Hello!

Welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, our show where we talk to fascinating and brilliant people about fascinating and interesting

things. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and my favorite thing that I've ever done pretty much

is the series of Slate Money Succession Recaps that we ran here on this show with a bunch of brilliant people.

And now I am very, very sad because the one brilliant person that we never had on Slate Money Succession

was McKay Coppins, currently of the Atlantic. McKay, welcome.

Thank you for having me. I'm sorry to have missed the Succession recaps as well,

but we can probably get into it a little bit here. I feel like this is exactly what we're

going to do. We're just going to have a conversation about something, well, which is probably

even better than Succession, which is the real life family drama of the Murdoch family, a subject which has been an obsession of many

people, but that you seem to have become something of an overnight expert in, given your,

I think I'm right in saying, like pretty much unprecedented degree of access to James and

Catherine Murdoch. I think that's probably true as far as journalists go.

And it's funny that you say overnight expert, and I know what you mean, because the story,

this profile of James and Catherine was a year in the making, but there are people, as you know,

professional Murdoch chroniclers who have been doing this for literally decades.

And that was kind of one of the

frankly, slightly intimidating things about coming to this story the way I did was that there are

people out there who have written, you know, multiple books about the Murdochs who have been

writing about this family since the 90s. And I think I was lucky. And in a way, I think it was an advantage,

at least probably James saw it this way, that I wasn't carrying decades worth of baggage into the

story, that I was coming at it with fairly fresh eyes. And I think that's part of why he opened up

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