also states something that I think will be important for the ongoing investigation of me and my colleagues.
[00:56:25]  And that's she actually states that Epstein had a mission to find a perfect Swedish girl.
[00:56:31]  She describes several girls in the manner of saying like, well, maybe she's not the Swedish girl you're looking for.
[00:56:41]  Maybe it's not this kind.
[00:56:43]  Maybe she's not perfect.
[00:56:44]  So it seems that Epstein had a request list.
[00:56:49]  He had something that he really, really wanted from a Swedish girl and that Barbara was trying to get him.
[00:56:55]  I hope that we'll see an increase in pressure about this.
[00:56:59]  We absolutely are in the Swedish media.
[00:57:02]  And I also hope that the US media covering this are reading at least like Google translating Swedish stories about this because there is a lot of details that are helpful to understand the broader picture as well.
[00:57:22]  And since his crimes were like borderless and global, I think the investigation also has to be.
[00:57:32]  Well, Max, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:57:36]  Our Swedish correspondent, Max V. Carlson.
[00:57:41]  I just, I have some questions, though.

=== Sweden's AI Ascendancy (03:55) ===

[00:57:45]  Just go ahead.
[00:57:46]  We've talked about Epstein.
[00:57:48]  What's up with Sweden?
[00:57:51]  Like, where's your place?
[00:57:52]  I mean, obviously, I know what your place physically is in between, you know, Finland and Norway.
[00:57:58]  But, like, where's your place really?
[00:57:59]  Like, there?
[00:58:00]  Because Norway, like, you know, you mentioned the diplomatic thing.
[00:58:03]  And obviously, you guys had Palma.
[00:58:06]  But Norway really, I mean, they had the Oslo Accords.
[00:58:11]  Finland, not so diplomatic, right?
[00:58:13]  Maybe a little less diplomatic.
[00:58:16]  But like, what is Sweden's place in the world right now?
[00:58:21]  Sweden is, in many ways, an odd country.
[00:58:23]  It's the third largest EU country, just looking at the borders, but we're not that many people.
[00:58:31]  Sweden is trying to be this humanitarian superpower still.
[00:58:38]  But right now, I would say that politics-wise, we're seeing the same as a lot of Western countries with the resurgence of the far right.
[00:58:48]  We're also seeing like Stockholm trying to be a better startup city than San Francisco, like the unicorn city, number one.
[00:58:58]  Europeans can't stop saying startup city.
[00:59:01]  True.
[00:59:01]  Ms. Macron's huge thing about Paris.
[00:59:04]  And I would also say one of the most interesting developments that I've also been covering is the incredible growth in the defense sector.
[00:59:15]  So one of the best examples of this is, of course, the Spotify founder, Daniel Eck, who left Spotify actually to be able to full time be at his defense company, Helsing AI.
[00:59:33]  What?
[00:59:34]  Oh, that's a crazy name.
[00:59:35]  Helsing AI?
[00:59:37]  Helsing AI so Helsing AI we're vampires only It's actually an AI defense company that wants to be the liberal version of Palantir.
[00:59:49]  They sell products that make dumb weapons smart, like sensors and stuff.
[00:59:55]  And right now they're churning out thousands of drones used in the Ukraine war.
[01:00:03]  So right now they are the second, Helsing AI is the second largest AI company in Europe right now and still growing with these licenses with NATO countries, which of course Sweden joined NATO last year.
[01:00:17]  Congratulations.
[01:00:18]  Thanks a lot.
[01:00:19]  And so that is one of the most important, also like crazy developments in such a short period of time.
[01:00:31]  That's crazy.
[01:00:32]  I didn't realize that because I know who the, I mean, I'm going to mispronounce his name so badly that you'll end the call, so I'm just not even going to say it.
[01:00:39]  But the Spotify founder, obviously he has been like kind of one of the more like visible Euro tech founder guys out there.
[01:00:48]  And, you know, Spotify is, well, we all know about Spotify, not a great company.
[01:00:54]  But I didn't realize that he had stepped back from that in order to make FPV drones, I guess, or whatever the fuck they're making.
[01:01:03]  Every single person pivoting from platforms to hard tech.
[01:01:06]  Exactly.
[01:01:06]  And not only hard tech, defense tech.
[01:01:09]  Yeah.
[01:01:09]  And also they're describing that their AI already can on its own killer target and they don't want to cross that line yet, but they still say very clearly that they're the policy of having a human in loop has to be evaluated, going forward.
[01:01:30]  So they they already say that they have the, the equipment to to be able to take out a target um just purely with with an AI system and a drone.

=== Defense Tech Pivot (02:58) ===

[01:01:40]  Yeah that's, that's that.
[01:01:41]  That's like.
[01:01:42]  I feel like the next big thing coming is they want to take humans out of the kill chain.
[01:01:46]  Yeah um, everyone's rearming.
[01:01:49]  Yeah, they truly are, and that.
[01:01:50]  So now, and we're the.
[01:01:52]  The controversial or like paradoxical thing in Sweden is that that's also helping, like the state pension funds, of course.
[01:02:00]  So uh no, it's.
[01:02:01]  That's what's.
[01:02:01]  Keeping the U.s economy afloat right now is all the only investment is in AI and a lot of that is in defense tech.
[01:02:09]  Obviously it's everywhere.
[01:02:11]  It's a huge war machine that has been turned on in almost every single country.
[01:02:16]  It truly is, and it's like the um.
[01:02:18]  Even a lot of the um, like metal worker unions are are also very pro this in in Sweden.
[01:02:25]  There, because they are, they're seeing a massive rise in in in job and like fair employment for for their members as well.
[01:02:33]  So that's that's also very Swedish in in The way that there there's like a collective gain on um, even like political trends that can be destructive in in a lot of other ways.
[01:02:47]  Um, that's.
[01:02:49]  It's good that, like northern Europe, we you've got like peptides and killer robots and that's just can be the future, and also like the, the we right now we're taking over the like U.s.
[01:03:00]  With these crappy modern payday loans of Klarna.
[01:03:03]  Oh yeah, that's I.
[01:03:05]  I mean, i'm just pronouncing it wrong, but if you say in that accent yes, I can tell it's from you.
[01:03:11]  You guys did Klarna.
[01:03:13]  I'm so sorry we did yes uh, we did.
[01:03:15]  You guys even need Klarna.
[01:03:16]  I always think of everybody in those countries as like wearing like a 400 sweater.
[01:03:22]  They, they actually um, they've been around in Sweden for a long time and been responsible for uh, a huge gain in like the uh, um in the debt, like just commercial debt or like just people buying stuff they don't have the money for.
[01:03:38]  Uh, truly like an app-based payday loan of the old years.
[01:03:42]  But but now um, and they're also um, they just have these super big offices in Stockholm and like thousands of employees and now they want to take over the Us uh, and in Sweden they're describing it as nothing of short of a success, like The?
[01:03:59]  U was launched.
[01:03:59]  But we're also seeing that that same damage, where people use money they don't have or spend money that we have.
[01:04:06]  Oh yeah it's.
[01:04:07]  Uh, we're used to that, though.
[01:04:08]  Yeah, I mean that's that's that's, but did you have an app for it?
[01:04:13]  No, the amplification of it is, yeah, you used to have to go to like one of the payday loan places that are only in bad neighborhoods.
[01:04:19]  Um, I can't wait for the designer or the head of Klarna to finally pivot to defense tech.
[01:04:24]  You know, once he's done with the platform Christ, I'll say this.
[01:04:28]  Any potential Swedish Chavezes out there listening, when you take over the country, you have to re-nationalize Bofors and then turn those guns around.

=== Vampire Allergies and Sunlight (07:58) ===

[01:04:39]  Norway sitting down, I guarantee the Norwegian-Swedish border is a soft border.
[01:04:45]  Just flow over that motherfucker.
[01:04:47]  And then after that, once you've got Norway under control, you got to hit Finland because there should just be one country up there.
[01:04:55]  But this is something that I've always said.
[01:04:57]  The Finns will somehow go to the Russians.
[01:04:59]  Yeah.
[01:04:59]  Or no, the Finns will like, like, I could see it becoming like a weird, they could just join the Turkic belt.
[01:05:07]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:05:07]  Like, it's like the Finns and whichever one of the Baltics are also kind of like Turkic descended.
[01:05:12]  Because there's one Baltic company.
[01:05:14]  But only this, Max.
[01:05:16]  Of the three Baltic countries, isn't one of them, they're like, you're not really Baltic?
[01:05:23]  They are, and they're fighting about this all the time.
[01:05:27]  They really are.
[01:05:29]  I was supposed to say that the thought about a bigger northern country or like at least an alliance is both the line of like EU or northern federalists where they want to see like the Sweden, Norway and Finland and Denmark in an alliance against like France and Germany's might and power in the EU.
[01:05:49]  But it's also the line of the most like far-right Nordic resistance movement, the last militant Nazis of Sweden.
[01:05:58]  So they were called the Swedish resistance movement before, but they are now called the Nordic resistance movement.
[01:06:05]  And they were actually terror designated by Biden.
[01:06:10]  And that made a huge difference in Sweden because all of their bank accounts were turned off just like by a switch.
[01:06:17]  I think that they've got Klarna.
[01:06:18]  Really, truly.
[01:06:20]  And so right now they're scrambling.
[01:06:23]  But we also have that.
[01:06:23]  Yeah, so the idea of a bigger northern is both the EU Federalists and with the horseshoe, also the Nazis.
[01:06:31]  Okay, well, then fine.
[01:06:33]  Then my actual solution is this.
[01:06:35]  You guys find the best place because no disrespect.
[01:06:38]  I hate cold weather.
[01:06:39]  I love California, even though me and Liz are from the part of California where actually there isn't hot weather.
[01:06:44]  But there's not that cold over there.
[01:06:45]  There is now, though.
[01:06:46]  There is now.
[01:06:47]  And you're right.
[01:06:48]  There is now.
[01:06:49]  But I get, it makes me chilly when it's cold out.
[01:06:53]  And when it gets dark, I get sleepy too early.
[01:06:57]  And thus, accessing my dreams becomes more difficult.
[01:07:02]  But maybe my solution is this.
[01:07:06]  Massive transfer.
[01:07:07]  Like find the most hospitable places within those three sort of wintry places and move everybody from every Nordic country there.
[01:07:18]  And then you'll have like a regular population kind of country.
[01:07:22]  And that's that's, I think, kind of that's the way to go.
[01:07:26]  I think that could work.
[01:07:27]  We still have the, so right now it's not that cold in Sweden, but we still have only like three and a half hours daylight during this period.
[01:07:35]  You have three and a half hours daylight right now?
[01:07:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:38]  That's so the sun goes down at like two or something.
[01:07:44]  And but so in the opposite of that is, of course, during the summer, where we have a lot of places where the sun never sets.
[01:07:53]  So that's also equally freaky.
[01:07:56]  I think that would freak me out more.
[01:07:58]  Yeah, I was going to say, you guys' domes must be permanently fucked from that.
[01:08:01]  That's crazy.
[01:08:03]  It is weird to be around like midnight and even later than that sun because everything is the same, but the shadows are the different way, like the other way around.
[01:08:12]  Wow.
[01:08:13]  So during the, like compared to the day.
[01:08:16]  So that's a bit of a freaky situation.
[01:08:21]  Well, Max, thank you so much for joining us and then answering our questions about Europe.
[01:08:28]  It was Max V. Carlson, ladies and gentlemen, the Trunon Swedish correspondent, but also actual investigative journalist with Express, or as we say, Expressen.
[01:08:40]  Max, thank you so much.
[01:08:42]  It was an honor.
[01:08:42]  Thank you, guys.
[01:08:57]  Well, all that talk about Northern Europe made Braze too chilly, so now we got to go.
[01:09:02]  Yeah, I'm too cold now.
[01:09:07]  It does, when he said that the sun set at 2 p.m., my body did have like a, I went into anaphylactic shock.
[01:09:15]  What the fuck is that?
[01:09:16]  I went into, what's it?
[01:09:17]  I got you're allergic.
[01:09:19]  You're allergic to the night.
[01:09:20]  I got no, I'm not.
[01:09:23]  Oh, interesting.
[01:09:24]  Seems like you just said you were.
[01:09:25]  I'm allergic to false night.
[01:09:27]  That's not false night.
[01:09:28]  That's real night.
[01:09:29]  Dude, if I was a vampire, I'd just move to Sweden.
[01:09:31]  But then it gets to the point.
[01:09:32]  Well, there are a lot of vampires in Northern Europe.
[01:09:35]  Okay, that makes sense.
[01:09:36]  I was wondering why they were always over.
[01:09:38]  You never hear about like, you know, Australian vampires.
[01:09:41]  Yeah.
[01:09:42]  Can I suck your blood a little bit?
[01:09:44]  And I don't give you a sucky on the neck, huh?
[01:09:50]  Can I leave it?
[01:09:51]  Give me a lick of the red.
[01:09:54]  Come here, my hair.
[01:09:57]  How horrible would that be?
[01:09:58]  Could you, Liz?
[01:09:59]  Could you imagine?
[01:10:00]  And it's like so hot out and dust everywhere.
[01:10:06]  And it's like night, but it's like 150 degrees.
[01:10:09]  Everyone looks like they live in San Diego.
[01:10:13]  And they're like racist against like Malaysians.
[01:10:16]  It's like aggressively, aggressively middle class.
[01:10:20]  Could you imagine?
[01:10:21]  Vampires.
[01:10:22]  You're like, it's like every woman's dream, obviously, vampire consort.
[01:10:27]  And it's like the vampire is finally like, oh, he's coming.
[01:10:32]  He's entering the door.
[01:10:32]  He's like, eh.
[01:10:35]  Do you think that would be the worst country to have a vampire from?
[01:10:38]  I could not imagine a worse country to be a vampire in or become a vampire or be hunted by a vampire in than Australia.
[01:10:45]  Israel.
[01:10:48]  You know, I want to suck your blood, but you're not being very nice to me.
[01:10:52]  I feel like you've been a little, I don't know, rude to me lately.
[01:10:56]  I would, if I will turn you into a vampire, you just owe him money for turning you into a vampire.
[01:11:04]  I guess, no, I mean, I could see like no, is Australia's got to be even worse than that.
[01:11:10]  It's really tough.
[01:11:11]  Because at least in Israel, you can like prey on those who like come to like Christian, whatever people who come to like see, you know, where it happened.
[01:11:22]  But in Australia, there's like God isn't there.
[01:11:24]  You know what I mean?
[01:11:25]  And like, no, very godless.
[01:11:27]  Very godless.
[01:11:28]  And if you are a vampire, actually, it probably rules to be a vampire Australia because there's all these creatures of the night that are just like for some reason, five times the size in other places.
[01:11:38]  It feels like lots of competition then.
[01:11:40]  Yeah, no, but it is interesting now that you bring it up.
[01:11:42]  The amount of nocturnal, the nocturnal community, quite large.
[01:11:49]  And yet you never hear about the vampire, the Australian vampire.
[01:11:54]  Well, it's because they have a, it's, it's because they have a culture that they can fit into there of the nocturnal community, like you're saying.
[01:12:01]  And so they don't have to like fuck with human.
[01:12:03]  Like they can do go to the, instead of the dishlickers, they can go to like the spider races, you know?
[01:12:09]  They can hang out with night dogs and shit like that.
[01:12:11]  Right.
[01:12:12]  It's, it's, God, can you imagine?
[01:12:17]  Horrible.
[01:12:18]  Being chased by a vampire and just immediately getting hit by a kangaroo.
[01:12:25]  Yeah, just the shit beaten out of you by a kangaroo.
[01:12:28]  By that big muscle kangaroo.
[01:12:31]  The one that fought Woody Allen.
[01:12:33]  Now, that's a crazy, that's crazy footage.
[01:12:35]  Woody Allen really did fight a kangaroo.

=== Pictures of Woody Allen Fighting Kangaroos (00:39) ===

[01:12:37]  And, you know, I got to tell you, those pictures of Woody, we broke that story, by the way.
[01:12:41]  Which one?
[01:12:42]  Very early on in Truanon's career of the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was on every single Woody Allen set for like 15 years.
[01:12:52]  And yeah, these pictures of Epstein giving some directors' tips to Woody.
[01:12:57]  Yeah.
[01:12:59]  All right.
[01:13:00]  Well, my name.
[01:13:02]  I can't even.
[01:13:03]  Dracula?
[01:13:05]  Yeah.
[01:13:06]  I'll go to a couple of pointies.
[01:13:09]  Fancy a route.
[01:13:11]  My name is Bryce.
[01:13:12]  I'm Liz.
[01:13:13]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[01:13:15]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:13:16]  We'll see you next time.