Warlords, Espionage, and Disinformation | Introducing Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
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Pushkin.

And his shadow, it seemed to appear in the most unexpected places. In the investigation into a deadly poisoning, in the wake of an Austrian political scandal, in Libya's refugee camps, with mercenaries in Syria, oligarchs on the French Riviera, Bulgarian criminals in a dishevelled English seaside resort. I've been pulling together all these threads to try and understand who Jan Marsalek was and what it is that connects them all.

And I think I've got an explanation for you. It's a story that says as much about our own society as it does about the wildlife of one rogue individual. It's about power and corruption and the secret front line of a huge geopolitical game that affects us all. I hope you enjoy this preview. And if you do, find Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.

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AARP has a bevy of free skill-building courses for you to choose from, because the steps you choose to take today will help you love what you do in the future. That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org slash skills. It's a winter's day in 2018. Paul Murphy is standing in front of the mirror of the Gents' Lavatory at work. He's changing for lunch.

I'd kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I put a tie on for that occasion. Paul is in his mid-50s. He's got a slightly grizzled look about him. You wouldn't pick him out in a crowd, but that's an advantage in his line of work. In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc about the size of a penny. He takes his shirt off, grabs a piece of medical tape and fixes this disc onto his shoulder because this disc is a tiny microphone. He slips his white shirt back on

puts a jacket on top, and with one last glance in the mirror, he's ready for lunch. Paul is the head of investigations at the Financial Times in London. He takes a cab across town to Mayfair, to a venue called 45 Park Lane. It's one of those places that is priced to keep out ordinary people.

You know, it's all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and very few customers. Very few. It's Dubai style, essentially. As Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool. Despite four decades in journalism, this is a first for him. He's never actually worn a wire himself. It's very, very nerve-wracking.

You know, I've got a bug on me. You know, I didn't want our undercover team to get discovered. That would be hugely embarrassing. So I was, you know, I was nervous. The maitre d' escorts Paul across the room. And there, rising from his chair, smiling courteously and greeting Paul with a handshake, is the man he's come to meet, Jan Marselek. Very slim, athletic build, razor-sharp blue suit. Paul came here to set a trap, to get this successful businessman on tape.

But by the time they finish their meal, he wonders if he's the one who has walked into a trap. If I'm honest, I felt a bit amateurish, you know. We were out of our depth. This guy was very, very slick, controlled, careful, polished. And, you know, I'm not. My name is Sam Jones and I'm a journalist with the Financial Times. I'm a foreign correspondent based in Central Europe.

This lunch you've just heard about, it's the unexpected beginning of an investigation that has, in one way or another, preoccupied me for the past five years. At the centre of it is the man in the sharp blue suit, Jan Marsalek. A man who, I discovered, is so fascinated by risk and deceit that one identity, one life, wasn't enough for him.

I find it's often people like this, the most unusual people, who reveal universal truth. The fact that we're all inventors of our own personal narratives, how fictions can be stitched together to create realities. This tale begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe, from Libya to Austria, from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the Côte d'Azur to Moscow.

Jan Marcelec's life is a window into a hidden world of geopolitical power games, games which, in ways big and small, govern our lives, games which have never felt more relevant or the players of them harder to fathom. This is a story about espionage, about Europe, about Russia and, ultimately, America.

From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money, Season 3, Agent of Chaos. Episode 1, The Bribe. Paul Murphy hired me to work for the FT 17 years ago. It's been a long time since Paul was my actual boss, but he was and still is a mentor to me. All of my best habits in journalism, and some of my worst ones, I've picked up from Paul.

Pretty much since starting my career, every couple of months or so, I end up at lunch with him, in Sweetings. It's a noisy, crowded fish restaurant deep in the city, London's financial district. It's distinctly old school. Even a bowler hat wouldn't look out of place. And coming here, it underscores lesson number one in the Paul Murphy school of journalism. You have to get out of the bloody office. Get out of the bloody office. Young reporters in particular think that you can do everything digitally.

But actually, you get a lot more information of somebody face to face. You have to win people's trust. And one way of doing that is have lunch with people. It's a great social setting to develop, you know, a relationship with somebody who you need them to trust you. I want to paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul because it pays in this story to try and get the measure of people's character.

or at least to try and understand the version of themselves people present to the world and why. Although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch, he's definitely not just another city soak. Most people tend to miss the little silver ring he's wearing, a skull designed by his daughter. People miss a lot about Paul, but that's part of the trick. He's very good at being underestimated. And because of that, he's also very good at getting people to trust him, to talk to him and to give him information.

To understand why I was drawn into this story, you need to know a bit about the reporting that was dominating Paul's life back in 2018. He and his star reporter, Dan McCrum, were neck deep investigating a German company called Wirecard, a company that was run by the man in the razor-sharp blue suit, the man who Paul would eventually meet for lunch in Mayfair, Jan Marselek. Wirecard ran the financial plumbing behind billions of online transactions,

It was so successful at that point, it was even secretly plotting a takeover of Germany's biggest bank. So to the world, Wirecard was a booming digital payments company. To Paul and his reporter Dan, Wirecard was a huge fraud, and they were well on the way to proving it. But it was no normal fraud, because for months, Paul and Dan, they suspected they'd been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at Wirecard, from its base in southern Germany.

I mean, it's kind of like, almost sounds silly to recount it, but, you know, we were paranoid about being followed around London. We would get on and off tube trains quickly just in case somebody was getting on the same tube train as us. We would turn off our phones so that our location couldn't be tracked. Dan had already had his emails hacked and some of them leaked online. It was an attempt to embarrass and discredit him.

There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated attack on his reputation on social media. When Paul told me all of this over a series of lunches at sweetings, I guess he was doing so because he wanted to know if I had any contacts in private intelligence or even in the actual intelligence services, people who might be able to help. Because the subject I really write about, the subject that has become my specialism at the FT, is spying.

Paul was probably also telling me out of frustration, because back then he and Dan had hit a bit of a wall in their reporting. They'd published all they could about Wirecard based on the evidence they had gathered so far, but they still didn't have a smoking gun, and Wirecard's aggressive lawyers, Shillings, had meanwhile come down hard on them. Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit. It wasn't a great time. It was this sense that, what have we got ourselves into?

That was like a real low moment. Maybe I've got myself into a bit too much hot water here. You do start to worry what you've sort of brought down on your family. It was quite oppressive. There was this turning point for Dan. One of his sources rang him up to tell him he'd been roughed up on the street by two thugs right outside his children's school. They demanded to know if this source had passed on confidential information about Wirecard.

Hearing this sent Dan into a bit of a tailspin because suddenly he was worrying about the safety of his own family. My first thing was I sort of go home and obsessively change every single one of my passwords. Start checking all the security on my house. I mean, the worst moment is we had just moved into this rented house and I suddenly realised I haven't checked the lock on this patio door at the back of the house, which we'd never used.

And it just slides straight open. Like our house had essentially been unlocked for the last couple of months. And at that point, I really did start freaking out about security, who might be after us. I mean, I basically became really paranoid. It was right at the peak of this paranoia that something even stranger happened. Something that led to that lunch at 45 Park Lane. Paul was talking to one of his oldest sources. And...

We got onto the subject of Wirecard, just a completely, you know, innocent, relaxed conversation. And this guy just suddenly said, you know that they'll pay you a lot of money to stop writing about them. And I kind of laughed. And he stopped me and said, no, they will pay you $10 million to stop writing about them.

I don't know if you work in the kind of job or live the kind of life where you've ever been bribed, but even as a journalist for the FT, this doesn't really happen, let alone for such a ridiculous sum of money. I mean, for $10 million, what would you do? And as such, it takes Paul a while to realise that this is a serious offer.

"'How do you know this?' he asks. "'Through my son,' his source tells him. "'He's got to know someone at Wirecard pretty well. "'They've been out together a few times, carousing. "'He's called Jan Marsalek.' "'And then,' Paul's source, "'he says something which makes Paul clock that this offer is real. "'Marsalek is paying this guy more than $200,000 "'just to convey the message. "'You should meet him for lunch,' he suggests. "'So what does Paul say? "'Tell me when and tell me where.'

Paul has no intention of taking the bribe, but this back-channel offer, it seems to confirm everything they suspect about Wirecard. Absolutely confirmed all our suspicions. Which were that the company is a criminal enterprise. Absolutely. This was kind of tangible evidence. All they need now is for Marseillec to offer the bribe himself and to get that on tape. It's time for the FT to mount its own surveillance operation.

So that day at 45 Park Lane, the formal introduction's over, it's time to order. Steaks, the overpriced speciality of this place. Around £170 for a six-ounce filet mignon. Right from the start, though, Paul begins to feel that Marslake isn't quite what he was expecting. Paul is on edge, but he's not alone. To his relief, it's not long before he spots his undercover support team.

Three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies catching up over lunch. They've snagged a table just next to him and they look pretty convincing. One of the reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.

Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle, catching Jan Marselek in profile. You can hear the tenor of his voice, but the background noise means it's impossible to make out his words.

To me, watching this footage back, it's striking how animated he is. He turns from side to side, addressing everyone at the table as he talks. His face lights up. He's sort of holding court, emphasising his words with expansive hand gestures. He almost looks like a politician. The longer the conversation goes on like this, the more clear it becomes to Paul that Marseilleck is the one in control.

This guy is expansive and engaging, charming, but not at all defensive. There's no trace of anger or guilt or care. He gently protests about the FT's unfair coverage of Wirecard as if it's been an inconvenience. But his whole tone seems to be saying, let's put this behind us. As they settle into the meal, Paul nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain.

Eager to get something incriminating, even if it's just a hint of something, on tape and on camera. I certainly talked about the kind of aggression that the business had shown us. And we also talked about whether journalists were corrupt. And he absolutely assured me that he knew that journalists could be bought.

I remember saying, we don't take bribes. And I remember him very specifically saying, I know that, Paul. I know you don't. I've seen evidence that you don't take bribes. And I thought, oh, you've seen my bank account. I remember the kind of jolting that he was kind of like stating this so openly.

But the conversation continues in this vein, nothing concrete. The killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for, well, it's clear that Marsalek is far too savvy an operator to make it here and now at their first meeting. I pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be offered a bribe in front of these people. A bit of a damp squib, in a way. Yes, it was damp.

So Paul is now left wondering, what does Marsalek want from him? Why has this meeting happened if he's not actually going to make him some kind of offer? The lunch lasted about 90 minutes and at the end, Marsalek insisted on paying. And pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card of solid gold. Was he a bit of a show-off?

Well, yes. You know, we're in one of the most expensive restaurants in London, eating kind of 200 quid steak. And he was paying for the bill with a gold credit card. So, yeah. As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself for having thought he'd be heading back with something explosive. But he also realises that this experience actually hasn't been a busted flush. Far from it.

Meeting Jan Marslek has only intrigued Paul more. It's put him into 3D. There's something about Marslek he can't quite put his finger on. I felt I'd met somebody who was very controlled and confident, who was almost certainly corrupt. I basically said, can we do that again? And indeed, Paul does meet with him again. That's coming up after the break.

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When Paul first started telling me about Wirecard, I think I treated it all as entertaining table talk. Paul is a great teller of stories, and I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations team was up to. After he told me about meeting Marseillec though, something began to needle at me.

Just a feeling about what kind of person Marsalek was. A feeling I couldn't pin down. Until I heard about the second lunch. One month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marsalek again. This time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras. It was just the two of them. They met at the Lanesborough, another high-end hotel in London.

We talked about geopolitics. We talked about technology. We talked about finance. You know, we talked about the state of the world. He had interesting opinions and information on all these things. If I'm honest, at this stage, I'd become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know so many people. And I kind of, you know, I was thinking, well, you know,

He's probably not going to offer me a bribe. We're not going to just catch him. He's not that stupid. This guy is smart and he knows people and he has information. At this point, did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes, it did. But he was a charming man. Did you like him? Yeah. Yes, I liked him.

If Wirecard, if you hadn't have known it to be a fraud, do you think you would have sought to stay in touch with him? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, in actual fact, you know, my thinking after that second lunch, I did. I actually thought I'm going to, you know, develop this guy as a source. What did you think he was hoping to get out of a relationship with you?

Actually, it was very clear. We posed an existential risk to Wirecard. He knew that by, you know, building a relationship directly with me, that he could potentially stop us writing about them, or at least he'd get the kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking. So as Paul tells me about all of this, the feeling I get most is that a game is afoot.

And both Paul and Marseilleck are enjoying playing it. They've both established rapport. They're both working to build trust. But they also test each other, push, try to implicate each other in this polite conversation. And all of this grips me because in it I see so much of the kind of psychology that I've spotted glimpses of covering intelligence and espionage. I recognise the shape of this kind of interaction.

A certain amused matter-of-fact detachment from things, despite the stakes. Think about it. Marseilleck is lunching happily with a man who is trying to destroy the company he works for and put him in jail. And Paul? Well, in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a minor transgression. Something that almost felt to me like a textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual. An indiscretion that might later make you vulnerable. Because Paul does all of this, works Marseilleck,

behind the back of the lead reporter on the Wirecard project, Dan McCrum. Why were you dealing with Marsalek and not Dan? Dan and I are different characters. Dan is a guy, you know, he's tall and he has all his features in the right place. And if your daughter brought him home as a boyfriend, he'd be really happy. You know, he's a good guy, he's intelligent, he's articulate, he's well-educated.

But actually, Dan is lethal. Dan's like a smiling axe man. He's dangerous. He's forensic. Yes, he's absolutely forensic and he won't let it lie. And, you know, I have a different style. I'm much softer and I chat people up. I present myself as being very kind of clubbable. You know, all journalists have different styles. I mean, I think you're probably more comfortable...

playing a role as well, no? Possibly, yes. Reading between the lines, I think probably a doubting part of him was also wondering whether the Wirecard investigation was at a dead end. The threat of a lawsuit from Shillings meant their reporting had stalled, and if that was the case, it might be worth Paul pursuing Marsalek as a source of his own, someone who could help him with other stories. Then, around six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call from an intermediary,

Marseilleck conveys that he has something very interesting to offer. Documents. He hints at what they're about, and it sounds outlandish. But it's enough of a hint that Paul agrees to Marseilleck's suggestion that he fly out to Munich, where Marseilleck lives, in order to get them. I kept it completely private. Only just the managing editor at the DFT knew what I was doing. They meet at the Kieferchenker.

It's a Munich institution, patrician, reassuringly expensive, white tablecloths, panelled rooms, but warm and efficient service. And it's practically Marsalek's house restaurant. Jan was waiting for me outside. We went in. We had a little private room. I remember having salmon with caviar. And as they talked, Marsalek pushed a brown folder full of papers across the table towards Paul. But of course...

They finished lunch. Marsalek said he had to go back to the office.

The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms. And so I literally went down some stairs and found myself a little corner and sat down and opened the folder. These documents, they related to something that happened in the UK that spring. Something awful, which had shocked the whole country.

Yesterday afternoon, passers-by noticed two people, apparently unconscious, on a bench in Salisbury. The Salisbury poisonings. As a police presence remains here in the city whilst they investigate, residents and visitors to the city have been reacting to the news. Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something could happen like this in Salisbury.

An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created, a chemical that only a handful of government specialists knew about, Novichok 234. The spy was found half dead alongside his unconscious daughter, but thanks to some remarkable medical work, they both survived. Another local resident, a mother of three, did not. She died after coming into contact with the Novichok.

It had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle. The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence officer who had fled to Britain in 2010. Prime Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow was to blame. The government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS are officers from the Russian Military Intelligence Service, also known as the GRU.

The GRU, the main directorate, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, an organisation with goals that should have consigned it to Cold War history. Misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations. Under Vladimir Putin's long watch, the GRU has quietly grown in power and influence. In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia aggressively denied its involvement.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, meanwhile, launched its own investigation, sending its experts to Salisbury to pour over the evidence. They produced a highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis from the site. The dossier also included Russia's own version of events. These were the documents Paul now had in his hands.

It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail, you know, the Russian version of the story. And then the other very interesting part of the documents was the actual formula for Novichok. The chemical diagram for the poison, a technical outline for something that had been kept hidden from the world for decades, a weapon of mass destruction.

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Those documents that Marsalek handed over that day at the Kfoshenka, Paul showed them to me.

And, well, they're internal documents from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And these have been sort of illegally photocopied, right? Also, I think they're photocopies anyway. Yeah, they're all kind of photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation. They've all got barcodes on them. And this sort of big stamped watermark which says... This printout may contain OPCW confidential information warning. Right.

Yeah. They're all different copy numbers, though, as well, aren't they? Yeah, which is kind of curious. That's one is 16. This one's 21. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an international body based in The Hague. Almost all of the world's big military powers are signatories. Its job is to police and monitor weapons like Novichok to ensure they are never, ever used. What was going through your head when you kind of first pulled this out of the manila envelope that they were all in?

Well, I was looking for a story. You know, the Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end. Suddenly I had, you know, what clearly were kind of classified documents pertaining specifically to that event. There had to be a story in it. You know, that's what I was after. And I was struck at how detailed and careful and yet completely...

how fanciful the Russian version of events was. In the documents, the Russians made the case that the British had manufactured Novichok, because Salisbury is just down the road from Porton Down, a highly secure military research base. And the Russians, they argued that the British government had somehow leaked the Novichok from its own chemical research lab. You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where did he get this information? What did he say? He said he got it from a friend.

And he did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information, I should try him in future. That I'd be quite surprised at the sort of information he could access. So this was sort of like a little bit of an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know, that if you wanted to keep him on side and he could...

While all of this unfolded, Dan McCrum, the lead reporter on the Wirecard investigation, hadn't been sitting still. In fact, he'd just found his very own treasure trove of documents.

And these documents, they would change everything because they finally gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard was a fraud and that Marsalek was at the centre of it. So when Paul got back to London and Dan told him all of this, Paul knew it was time to go back on the offensive against Wirecard directly and also, therefore, that it was time to fess up to Dan and to tell him he'd been secretly lunching with Marsalek over the past few months.

Paul, you know, he'd gone to meet Marseilleck for lunch and he was kind of cultivating this parallel kind of, you know, relationship with Marseilleck. When did you find out about that? And what was your first thought? Oh, man, there are moments in life when you are taken by surprise. I basically think he hadn't wanted to like blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting the story because the important thing was to get the story out.

But it had reached the point where it was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn't mentioned that he had quietly been dining with Jan Marslek. I'm like, sorry, what? But then he goes, he's been flashing around top secret documents with a recipe for Novichok on them. I think my reaction was if he had just tried to tell me that Marslek had faked the moon landings. It was so completely out of left field.

That you're like, sorry, what did you just say? To be clear, we had no evidence that Marsalek actually had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings. But the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell. Not only because the documents made it clear that Marsalek was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud, but also because Marsalek had effectively chosen to disclose this. Marsalek pulled the spotlight onto himself.

And it made us realise how little we knew about him at all. At that point, we just kind of had this sense that Marsalek was this kind of man of action and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics. Warkaard's aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified, and they managed to trace it back to a private security company in Vienna, the capital of Austria and Marsalek's home city.

Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next few months battling to prove the fraud with the new documents Dan had received. But me? I was about to start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria. If I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought, then I could surely make some inquiries. We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle to all this. We just didn't know what the angle was.

We just didn't know which doors you had to knock on. We didn't know who you needed to get to. Yeah, well, it worked. I remember thinking you were mad. I just thought, OK, all right, I'm just going to go to Austria and start talking to people about Jan Marsalek. But, you know, you were right. Sometimes it's the smallest, most unpromising or unexpected little thread that you pull on that suddenly unravels something.

Sometimes that thread is just an intuition, a feeling about someone, a sense that there's definitely something more here I don't know about, but that I recognise the shadow of. As it turned out, this particular trace, well, it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn't just the sordid tale of one well-connected fraudster, but instead the tale of one of the biggest spy scandals to have hit Europe since the Cold War.

To this day, I remember that first note coming back from you just saying that you needed a secure channel to communicate. The detail you put in that first note was just mind-boggling, absolutely shocking. It was like a whole world just opened up. You know, this was no longer just about some weird German corporate. There was this kind of huge geopolitical kind of side to the story that was only just coming into view.

Maybe you've felt in recent years that the world is a less certain place, that from the background there are threats or worries you'd never had to think about before that are suddenly present. Wars that look like they might tip out of control, radical politicians tearing at the threads of civil society, lies turned into truth by money. Well, this story is, in some senses, an accounting of that, a story that can sometimes make you realise how tissue-thin the idea of a stable, law-abiding society can be.

one that's governed by economic, political and moral rules we've all agreed on. It's a story about what kind of people get drawn into the world on the other side of that, and what kind of world that is, a space carved out by crime and corruption, where money and power are unchecked by laws, or borders, or markets. That kind of world might sound terrifying, but to some people it's irresistible. To some people it's not an alternative world at all, it's the real world.

Coming up this season on Hot Money. I know politics is corrupt. I know everything. I know that. I know that. I believe to know that. But this is too much. I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it. And perhaps misdeeds and misbehavior is stopped. Very fast, actually, he started then talking about his experience in Syria.

He definitely has a view that he's operating with complete freedom to do whatever he likes. I don't know if they followed me to my home. The decision was very simple. It was a choice between being killed or in prison. And the other option was just to try to get real freedom. How much of it was an act? How much was genius? How much was learned? How much was instinctive? I often ask myself now, did I...

know the true Jan at all. Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones. The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Maureen Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shikurji. Fact-checking by Keira Levine.

Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira, with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Our show art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines-McQuaid and Matthew Garrahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Rula Kalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn. I'm Sam Jones. This is an iHeart Podcast.