Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. The lavish expense accounts, the power, the shoulder pads. The days of elite media in New York are long gone. But there is perhaps still no sharper observer of politics and culture than one of that period's most prominent figures, Tina Brown.
In the 80s and 90s, she was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker until leaving to start an ill-fated magazine called Talk with Harvey Weinstein. That venture folded after a few years. But Brown wasn't done, entering her online era with the launch of The Daily Beast in 2008 and becoming an author of books about the royal family and her time at Vanity Fair.
These days, she's brought her signature stinging analysis of the media, the royals and the political class to Substack, where her deeply enjoyable newsletter is called Fresh Hell. At a time when there is so much change and uncertainty in our media and our politics, I thought it would be grounding to sit down with someone who has the long view. Tina did not disappoint.
And just to note, our first conversation happened before news broke that King Charles had stripped Prince Andrew of his titles, seemingly for his association with Jeffrey Epstein. We did chat about that more in our second interview. And both conversations happened before the latest batch of Epstein messages came. some mentioning President Trump, were released by Congress.
Here's my very entertaining conversation with Tina Brown.
Gosh, this is the lair, the coven.
It is. Hi, I'm Lulu. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you. Please have a seat. Thank you. I want to actually start by reading some of you to you. Here are some of your descriptions of some folks that we all know. Mark Zuckerberg met as Slippery Salamander. Prince Harry, the Ginger Winger.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Tina Brown provide about the media landscape?
And you describe our president as Tyrannosaurus Trump. I mean, it's wonderful writing. I just wonder how you come up with these acid descriptions.
Well, something happens, you know, when I sort of hit the typewriter, you know, that dates me. Something happens when I hit the keyboard. And also, I think that because I'm writing this Substack Fresh Hell, it's a kind of, I'm in a different zone. I'm sort of my diary self, if you know what I mean. Mm-hmm.
And I don't feel I have to have any sort of restraint anymore, which is very exciting to me as a writer.
I mean, this is the thing that really comes through, that you are writing now like you just are not going to be censored in any way. You're not afraid.
Well, I mean, I sort of feel, you know, I think of myself in the third trimester of my life rather than the age that I am. And we'll go through your many iterations. And why not? You know, it's like I feel liberated in some way. I don't care, you know. And it's sort of great not to in a way be sort of,
in charge of lots of people either because I don't have to worry, well, what happens if I want that person to advertise or if I want to put that person on the cover? I can just sort of let rip and it's liberating and I think it's needed actually, you know, because there's so much kind of pussyfooting and mealy-mouthing around that
has been going on in writing, it seems, for the last sort of 10 years, that now you can just really have fun. And I can have fun anyway, and I'm trying to.
As you mentioned, these descriptions come from your Substack Fresh Hell. But before you were on Substack, you were the original queen of Condé Nast.
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Chapter 3: How has Tina Brown's career shaped her views on the elite?
You became the editor of Vanity Fair at 30 in 1984, which is very sobering for those of us who did not get to such august heights so young. And then, of course, you went on to run The New Yorker. You know, there's a lot of nostalgia for that era now. There's books, articles, podcasts. Do you miss that time? What do you miss about that time?
Well, you're absolutely right about the nostalgia. You know, my book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, which I wrote, you know, seven or eight years ago, people just keep coming up to me and saying, oh, I've been reading it. It's like the, you know, I feel so nostalgic for that period. I think it's because... This was when work was so much fun. You know, it's like all the fun has come out of work.
Because now, for the journalism media world, it's all about, like, how do you get a platform that anybody will look at? How do you raise the money for it? What can you say that, you know, some sponsor doesn't want you to say? It's like this was a period that I lived through where it was this hell for leather pursuit of... great stuff, you know, and I had a ball doing it.
And the offices of Vanity Fair were just the HQ of interesting, adventurous talent. And the same at the New Yorker. I realize now how terribly lucky I was at the New Yorker to be sitting there with people like Art Spiegelman and Adam Gopnik and David Remnick and Jane Mayer and all these wonderful writers arguing about
what we were going to say in the pieces, you know, whether we wanted to reuse that story, whether it was accurate, whether it was fair, whether it was all these stored things that we talked about were nothing to do with, like, is our business going up in flames?
And that's unfortunately what this latest, the newer generation have experienced ever since they've begun their careers, which is very, very sad.
I mean, I have a theory for why there is so much nostalgia, which is... even as the internet has sort of democratized the way that people get information and who gives information, we've seen the whole system that you presided over in that era sort of be dismantled. And I think people are craving a bit more of authority because people want to guide through the muck. They want some curation.
Of course they do. I mean, the gatekeepers have gone. Everyone goes, yes, well, as if the gatekeepers were some kind of terrible, you know, inhibition to doing anything good. The gatekeepers were also the tastemakers, you know. So the thing about not having any gatekeepers means that there is no one person who's got the flair, the taste and the courage to say, I like that. I want to do it.
Whether it's somebody running a streaming service or somebody running a book publishing company or somebody running a magazine. You want those people whose taste is confident. And unfortunately, lacking those gatekeepers now, it's just this big blob out there of just sort of, you know, stuff and dross that comes careening at you. And you don't know where to find the good stuff.
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Chapter 4: What does Tina Brown think about the current state of journalism?
It's like, where? What? You know, I thought I've got like a thousand sub stack, you know, things. I'm reading social media. I'm reading the old guard stuff. But my head is exploding. There is nobody who can actually tell you, very few anyway, that can corral the good stuff for you and tell you this is needed. And I personally miss it very much. And I think other people miss it.
They're exhausted, you know. And unfortunately, what it's leading to is just a lot of people checking out. So it's a very demoralizing time. You know, I'm always being asked by sort of young people at, you know, journalism colleges and so on, like, how do I get into journalism?
And I look at them sort of feeling like – often I say, actually, you should go to India because India, in fact, has a very vibrant literary culture. You know, there's not much literary culture about anymore, you know. India, for some reason – There's a lot of sort of interest in intellectual debate. And, you know, you go out and everybody's talking about articles and pieces and books.
And there seems to be a great deal of energy. So it's a long way to go, shall we say. I just can't believe that your advice is go to India. It's not popular. I will say that when I say that you do see the light fade from the eyes, you know.
I would be a little demoralized if that's the advice that I was getting now, trying to break in. I want to get back to your early career a little later, but you are actually an authority on some pretty current things that are happening that actually had their roots in that era of the 80s and the 90s. And one of them, of course, is... Jeffrey Epstein. You knew Jeffrey Epstein.
You knew Ghislaine Maxwell socially. In your book, The Palace Papers, you described her as omnipresent in the social scene. She was always at book launches and cocktail parties. How did you understand their relationship? Was it love? Was it money? Was it both?
Well, I mean, I didn't understand their relationship at the time because you never saw Epstein with her, actually. When Ghislaine was kind of working the scene, I think Epstein was slightly in her rearview mirror when I knew her. I didn't really know about that background with Epstein until I read about it later. I think that she was... an abused figure herself, actually.
I mean, her father, Robert Maxwell, was a really terrible, tyrannical guy, a press baron at the time and a crook. You know, he also, very ironically for her in terms of her life story, he also died mysteriously in a suicide or was it a murder when he went over the side of his boat, having robbed the pension fund. So he was a crook, the father, but he was a crook that was
the king of the world for a time. So she was raised in that atmosphere of the glorious press baron, only to find that, in fact, he was a crook. So she had that sort of trauma. But I also had this great sort of story in my book, which I found when I was reporting the palace papers, that she took somebody up to her room when she was a little girl to show her her room.
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Chapter 5: How does Tina Brown describe her writing style on Substack?
And she said, oh, yes, she said, those are my hairbrushes. Daddy lets me choose one when he wants to beat me. So, I mean, you just suddenly saw, you know, he was sort of asking her to curate her own punishment for him to abuse. So that, I think, is at the core of it, that her father was this really terrible person. But I think with Epstein, she was mad about him.
You know, I think she was crazy about Epstein. And the only way she felt she could get into his good graces, if you like, was to sort of participate in and in the end, you know, curate his abuse of young women. And You know, one thing I really strongly feel now is that there's a kind of sense that, oh, Epstein, you know, Ghislaine was his sort of procurer. Okay, that's bad enough.
But actually, when you read the new recent book by Virginia Dufry, who, of course, was the sex slave of Epstein, It's so clear that, you know, she wasn't just a procurer. That's bad enough. But she was a real participant in the sexual abuse. I mean, she joined in, in the threesomes and hurting the girls during sexual, you know, activities. And she wasn't just a stand-in for Epstein.
She was, as I think Virginia says, you know, twin. They were twin halves of the same evil. And I think that's true, actually. But you never would have known it from seeing her work those parties. And I think she deserves to, you know, rot in that prison a very long time, in my view.
Do you think she will?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if on his way out, Trump does pardon her when MAGA no longer counts. After all, once he's out of there, why should he care about MAGA anymore? He won't. He will have, you know, the crypto coffers will be full and he might want to pardon Ghislaine just because he can. But I think if he did it now, there would be a real uproar.
You know, in the early 2010s, when you oversaw The Daily Beast, you ran one of the first national series on the Epstein stories. Yes. And you noted, after you wrote about that period, that they didn't really stick at the time.
They didn't. I mean, when we published... Conchita Sarnoff, who was a campaigner for sexual trafficking, she brought the story to us. We were the very first to run the piece about the sweetheart deal between Acosta in Florida, the DA, with Jeffrey Epstein, where he got a sort of light slap on the wrist punishment. Who then became, of course, Trump's labor secretary in the first term.
Indeed.
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Chapter 6: What nostalgic feelings does Tina Brown have about her time at Vanity Fair?
And I think he's realized too late that sort of he was born to be a prince. And now he's essentially just some kind of guy doing PR gigs while Meghan, you know, tries out her latest cooking idea. And it looks really more and more as if Harry's best decision would be to find a way to come back to England. I'd like to see a way for him to sort of
make amends with his family but I think it's it gets harder and harder as the years go by let's put it that way and I think that William is going to be the decider of that and I think William has a very tough view of the whole situation which is the betrayal of Harry is not something that can be remedied
Why is this something that you keep coming back to, the royal family? I mean, obviously, where you started in the UK, you sort of brushed up against it. But why has it been an enduring sort of interest?
Well, lots of reasons. First of all, when I write about the royals, it enables me to write about a lot of other things, too, right, which do fascinate me. Class, you know, British society, celebrity culture. These things all pertain to these royal stories, so that's very interesting to me.
The other thing that's very interesting to me is the ongoing human drama of real people with real feelings and hurts and pains and joys. intention with a monarchical system which is a thousand years old. So that is in itself extremely interesting. You know, there are people who are as human as you and I, but they're actually in this cage and somehow have to find a life inside it.
You could almost argue it's too cruel a predicament for modern humans.
As promised, I wanted to get back to your time editing the big magazines where you started. Anna Wintour, the great Vogue editor, is stepping down. She was there while you were at VF and The New Yorker. You're both women who've broken a lot of barriers, contemporaries at the time. How do you see her legacy?
I mean, I think Anna's really remarkable. I mean, she's got such an incredible work ethic. And I mean, she just, in a sense, I mean, she became Condé Nast. I mean, she went from being the editor of Vogue to being sort of... Connective tissue. Connective tissue for the entire company. And, I mean, hats off to her. That's obviously something she wanted to do.
I think it must have been a kind of a bit nightmarish, frankly, to be staying in that same environment as it changed and changed and changed. But, you know, she's always found a way to reinvent. I think her role, though, is a really difficult one because, you know, the whole question of a magazine company like Condé Nast has changed so utterly from the times when we were there.
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Chapter 7: What is Tina Brown's perspective on the royal family's challenges?
Because I think, look, again, I mean, I'm afraid, I hate to say it, but I think it's the sort of the sexist way of looking at women. I don't really know. I think it's the sort of condescending myth that makes men feel better sometimes because we're very threatening. And therefore, my success had to be wrapped around with a kind of somewhat belittling sort of rocket imagery.
I have to say that what used to amuse me really is that when I got awards as an editor, the citations were always so much more silly than those citations that men would get. It would be like, Cheney Brown is the buzzy, you know, irreverent editor. It's like, excuse me, I just published a 30,000-word piece about, you know, an El Salvador atrocity, you know.
And I'm still like the buzzy, like as if I'm some kind of a, you know, can-can dancer or something, you know. But I've sort of got used to that now. You hate that word. I've seen you in your writing say that you just hate that word buzzy. It's a silly word. You know, the whole thing about buzz is— is people are talking about what you've written, okay? Isn't that what we all want?
You want to land into silence? You want to publish something into a sort of cosmic darkness out there? You know? If I published a magazine and people weren't talking about it, I'd failed, you know? So, yeah, no, so I... I sometimes sign my letters the Earth, Wild, Queen and Buzz.
The once in future, perhaps. I am wondering what your take is on this current media moment where we're seeing... a lot of very fraught relationships between media organizations and people with money. The LA Times, The Washington Post, David Ellison, the son of Larry, one of the richest men in the world who is now in charge of Paramount and CBS.
And obviously, outlets, especially now, need to have a relationship with people with money, and they always have had that relationship. I just wonder, why do you think people like this get involved in journalism?
I wish that they would learn something about journalism before they leap in and think that they can. just simply by journalism and then start to insert themselves. I mean, I am so bored, frankly, with sort of the uber-rich thinking that just because they're rich, they know everything about everything. Because they don't, you know.
And they're so disrespectful, frankly, of our business, if you like. You know, I don't think that I know anything about You know, I don't know. Rockets. Rockets or whatever it is that happens on Amazon's platforms. I mean, I would be humbled in the face of such brilliant engineers or whatever. But they have absolutely no respect. For us, absolutely none.
And that is my major beef, you know, essentially with the digital barons. I am probably burning with resentment about it at all times, actually. Really? Yes, absolutely. I find it intolerable, to be honest, because I have such respect for journalists and, for instance,
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Chapter 8: How does Tina Brown perceive the influence of the ultra-rich on media?
How are you? I'm in London and having a pretty great time, I have to say.
So since we last spoke, there have been, to say the least, some developments on the Prince Andrew front. King Charles stripped him of his last remaining titles. He is no longer a prince, evicted him from Royal Lodge. So are we at the end of the Prince Andrew sorry saga? Yeah.
Well, the problem is, I fear we're not. What you saw really in the last couple of weeks was the sort of result, in a sense, of the kind of conflict and dithering really of the king who didn't want to go as far as he had to go, sort of pushed by public opinion.
I mean, it would have been much better if he'd simply stripped him of all of his honors originally, you know, or rather that had been done in 2019 when his mother was there. Instead of which, you know, it's been allowed to kind of bleed out in one episode after the next. I do think that he actually should have left the country.
But how it's all going to work out, I don't think they've really solved it, no. It's better than it was.
I mean, isn't part of the problem with someone like Andrew that if you cut him off completely and you kick him out of the royal family utterly, then he is a loose cannon out in the world with no means of supporting himself and could wreak all sorts of havoc. Indeed.
No, I mean, he would have only his secrets to sell, essentially. And they can't allow that to happen. And the same is true of Fergie, who is such a wild, loose cannon. So they have to be kept sort of under control. But it's pretty hard for them to do that. And I think when William is king, you know, I think he might be even tougher on the situation.
I don't quite know what he could do to make it even tougher, but I think he will be. Are you a royalist? I'd certainly much rather have a royal family than, you know, a republic. I've come to see that actually countries which do have a monarchy tend to be more stable. And I think that, you know, they do rally the nation. They can change the mood by their sort of ability to just be above politics.
And I think being above politics is a huge asset right now to any nation.
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