Check in the mail: our analysis of Epstein’s correspondence
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.3 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our data journalists trawled through the vast email archive of Jeffrey Epstein, a dead sex offender. It is a revealing look at how and with whom he communicated. As interest grows in banning young people’s use of social media, we argue there are better ways to mitigate harms. And a blindfolded introduction to “blouge”, a new, more climate-resilient wine variety.
Guests and host:
- Rosie Blau, host of “The Intelligence”
- Dan Rosenheck, data editor
- Tom Wainwright, media editor
- Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist
Topics covered:
- The Epstein files
- Social-media bans
- “Blouge” wine
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:14.1 | I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. |
| 0:16.0 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:25.2 | Thank you. we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Since December, under 16s in Australia have been banned from social media. |
| 0:30.2 | Other countries are getting ready to follow, but does such legislation actually work? |
| 0:38.2 | And for this recording, I was taken into the studio blindfold, then asked a guess what I was tasting. |
| 0:45.0 | It turned out to be part exercise in ritual humiliation, part education about a new phenomenon |
| 0:50.8 | coming to a supermarket near you. |
| 1:01.6 | Thank you. First up, though. |
| 1:10.0 | The recent release of documents relating to paedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein has revealed an astonishing network. |
| 1:17.5 | An unknown number of powerful men and some women trafficked and abused a much larger number of vulnerable women and girls. |
| 1:24.6 | The emails also reveal a broader trade in influence and favours, |
| 1:29.3 | a network peddling patronage, secrets and access. |
| 1:33.9 | But making sense of the more than 3 million documents comes with incredible challenges. |
| 1:39.1 | One, journalists all over the world, are tackling. |
| 1:42.3 | Our data team has just published its analysis of what the trove contains. |
| 1:47.9 | Fortunately, there was this volunteer group of software engineers who extracted all of the text from these PDFs. |
| 1:57.9 | Dan Rosenheck is the economist's data editor. |
| 2:08.6 | And transformed them into a big fat database that anyone can search on the internet via a website that looks just like Gmail and that we were able to train our analysis on. |
| 2:14.6 | What were you actually looking for as you comb through the releases? |
| 2:20.3 | These emails, which are concentrated between 2008 and 2019, |
... |
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