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Hear Ezra Koenig and Foster the People’s Mark Foster Discuss Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy Theories on Beats 1 Radio

Ezra Koenig regularly hosts a Beats 1 radio show called “Time Crisis” and for today’s episode, the Vampire Weekend songwriter was joined by Foster the People frontman Mark Foster, as Pitchfork points out. Foster the People recently turned heads in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death when the band claimed on Twitter that the former Donald Trump and Bill Clinton acquaintance’s death was a deep-state coverup, using the social network to promote various conspiracy theories.

“I was looking at the Snopes article about it, and there’s the Foster the People tweet in the Snopes article about it. In some ways, you’ve become—whether or not you wanted to be—your the voice of that particular theory,” Koenig says in the episode. “Was it the photo that set you off? What about before you saw the photo, did you already think, ‘I bet he’s not even dead?'”

“I think you go through all the realms of possibilities of what happened, what could have happened,” Foster says. “And look, I’m not a forensics expert—I put out a fucking tweet, you know what I mean? Just being a musician that wanted to put out a tweet and start a public discourse about this guy. But you look at the photo, and it’s not the same guy!”

Koenig makes a point to stress that he doesn’t necessarily believe the theory Foster discusses. “I’m a very live and let live open-minded kind of guy,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Hey man I don’t believe everything The New York Times says, like sure, tell me why you think that is. Koenig and his co-host Jake Longstreth compared the Epstein conspiracy theories to historically popular conspiracy theories like those pertaining to September 11 and the JFK assassination.

“I guess I would say that I feel like we’re living in an age of misinformation,” Foster concluded at the end of the episode. “People need to do their own research and dig and not believe everything that you hear.”

Check out today’s episode of Time Crisis here.