9/8/26: Fetterman Staffers Expose Insane Behavior, Leon Black & Jeffrey Epstein

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Let's put this article up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. The headline here is Behind Closed Doors. John Thetterman shows little interest in the work of a senator, the headline very much underplays. Some of the anecdotes that they have here backed up by text messages. Let me go ahead and show you some of the most stunning examples that they pull here. Let's put the first one up on the screen, so they say that last summer, he was supposed to meet with CHOP is the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He's as to his staffer in a text message, "Why do I have to keep meeting with the Children's Hospital?" The aid says, "Because they're worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts," Thetterman replies, "Well, I'm not. I'm convinced they just want free trips to D.C. So agrived at the IDA has to meet with the Children's Hospital and saying, "I don't really give a shit about vaccines and Medicaid cuts myself. It's not of interest to me. Let's go ahead and put this next one up on the screen." We've got some more tweets here from an aid. This is with regards to the funeral of three different police officers that he was supposed to attend. So the aid says, "Update on the event, no one will be allowed to staff you due to number restrictions. The organizers are requiring everyone to be seated by 11 a.m. and the funeral will begin at noon and last at least three hours." Thetterman says, "Three hours? Question question?" The aid says, "Yes, it's a very formal ceremony and the equivalent of three separate funerals." Thetterman. This may be a non-starter. So can attend the cop funerals because it's just going to be to burden some on him too much of a time. Commitment in three hours is just too much out of his day. Let's put the next one up on the screen here. We've also got some details here, I believe, about his commitment to Israel in the way this is all going. So they say that he wanted to, told his advisors and senior staff he wanted to introduce a resolution forcing every senator to take a public stance on whether the Warren Gaza constituted a genocide. I would also actually welcome that resolution. His senior staff tried to talk him out of this idea, according to people familiar with the matter, but he was undeterred. Last September, the Israeli ambassador met with Thetterman in his office and suggested an alternative. Thetterman could write an op-ed, explaining why he continued to support Israel, according to people familiar with the matter. Thetterman agreed and told Leiter that's the ambassador. He would write the submission based on any points, the ambassador sent over, according to these people, a few days later, MC staff sent over drafted points for Thetterman to consider. So literally taking talking points from the Israeli, from Israeli officials, that's great. There was another incident we didn't pull the graphic of, but there were three disabled veterans from Pennsylvania who'd set up a meeting with him that they traveled all the way from Pennsylvania to DC for, you know, they'd waited months to be able to have his ear on an issue that was important to them and their quality of care. He texted staffers, oh, I think I got food poisoning. I'm not going to be able to make this meeting with the veterans. Then shortly after the meeting shows up in the office, seeming perfectly fine and says, I've gotten, I've got an appearance with Fox News on the topic, of course, I think it was the Iran War or Israel. So I got, I don't want to be late for that. I got to get over for that. So showing his priorities there, but not shocking, but pretty stunning. Just, I mean, this really is, goes beyond a sort of left-rights spectrum. Just shows what a kind of like piece of shit he is honestly, not caring about his constituents on basic issues, like healthcare for children or disabled veterans or these cops that were killed, whose funeral he was supposed to attend and shows you his priorities. He wants to be on camera, talking about how much he loves Israel. You put that together with that article we covered previously, Saga, about how he has this one super pro-Israel guy who's like showed up out of nowhere and is with him all the time and sort of guiding him. You know, it's a pretty, it's a very disturbing picture because this is definitely not what Pennsylvania voters thought they were getting when they voted for this guy. Absolutely. And the thing is that really Senator, it's not a hard job. I know that people build it up and all of this, unless you're the majority leader, you basically don't do anything really all that great. You take a party line vote, up or down, occasionally, the good ones that get Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they can do investigations, etc. But especially when you're in the minority, you don't do anything. Your only real job is to take these types of meetings and to use your name, you use your staffers and your name to go into get things done for your constituents, like the Children's Hospital. That's something they actually might be able to help or say, they're like, hey, you've got a budget cut that's coming here. Let me get on the phone with the administration. In fact, Federman, you could even argue considering all of these connections he has now with the Republicans. He could be really using that for the benefit of Pennsylvania. He could say, I'm not going to vote for this, this and this. I'll back you guys up on Israel. You guys got to give me this. You got to make sure you keep chop out of the budget cuts. You got to make sure that some of these cuts and things don't affect this disabled veteran community or this veteran's hospital. This is what real politics looks like. A lot of it wouldn't show up at the national level for a show or something like that for us, but that's what makes an actually effective United States Senator. He does none of that. He doesn't seem to care about Pennsylvania at all. He does not seem to care about his constituents at all. The only public appearances this guy is making are ones that are organized by Dave McCormick staff, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, who he doesn't even have to do any of the work. I think it's also a very telling. Look, you and I both know there's a lot of bad bosses on the hill, right? There are legendary senators like the Klobuchar thing has come out. I won't spill all the beans, but everybody knows these people's names. I have never, ever seen people leak an internal senators text messages. And in this case, we now have a group of federalmen staffers put, what is it, D4, where his own former staffers have come together and are now saying hello Twitter, we're a group of former campaigns and staffers or John Fetterman who are disgusted with what he's become. If you were troubled by yesterday's story, trust us. They're just the tip of the iceberg. It is even worse than you thought. We've come together to share our stories and screenshots to show his Pennsylvanians exactly who their Senator is. Set your calendar for September 14th. The day the Senate is back in session for our first drop. Let's be honest, maybe the 15th, he'll skip Monday votes. He is calling these smears. I mean, again, I can tell you a roster of a dozen of stories of people here in Washington and what these people are really like. And they have never had a band of their former staffers come out and just be like, let me show you how much of a piece of shit that this guy really is. I mean, this is the, there is a code of Washington. You never leak this type of stuff for the principal, but he has no respect for these people. And what's telling is, is I don't think any of the other senators would even care. They would still hire them. That's the main reason why this stuff usually doesn't come out because they despise John Fetterman just as much as his own staff does. - That's how impressive this situation is. Yeah, well, and also he's already, most of the people, if not all, the people who were with him when he was a progressive running as having endorsed Bernie Sanders and in favor of Medicare for all, those people have by and large left already. So the staffers we're talking about now, these are the people that came in knowing like, okay, well, you know, he's the centrist now and he hangs out with Republicans and he's super pro-Israel. Like, those are the people that we're talking about who are now leaking these anecdotes who are like above and beyond anything else. Like, all he cares about are his Fox News appearances. There's a broader issue here. Clearly, like, he is not the same person politically as he was because he was a established politician with the track record and we interviewed him before the stroke, etc. This is a person who is different because of a stroke and because of the damage that was done to his brain. I know that's uncomfortable to say, but there's just no other conclusion you can come to based on how differently he's comported himself now versus before. How is it that there's no mechanism for voters to get to weigh in on the capability of a center? We mostly talk about this with health issues like specific, like the Tom Keane situation or most frequently with people who are extremely old and whose brains are deteriorating in front of us. This is a major democracy issue that this guy who is completely changed his stripes just and does not care about doing the job and doesn't seem to care about getting re-elected either is just a lot to persist and there's no check on that whatsoever. I think to a lot of people that seems totally, totally insane and you can imagine what happened here, Saga. Like, he's awkward and weird and people don't like him in the Democratic caucus. So you had the, you know, the Israel types, the pro-Israel types are swooping and they got their guy on the inside who's like, oh, let me tell you what to do and let's push this and here I'll help you with your op-ed and all of those sorts of things. And then the Republicans smell an opportunity. So you had a couple of Republicans, including as you were pointing out, his Republican colleague from Pennsylvania, Senator from Pennsylvania. Oh, I'll be your friends. Like, let's go hang out. Let's have dinner together. I come over to my house meet my wife. We have seen way too many times how even with people who haven't had, you know, significant brain injuries, who they can be really seduced by that. Oh, this, this is the people that are being nice to me. So my politics are going to shift more to their viewpoint because they're the ones that are being nice to me. Whereas the people I used to agree with politically, they're being mean to me. So I'm going to completely change my politics just based on who's being nice or who's being mean to me. And so Republicans have really, I think, very cleverly kind of, you know, manipulated him and have helped to craft him into the person that we see today. In terms of his political future, you and I were debating this, I think he is delusional enough to think that he could get reelected. One of the last articles that came out about him, his staffers were saying that he thinks he could be a vice presidential pick. He even thought maybe he would run for president, but he was like, oh, maybe I'll be a vice presidential pick on the Democratic side, which is so insane, which is why I think he may soger be deluding himself into thinking that he has a lane either as a Democrat or Republican to actually win reelection, even though it's utterly proposed. I mean, Democrats completely hate him. And then the Republicans, they're not going to want some like, you know, sort of Republican. They're going to want someone who's a true believer who's with him all the way on everything. And he is not that. So as much as they may love him when he's a Democrat who's pissing on Democrats, it's another thing for him to get nominated, let alone be able to win in a competitive election. I, I don't know. I could be wrong. He's more cinema than my, I will say I've, I've hated John Federman before the brain aneurysm. So I think I do deserve. You've hated him the whole time. I've hated him from day one. He was weed degenerate from the beginning. Maybe it's weed. You know, actually, I should adopt that new thing. It's not just the brain aneurysm. It's the marijuana that cooked his brain. But look, the guy is a literal resident ogre being used by the Israel lobby or Katie Brit or Dave McCormick. You could be right. He is so delusional that he may run for re-election. Here's the thing. I don't think he would even make it through the Democratic primary as, at least as a right now, right? He would have a better chance in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary. He probably zero percent chance. And like you said, by the way, Pennsylvania GOP is literally insane. They're, they're nominating like outright morons out up there on the ticket. McCormick is definitely not the, how should I say is he is not the norm whenever it comes to who they usually are putting up there on the ballot. But when we actually just like think about Federman's career, this is a guy motivated clearly by ego and by media love. That's part of the reason why running for office is hard. You know, Federman now is lazy. He literally does nothing. When he ran for re-election to his credit, he actually did go to like almost all the counties in Pennsylvania. He barnstormed the whole state. He was all over the media too. I mean, you got to really work at it to, I mean, this is a big ass state. It's a 15 million people, right? With, you know, takes several hours to drive across the entire thing. You really think he wants to do that? I mean, he was already a little rich boy beforehand whose parents were floating his mortgage and all of his payments. Now he could just be a multi-millionaire and do Fox News hits from his, you know, weird basement in Pittsburgh, which is like some former auto dealer. That seems, again, to me to fit his more current personality as opposed to actually running. Because running is not, it's not easy. You gotta go out and shake hands. You gotta take meetings. I mean, if you think taking meetings with veterans is hard, type of groups you have to meet when you're running for office, that's a whole other level of what it would actually take. That's my only reason. I think he's just unbelievably lazy and motivated at this point by money and fame. I mean, it's not that hard to live that life, especially now you've done what you've done. You can get hired by some lobbyist firm. You can, you can make a million dollars a year for the rest of his life. I don't know. Seems like a path he might take. Or hired by, you know, government of Israel. Yeah. Whatever for them. Like all of that is certainly on the table for him and his future career prospects. You should know. You may be right. He should make all right. He should convert to your yesterday. He better, we better off. We really want it. All right. Let's move on. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. And the argument is do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they received. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same way. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And that's why we make the Sullivan College football show. I'm Ty Hildembrand. He's Dan Rubenstein. How's it going? Every week we preview the games that matter sort through the biggest storylines and tell you what to watch before kickoff. There's a lot to keep track of. Who's for real? Which upset is hiding in plain sight and which storyline is about to take over your group chat. And when the games are over, join us in the aftermath too. We're going to react to what happened. Talk about the biggest results. Of course, we'll cover the playoff picture. And all the little details you might have missed while flipping between like 12 games at once. Whether you know every coach and coordinator or just want to understand why everybody is yelling, we're here to help make sense of the madness. Listen to the Solid Verbal College football show on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're very excited now to be joined by William Cohan. He is the author of a new book Money to Burn. Let's put it up here on the screen. The unbornish truth about Leon Black Apollo and the rise of a new Wall Street. William is a longtime financial journalist and has done an extraordinary work here. We're very excited now to be joined by him on the show. Thank you for joining us, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for me. Absolutely. So I will confess I know a little bit. bit about Leon Black from his days at Apollo. Obviously, now your book has done a lot of work to uncover his rise and what it means about financial capitalism. But for the vast majority of Americans, they think they became familiar with him with the more recent revelations around Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, Mr. Black is currently in the news. Let's put it up here on the screen currently actually suing the United States House of Representatives over a subpoena and refusing to give a deposition, which has included many of the other billionaires named in the Epstein files. What throughout your work struck you about Leon Blacks, his rise in his fortune and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? Well, I mean, first of all, yes, I agree that everybody, if they know him at all, they know him because of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which is of course, I mean, Jeffrey Epstein's behavior is reprehensible in every way, as we all know. And Leon's relationship is sorted at worst, pretty even potentially criminal, although he's certainly not been found to have any criminal engagements with him. But it certainly is reflective of poor judgment, which he and Leon, I talked about. But again, the story of Leon and his father and his family and, you know, and, I mean, Jeffrey Epstein is really the last portion of all of this. You know, it began with his, his famous father committing suicide when Leon was in a second year at Harvard Business School, which he didn't even want to go to, but his father basically insisted that he do that. And then after his father's death, realizing that he had to become the family's breadwinner, and he figured out the best way to do that was to go to Wall Street, turned out that he was very, very good at what Wall Street did, especially advising companies on murders and acquisitions. He did that at Drexel Burnham, which was of course a very powerful firm, especially in the late '80s, during the reign of Mike Milken, of course, someone most people know he is. But then, then Drexel blew up in 1990, actually was liquidated. And Leon sort of prouled a bunch of the best people he could find from Drexel and started Apollo, which was a private equity firm, so to speak. It was also more than that. And so, you know, he made his fortune in sort of a very sharp, elbowed way. The firm was very aggressive, very smart, smarter than most other firms and made a lot of money over many years. The firm is now what, 36 years old, and Leon and his partners became billionaires. And then what we all know now is that in addition to having very good judgment, I guess, about doing deals and making a lot of money, he had very poor judgment in his personal life with his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, and also a number of women he was having a experience with who are not his wife. What do you think led to that? And is there anything that we can sort of extrapolate? Because obviously, Leon Block is far from the only elite who had that quote-unquote bad judgment with regard to their activities and Jeffrey Epstein. What was it that led to that dichotomy you're setting up where, in the business world, he perhaps had good judgment, putting the moral judgments there aside, but in his personal life had such incredibly disastrous judgment that led to a lot of massive reputational harm and ultimately business damage for him as well. Yeah, I mean, he ended up having to care up his job as CEO of Apollo and his chairman of the Apollo board, although he remains so with 85 million shares, the largest single shareholder in Apollo, which has made him worth, you know, whatever, 15 to 20 billion dollars now. You know, I asked Leon on many occasions because I had unusual access to him. He was on the record for 99% of our conversations, which, you know, I give him credit for most guys. Yeah, that's very right. Yeah, wouldn't sit for that, and, you know, he hasn't talked to many other journalists. So, you know, I appreciated that very much, and there was like no question that he shied away from. It's clear that he, you know, I don't know whether it was his father's suicide when he was in graduate school, that obviously, you know, he revered his father, his father, he comes from 10 generations of Orthodox rabbis, his father was Orthodox rabbis, practicing Orthodox rabbis in Woodmeer Long Island and then went to business school and became a banker at Lehman and then went off and ran a company and created a major and important conglomerate and then jumped out of the Pan Am building. And that was front page news in the New York Times. So, obviously that was traumatic. Leon, you know, I didn't psychoanalyze him. I'm not sure why somebody steps out on his wife. I mean, he's got four kids. By all reports, they're, you know, he's a good father and the kids are all well adjusted, including one who works for the Trump administration. Look, I can't explain why that happens. That happens a lot as we all know. Leon's poor judgment in that regard became a front page news and his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein became front page news. But, you know, which I see is sort of a strange circle of life with his father, both involved in scandal, even though Leon was trying to restore the family's name and to some extent did do that. But now he's meshed and, you know, entwined. Now, forever, I guess with Jeffrey Epstein. But, you know, he answered my questions about it. He explained the involvement. There was this report by Deckard the law firm, which, you know, basically found no wrongdoing on his part that it was for tax and estate advice. You know, there's been subsequent reporting in the New York Times and other places that showed that there was some more involvement with other women than was reviewed in the Deckard report, but people have been trying to make it happen. He's paying off a lot for that tax advice. That's what I was going to get out, sir, is that to me, you know, look, you talk about his personal and his questions. I don't care about his personal and his questions at all. I mean, this guy's worth what 915 billion? You're paying 170 million for tax advice. Somebody is not a registered financial advisor through some sketchy LLCs. I mean, did you get into the details on that? Because that just doesn't pass. I know a lot of people who will worth a lot of money. They have a team of professionals, the wealth management firm. I mean, this guy had access to the top wealth management tax people in the history of the world. And you have somebody who can barely spell on a private email. That doesn't pass the smell. Smell test to me. I'm curious what he said to you about it. So, first of all, when the Deckard report came out, which was in January 2021, which Leon basically asked the Apollo special committee of Apollo board of directors to undertake. And he told me that he's basically, and this is true, he is the only person who has ever asked for an investigation to be done of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. I don't see Bill Gates doing that. I don't see Larry Summers doing that or A. Hood Barack. I mean, he said he did that because he believed he did nothing wrong. Okay, so that's his real events. Deckard basically ratified that. I wrote a piece in Vanity Fair when that Deckard report came out and said, "Hey, Leon, do you think we're idiots? How could this possibly be true? You're Leon Black. You're one of the great financial minds of your generation. You're on the cover of Business Week with one word headline that said ruthless. So you're aggressive, you're smart, you're brilliant, and you want everybody to know you're aggressive, smart and brilliant. How could you have paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for something you could have paid Paul White's $5 million for?" So Leon and I spent a lot of time talking about that. And again, he has his answer. I've been through the, as much as I could, given that, of course, these $3 million, $3 million files dropped in and around the time that my book was closed before been locked before publishing. There were all these crazy, renting emails from Epstein to Leon, but Leon never replied to any of them. We talked about how this all could have happened and what Epstein did for him. Look, he was not allowed to die that. Jeffrey Epstein, he He did not graduate college, but he was somebody who managed to either hoodwink or blackmail or something, a lot of rich and powerful people. He obviously, his behavior with women was reprehensible. Leon and I talked about this, you know, I go into it in the book, it's complex, I could try to explain it to you here. But basically, what the 158 was, payments accumulated over, you know, six or seven years. So that's number one. The tax in the state advice that related to his, his graphs, which are the trusts that he set up for his children, he was facing, and this is in the deck of report, something like a $2 billion tax bill, if it weren't resolved, because apparently now I find this hard to believe, and I said this to him, that the person who did the original graphs kind of messed them up, and he was facing a $2 billion tax bill, I said on that hard to believe, but okay, and that he had shown them to other typical Wall Street tax and advice attorneys. And none of them could figure out what to do to avoid this tax bill that we was staring down Leon, and he, you know, decided at that point, well, what do I have to lose? I'll mention it to Jennifer Yupstein, who was on the board of his family foundation. Okay, that's weird number one. And why would he think that the Jeffrey Epstein could come up with a solution that the high-priced Wall Street lawyers couldn't come up with? Well, I was curious about that, and he laid it all out and comes down to what I call this miracle consideration, and I'll try to put it in layman's terms, which is that for some reason, which I don't understand, Leon was paid extra dividends, hundreds of millions, like as much as 400 million of dividends on his Apollo stock, that he was not really entitled to, and Epstein came up with a solution, well, if we give up those dividends, if we give those back, then that'll be the consideration, what I call the miracle consideration, for how to redraft these grats to fix them to avoid the $2 billion tax liability. And I mean, as crazy as that sounds, that is exactly what happened, I've seen the redraft to documents, I've talked to his attorneys at other, at his law firms that ratified what Epstein did, was crazy as that sounds, I mean, I was like sort of thinking to myself, please Leon, don't tell me something that actually makes sense and justifies this, don't share with me documents that I can see that actually verify some of the things you're saying here. But he did, and I did, and it really hasn't been challenged, there's been the IRS hasn't challenged it, I mean, Ron Wyden, saying Ron Wyden talks about it and challenges it, but he hasn't really come up with the goods yet, so people are still looking at this and people are still incredulous, as to some extent I am, but $158 was more than just this one problem that he solved, or Leon, or supposedly solved, or effectively solved, because he hasn't been charged for that $2 billion, and so it's like sort of an M&A fee for saving him his $2 billion dollars, and then he went on to weasel himself, you know, into all sorts of other businesses that Leon was involved with, and into his family office at Elysium, and this went on for a number of years, and he expected to get paid, you know, every year that he was giving this advice to Leon about, you know, how to structure his purchase of a jet, or his art collection, which is, you know, basically invaluable, or his boat, or his apartments, or his homes, and all to be done in a tax-efficient manner, and again, there's a lot of emails about this from Epstein to Leon in the files, but there's really no response from Leon to any of this, and basically Leon's view is he was a raving mad lunatic who was trying to, you know, squeeze me for as much money as he could to the point where I had to cut off the relationship, which he did, and, you know, we all know Jeffrey Epstein is dead now, and it's very hard to verify the other side of this argument, and so that's what we're left with. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive, what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. You just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Rollin' Martin unfiltered podcast? And the argument is, do you want to win? It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. Rollin' Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van. Catch Rollin' Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. 12 seats. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 23, you better be hitting the ground, going to heart in the south now. Download Rollin' Martin unfiltered on the iHotRadio app Apple Podcast. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart. And that's why we make the solid verbal college football show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubenstein. How's it going? Every week, we preview the games that matter, sort through the biggest storylines, and tell you what to watch before kickoff. Who's for real? Which upset is hiding in plain sight? And which storyline is about to take over your group chat? And when the games are over, join us in the aftermath, too. We're going to react to what happened, talk about the biggest results. And all the little details you might have missed, while flipping between like 12 games at once. Whether you know every coach and coordinator or just want to understand why everybody is yelling, we're here to help make sense. Of the madness. Listen to the solid verbal college football show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Epstein piece is a comparatively small portion of the book, which uses Leon Black. Both to track his biography, but also to track the way that private equity has changed over the years. And this is something we've been touching on some in the show as well, in particular, how large the how large private credit is and, you know, some potential risk that could pose to the economy could put F5 up on the screen. I think things have stabilized somewhat, but the private credit market was under stress recently. This was a recent article that says they're marking down more loans. Can you explain for people who are total layman? What is private credit? What is the role that it's filling in the economy? And what are some of the risks that people are concerned about here? That's a great question. And thank you for asking that because, you know, people like to talk about Jeffrey Epstein and Leon Black all day long, which I understand, but there's definitely more to this than that. And the bigger risk that exists is in this explosion of private credit. So long story short, essentially, after the 2008 financial crisis, the big Wall Street banks are now regulated by the Federal Reserve. And then with the passage of the Dodd-Frank Law, basically there were serious restrictions on the kinds of loans they could make at the big banks and how long they could hold them on their balance sheet. Basically they went from being in the storage business where they could hold these loans on their balance sheets for, you know, maybe, in fact, the duration of the loan, which often would be five or seven or ten years, into the moving business where they had to syndicate those loans and move them up their balance sheets because the Fed and the Congress was worried that the last financial crisis in 2008 was basically exacerbated by the big Wall Street banks and the crappy assets they had on their balance sheets and they wanted to say, look, no more of that. Out they go, you can't hold those loans anymore. You can't really make as many of those loans as you did before. So that created a vacuum in the market, which firms like Apollo and Blackstone and KKR and a whole rash of other private credit providers stepped into filth. So for many years Apollo was just like a private equity firm. You know, we've had it's own. variation of that. But, you know, right now it has a trillion dollars of assets under management, 150 billion of which are private equity, and 850 billion, 850 billion of the one trillion is now private credit. So what is that? Basically, it's just, so that was an explosion. And, and, you know, now the private credit market is said to be 40 trillion dollars if you include investment grade credit, 2 trillion if you include, just focus on sort of riskier loans, junk bonds, and other kinds of mezzanine financing. But essentially what Apollo is now doing, through the capital that's generated from its insurance business called the theme, which is an an annuity provider, which an annuity is basically a long-term obligation that the insurer owes to people like you and me who, you know, want a fixed rate of return on essentially their, for their retirements, that they are taking that capital and investing it by and large, not completely, in the senior secured debt of companies that it's lending to. And that's become a very big business on Wall Street that most people don't, as you said, don't understand or recognize because it's grown up in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, and intentionally because of the architecture of Wall Street that the Fed has imposed on the big Wall Street banks. So now Apollo and Blackstone and KKR are stepping into the void that was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. And in many ways, these firms have created a sort of symbiotic relationship with the Jeepy Morgan Chases and B of A's and Goldman's and Morgan Stanley's in the world, where the Wall Street banks have the relationship with the companies, get paid for that relationship, but then essentially hand off the asset, which is this loan, to Apollo, which then is happy to hold it and happy to syndicate it out to other investors. So it's this flywheel, as they like to say, on Wall Street expression, I cannot stand, that sort of makes the whole thing work. And the question is, have we created a whole new potential set of risks that we're not really prepared for and don't understand? And I think that's the open question, and that's what that article that you put up goes to because what these firms have done and what the SEC and others and the Fed has been to allow is for these syndicated loans, these private credit loans, to be sold to individual investors through publicly traded vehicles called BDCs, business development corporations, that limit to 5% a quarter of the amount of money that people can take out. So when some of these loans started going bad, the retail investors were wondering, hey, I want my money out, but the next thing you knew, they found out that they could only get 5% of their money out of best. And so they started clamoring and going to the media and saying, hey, what happened here? I didn't read the fine print. How can I not get my money out? Well, that's what they've signed up for. Makes sense. Yeah, it's usually not a good sign though. When you go to go to what's essentially a bank and, hey, can I have my money back? They're like, oh, not today. How about later? That's right. But of course, there's no, there's no ATM and Apollo. Right. You're not going to go to ATM or a theme and get your money out. You can get it out. It's going to be a penalty, but you basically signed up for seven or 10 years. Not like within ATM, you get your money out. The instinct you want it, which is what happened with Silicon Valley Bank. Why that went down the tubes a few years ago is because people took their money out instantly from the ATMs. And they had all these long term assets. They couldn't liquidate fast enough except at a discount. So we'll see if the same version of that has been created here. That's the big mystery. That's the new thing on Wall Street that's been created that I want to explore in the book. Totally. That people don't really fully understand yet and hasn't been fully tested. Well, sir, we really appreciate you joining us. We encourage everybody to go read the book. Obviously, you're very thorough and you have a deep amount of knowledge here, extraordinary access here to Leon Black and to kind of the history of how this all came to be. So we appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. And I apologize about my camera angle. All good. We made it work. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you both for having me. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Great. When's the show for everybody tomorrow? They'll see you then. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait and hold up. They changed all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a whole sale attack. It is targeting Black people in every federal agency. It's wrong. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHR radio app Apple Podcast. Or wherever you get your podcasts. The league's newest podcast. The NFL report posted by me, Andrew Sicilyano, it is your home for everything football. Breaking news, expert analysis, game picks and here from your favorite players to join me and at all starcasts of experts for everything you need to know from around the league. Get new episode to the NFL report, Monday through Friday, all season long. Listen to the NFL report podcast on the IHR radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And that's why we make the Sullivan verbal college football show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubenstein. But you can join us in the aftermath as we react to what happened, why it matters, and how the sport went completely bonkers yet again. Listen to the Solid Verbal College football show on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHR podcast. Guaranteed Human.