Journalistic Ethics and Final Reflections

Hello and welcome back to the Louis Theroo Podcast. Today I'm joined by esteemed writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radan Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books, including Say Nothing, which explores The Legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Empire of Pain, his deep dive into the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, Patrick's reporting often sits somewhere between investigative journalism and narrative storytelling. He writes about, quote, I think this is his quote crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane, separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial . Patrick is also the host of the popular 2020 podcast, Wind of Change, in which he investigates whether or not the song of the same name by the scorpions was secretly written by the CIA. Personal note, I've read several of Patrick's books. I'm a reader. You know this about me. The first one was the Sackler family one, Empire of Pain. I'd made my own documentary about the opioid crisis called Heroin Town. So I was already interested. Then I read the one about Northern Ireland, then I read the collection of profiles, and now I've read the new one called London Falling A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family Search for Truth . This all comes up in the chat, but he has a real gift for storytelling, like his ability to unf url a narrative in a way that's completely engrossing. I dragged the book around on holiday and it was like a little teddy bear and I'd find cracks in my day, like little moments where I could just read a bit You know that feeling when you're stuck into a book and it just you feel or all all day you've got that feeling of looking forward to the next bit that you can read. Oh that's a big nice blurb for Patrick. You can put that on the paperback. It was my teddy birth, says Louis Thoreau. We recorded this conversation in late January this year at Spotify HQ. He arrived fresh off the plane from New York, a little jet lagged, but ready to discuss his new book . A quick warning: this conversation contains some strong language and adult themes, all that, as well as much else besides coming up. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We do a lot of our shopping these days online. I've often thought in another life I could have had a blossoming online shop on Shopify . What would I sell? Maybe my chart topping books, some TLTP bingo cards for the Die Hard Podcast fans. I could finally centralize all that bootleg merch. Pillows, cushions, t-shirts , cards in one place. And where would it be? On Shopify. If you want a better experience shopping online for you and your customers, Shopify is the answer. It's the commerce platform behind millions of your favorite thriving businesses like Gymshark and even Matt el, the international toy making conglomerate. But it doesn't matter how big or small your business is, the big bonus of using Shopify is that they'll help you every step of the way from designing your first website to finding customers, marketing new products, managing inventory, shipping internationally and beyond important for my many fans overseas. They're the ultimate business partner, and the best part of all, you can do all that in one place . See fewer shopping carts go abandoned on those websites. You know what I mean? I can't deal with this. I'm going to stop doing it. And earn more with Shopify. Sign up for your one pound per month trial today at shopify dot C O dot UK slash Louis That's Shopify dot C ot UK slash Louis Thank you for um the pleasure of reading your book. I read it over Christmas and um just parenthetically, uh because I this is how hot a commodity it is. They actually printed my name on every page. Just in case you're in any doubt. Like a Hollywood script, right? Right. My kids are conf confusedused., The theyy're teenagers. They''rere like like, they, Dad, why does it say Louis through on all the pages? And they thought it was like a new affectation. Like I'd got got it monogrammed. Right, exactly. There you go. Like from now on, I only read books that have been personalized. So I'd love to talk about that. I'd love to talk about some of your other books. Um say nothing about uh the troubles and um Empire of Pain as well, some of your profiles. But but since you're here to promote a book and because it's the newest piece of work and it's so great, um, let's talk about London Falling, A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family Search for Truth. Tell me a little bit about um how you came to write it and what excited you about it and what you feel what you feel will connect with people why why you feel it's kind of worth reading. Yeah, I mean I so I found that whenever I go looking for ideas, I don't know what it's like for you, but I I never find them when I go looking for them. They tend to find me and in this case I had written an essay for the New Yorker, not an original piece of reporting. I was actually writing mainly about other people's books, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine , a few years ago, about the oligarchs in London and the way, the sort of awkwardness for the UK when the invasion happened, that it emerges that there's this group of people who are very closely connected in some cases with Putin and the regime, um who also are very kind of tied into the economic and political life here in England. So I wrote an essay about that, the awkwardness of that, and the ways in which this kind of rush of new money, new foreign money, had transformed this city over the last 25 years. I lived here uh 25 years ago. And so I sort of knew I knew London on the cusp of these changes. And so I those kinds of things have been kind of floating around in my head. And then two summers ago, I lived for the summer in London. I was producing a television series called Say Nothing based on my book. And I was on set one day, and I fell into conversation with a guy who was a guest of the director. They just happened to be visiting that day. And um, we got to chatting and he said, I might have a story for you. And what he said was, there's a family that I'm very close with who live in London, and they had a 19-year-old boy who died a few years ago, and he died in mysterious circumstances. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened to him, and they they made this awful discovery, which is that he had had a secret life that they didn't know about. He had been moving about London as a teenager pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch . And honestly, he had said about that much to me, and I knew this is my next thing because it felt like a way to look at some of those kind of big 30,000 foot issues I was interested in, but through a very intimate story. I mean, there was a question in my mind about will the family do they want to tell this story. They hadn't spoken to anybody about it in the press um up to that point. And so I had to meet them and there was a whole process of kind of figuring out the degree to which they were comfortable sharing. The Brettler family. The Brettlers. Matthew and is it Rochelle? Rochelle, exactly. And they've got two boys of whom the younger one is the central protagonist, and he's well, he's dead at the start of the story. The point you intersect with it. His name's Zach , although he's passing himself off as Zach Ismailoff. There's a lot of themes, some of the themes to do with that I could certainly connect to as a father of three boys, uh kind of the control, but also the lack of control you have over your children, the way in which they become independent people, people you don't quite recognize. And you sort of imagine that you will be be a model for them in some way. In some you know, this seems like the reverse . Uh the teenage Zach seems to react to everything he feels is inadequate about his parents, his dad in particular. He feels like they're not rich enough, they're not impressive enough, and he kind of embraces a personality type I found recognizable from the internet and you touch on it but you don't go deep into it this sort of somewhat Andrew Tate adjacent Hustlebro uh persona . Uh how much of the internet is part of the story, do you think? You talk about him following that stuff on Instagram, but you don't get the sense he's been particularly radicalized by social media, or it was that present , do you think? Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean I think the internet is some of this is about the way I write, but I, you know, there's certain things I I just I don't want to do in anything but a very light touch. And so I didn't want the headline here to be, you know, the internet is taking our children away from my eggs. Exactly, exactly. Um, but yeah, of course that's there. But it but it starts before that. I mean, Zach was born in 2000 , right? So he comes of age at a very specific moment. It's a specific moment in London, leaving aside the internet or anything like that, where you have a kind of um , you know, certain neighborhoods in London, you walk around them and it's super cars everywhere and just huge amounts of kind of conspicuous wealth. And there's a kind of gaudy sort of blinginess, right? That is just part of the landscape in a way that was not , I think, necessarily always true in the past. And so there's that. And then there's movies. So he grows up and he he loves the Wolf of Wall Street. He loves this movie War Dogs. I checked with my teenage boys. Apparently those are very much um documents of that culture. Another one is um uh Nightcrawler as well. Oh interesting. Are you familiar with the Sigma thing? It's the Sigma archetype.. Yeah So it's this idea of having a sigma protagonist, kind of lone wolf protagonist who violates society's norms. Yes. And might be a sociopath, but that's okay. Right, right. Yeah. American Psycho is another one. Yeah, American Psycho, absolutely. I mean it's a kind of um Yeah, the Internet didn't . No, I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at. Right. And and the funny thing is that the and listen, I love The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a fantastic film. It's doing something that I think is a little too cute, right? Which is that it's ostensibly and this is true for any of these things, right? Like ostensibly they are standing in moral judgment of these people that you're that they're depicting. But in fact , for a lot of people who maybe are kind of unwary or unsophisticated consumers or just teenage boys, it's an aspirational thing, right? Like when when the film, particularly of American Psycho , isn't saying in any kind of explicit way , look at Patrick Bateman, you should aspire to be him, right? And yet there is something about the nature of these things where when it's Christian Bale and he's, you know, dressed in great suits and and has, you know, terrific abs and all the rest of it, it's possible for somebody who's young and impressionable to get kind of ensorciled by that a Oh yeah. I never heard that. I use it all I'll probably use it again today. Well insorceled, just what it sounds like. That sounds like a Scientology . It's one of my go-tos . So the I I think that it's the slipperiness of the algorithm where you might have a kid who has like a bit of a penchant for that stuff. And then what Instagram does is it selects for that and it just shows you more and more and more of it. Rogues is the title of one of your anthologies. It's a fine line. I think doing justice to the charisma that many of these uh sociopathic types m may have while not falling into the trap of glamorizing. Uh it's not a science, right? It's it's just uh you've got to find your way pick your way through that. It's really striking as well how you can I often think about this is gonna seem way off piece, but in the Lord of the Rings, uh Saruman, he he kind of goes to the dark side because he looks too much into the palantir, I think. And um I think about something like Glen Gary Glen Ross, which in in certainly in the movie you've got this speech given by the uh Alec Baldwin character at the beginning. Do you remember? He goes first prize, uh a new car, second price, set of stake knives. Third prize, you're fired. You're fired. And uh it's written as a kind of pastiche of a certain sales bro culture and a critique, right? But then it turns out salespeople I I've heard would listen to that to pump themselves up. Yeah. And now Mammoth, the the writer, has kind of gone to the other side. Yeah. He's embraced a kind of pro-Trump alpha Yeah, I think it's very easy to kind of pass through the looking glass. And people do this all the time. I mean, interestingly enough, that very speech you're talking about, I I wrote this book, Empire of Pain, about Purdue Pharma, which was selling this quite addictive drug. Um, and they had this kind of army of kind of marketing people who would go out and try and persuade doctors to prescribe it. And there were training sessions that I found the PowerPoints of in which they would say, A, B, C, always B c losing. They were quoting this satiric what had been a satirical scene in Glen Greg Glenn Ross about the kind of moral vacuity of salespeople selling, and it's similar to Wolf of Wall Street, selling garbage properties in that case to to fools, right? That's right. And saying this is what we should try and emulate. Selling swampland. Um but but Mammoth went full Ceraman if you want that analogy to what people do. Uh one of the deep themes across your work is that many of the institutions we rely upon, governments or panels of experts in the world of fine wine or the art uh connoisseur community that they're so hollowed out or so corrupted that they've become indistinguishable from their opposite. Um you talk in one of your stories about Guinea , uh the West African nation where the national mint is printing counterfeit money, which is kind of the perfect encapsul ation of a hijacked state. Uh but it versions of that exist through lots of other uh uh uh of your stories. Another example is the ways in which I think it's in London Falling maybe any long-term criminal, it's alleged, uh, you know, invol ved in organized crime is going to have to be at some level an informant. Yeah. I mean, this is something that a that a former Met detective told me. But the um the argument that he was making was that there are these relationships between cops and crooks that are mutually beneficial, the really good, like professional criminals, the ones who want to have any kind of career longevity. They figure out pretty early on that you want those relationships. That that's your kind of stay out of jail card. Um in a strange way, it's the kind of beginners, it's the ones who don't realize. It's the unsophisticated players who maintain their criminal principles and never do any horse trading with the authorities who flame out quickly and end up behind bars. I mean the temptation is to fall into some kind of spirit of absolute moral relativism. Do you know what I mean? Like I I w w when you collapse the categories, you're like, well, it's all pointless. Like the rule of law is a is a fiction. Shall we try and push back on that a bit? I mean you're asking me at the wrong moment in recent history to push back on that. But yes. you know, I'm an American and it's twenty twenty six and um the last year has seen a kind of buccanal of lawlessness and sort of the kind of evisceration of one norm after another, one institu,tion after another, a whole series of what I had grown up, you know, maybe naively thinking of as pretty bedrock principles and kind of durable aspects of the like institutional architecture of life that turn out to be just much more kind of vulnerable and permeable and corruptible than I would have than even I would have thought. And I think where you're going with your line of questioning is that I was a pretty cynical guy Uh it's certainly the case that um to take one example, you know, if the United Nations calls something a a a war crime or then a genocide, the situation in Gaza. And then the U S uh says actually we don't really not only do we not care, we don't really recognize the UN. I was reading this morning about have you been following the whole, is it called the Board of Peace? Uh yeah, and who's who's the who are they inviting? Uh well uh Orban and Millet of Argentina Orban of Hungary and Millet of Argentina, the two have said we're we're on board, we'll do this. Yeah. Uh uh no one else has confirmed, I don't think. Uh-huh. Intriguingly, Netanyahu has some questions because I think there's there's some participation from states that they're not happy about. Uh if you pay th a billion, did you know this part? If you pay a billion dollars, you get permanent membership. Table sticks. But I in the context of a kind of what it it's it's being characterized as an attempt to de kind of uh displace the the UN and become a kind of international. But this is but isn't it I mean it's funny. My m one of my sons um over the holidays read Animal Farm and we were talking about it. And I think what's so bizarre is that like I grew up reading these books in school. It was part of my vocabulary. There was a sense of , you know, in in kind of backwards eras in history, backwards societies, these kinds of things happen where you sort of invert the meaning of language or you create an institution that ostensibly does something and in fact its whole purpose is to negate the principle for which allegedly it stands. Um I guess I had some again like pretty naive sense that we'd learned that we'd sort of moved on from that kind of thing. Or that if it was happening, it was happening kind of in the margins and we could argue about it in like the pages of the New York Review of Books, but but not that it would be so flagrant. Aaron Powell You know, they say of politicians as they do of surgeons, too, funnily enough, that they skew surprisingly high on sociopathy. Have you ever heard that? Uh I hadn't, but it but it doesn't tell me. Well we're gonna go to war and thousands will die, but it's better than the alternative altern.ative Um well let me find another way in. You did a profile of Larry Gagosian, the art dealer, who is another of these figures, right? Yeah. How would you describe him? Very Sigma. Very sigma. Yeah. I mean Larry. Larry's a good example, right? He Yeah, absolutely. He's one of these characters. So this for for those who um who are not familiar with the name, Larry Gugosin is um the biggest art dealer in the world. I argue in this New Yorker piece, probably the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He's worth billions. Yeah. And he's got this massive operation and very wealthy uh clients, these kind of masters of the universe, these it's generally men, men who want for nothing. And Larry has something David Geffen is a big one . I mean a as is Roman Abramovich and various others. But he's figured out a way to um ensorcil these men. Um I've forgotten what it means. I'm I'm I've I've I've gotten I've gotten two use of these in. Um by the third, just by sheer context, you'll have figured it out. He's kind of figured out that you get these very, very wealthy people who want for nothing and they have all the yachts that you could want and all the homes that you could want. But eventually what happens is that, you know, there's a Picasso and there's only one of them and it's from this particular period and the other guy wants it, or there's a climped that they can't have . And I think one of his secret weapons is that he just lacks introspection. Like never mind self-doubt. Just introspection. But geniuses, I think he's characterizing Gagosian as a kind of genius. Geniuses have the fewest moving parts. Gagosian is simple. He's basically a shark, a feeding machine. And G osian has also said he avoids self reflection because that quote is how you lose your edge holy of these types of people could we say that about? Who does that remind you of? Right? Yeah. Who we Trump, right? Just checking. I thought you were gonna see . But see, I guess, I guess listen, I think that is a prevailing type in the world. I think that those types of people have really thrived in recent decades and that they're kind of over-indexed in the sort of media and social media worlds. I mean, I remember at one point my young my younger boy, when he was probably about seven, said something about Elon Musk. And I just thought, can I swear on this show? Sure. Like, how do you even know the name of some I when I was Did he say something approving? Yeah, kind of vaguely, but but it was more for me just the you're seven. It's not a name you should know. There's no reason why that personality should enter your worldview. And then you have this other thing. So I have a friend who's a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley, and he I'm trying to think because I don't want to get him in any trouble, but he had had the experience of working at a number of different companies where the people he was working for seemed to be lunatics. And he made a remark to me at some point about how it's not a coincidence, it's not an accident. There there are generations of people who move to Silicon Valley and start companies. And they're looking at people like Musk or Steve Jobs, like whatever you think of what Steve Jobs achieved, kind of a lunatic, right? So but they those are aspirational figures for those people. There's a sense that actually you have to be a maniac in order to succeed. So there's this kind of strange self-selecting redoubling of this stuff. And listen, we uh I you know, in in the U.S., you have people , prominent people saying essentially that like the notion of empathy is a kind of left-wing conspiracy or like a left-wing fabrication. I think Vance has said something to that effect. I mean, there are a number of people, certainly people like Charlie Kirk. I mean, there are there is a sense that kind of having empathy for other human beings is a a sort of in like inherently suspect. Did you read J.D. Vance's book when it came out? Hill Billy Elogy. Came out like twenty twelve, maybe. He was sort of LARPing as a liberal or at least a political agnostic. So can I make a a confession? Um please. Just you and me and everybody who's listening to this. So JD Vance, salt of the earth, you know, skeptical of New York City and the liberal elite there. I was at the book party for Hillbillyology. Stop it. At the Upper West Side apartment of Amy Chua, Vance's Yale Law School professor and mentor. Um and you know, such Who wrote who wrote the Tiger? Tiger Mom. Tiger Mom. And such um such yeah, salt of the earth Americans as Tom Brocaw and uh Wendy Dang were in attendance. There was a there was a kind of a lavish sushi spread. I just thought this was funny later on when Vance would talk about how you know New York City was a hellscape that you should avoid at all costs. Wow. You were I was there. I was there at the beginning. That was a different Vance, was it? I mean, was it? I don't know. This my book is about this kid, Zach Brettler, who was a bit of a chameleon and could become different things at different moments. And I don't mean to compare them in too narrow a sense, but I think that, um I think Vance has always been opportunistic. And I think at different moments he's pursued the opportunity that presented itself. And at that particular moment, to be the kind of Trump whisperer, you know, the sort of conservative coded guy who could explain the sense of disillusionment that the white working class felt to upper west side liberals. He seemed very comfortable in that role . Um I mean we could talk about more about London Fourn, but I wanna I wanna leave people with the pleasure of kind of finding out for themselves. Um we should talk about Empire of Pain. I remember coming to it uh having read Say Nothing , you know, I knew about the Sackless. There'd been quite a lot of coverage in the New York Times. This uh dynasty of pharmaceutical pioneers, they'd created various drugs. The most notoriously that it was uh oxy Contin. And then they they it became clear fairly early that OxyContin was being widely abused . Um they used to call it Hillbilly Heroin. Yeah um and uh it was suggested that they the family had knowingly covered this up and aggressively marketed the drug at points where they should have definitely stopped, and then covered their tracks, made millions. Um Billions. It's a such a shocking story. And I mean you've made this point in the past, but it obviously the striking thing is in a world where we're used to seeing you know il,legal drugs as the problem . It seems it seemed to s outstrip by far the damage that was being done. Although since then it's become it's kind of that contagion of addiction has been fed by um illegal drugs. Many of them moved on to heroin after the um And eventually to Fentanyl. And fentanyl after because the the rules were tightened up. How how do you want to characterize your that story and how how how are you connected with it? So I came to it in a weird way. I mean it it's it's funny, it's a thing that has some resonance um now that uh you know the US has this new colony, Venezuela. Um the fifty-first state. Exactly. So So I had written a lot about drugs for um The New Yorker, for the New York Times Magazine. I wrote a couple of big pieces about the Sinaloa drug cartel. I was always very struck by there's a kind of particular idiom. I don't think the US is alone in this, but we are kind of an exceptional country in that we're the biggest consumer of illegal drugs on the planet. And we have this tendency to describe the drug trade as if it is this thing where drugs kind of come into the country. They're they start in the south, they flow north, they come into the country, and then we have no choice but to do them. And so it's this kind of purely supply driven thing. Aaron Powell Right. If we kill enough drug dealers, then the drugs are exists. And I was always curious. I mean, when I was doing the work on the Cinolo dark cartolers, part of what was so interesting to me was that all those drugs come into the US and they and they change hands and money changes hands, and then there's all this money that flows south or is laundered in the US. And then all the weapons, like there's, you know, nobody knows exactly how many people have died in the drug wars in Mexico over the last 20 years? But it's like well over 100,000 people have been murdered. And statistically, the majority of those killings have happened with American guns that are purchased in the United States and then brought south across the border. But we never talk about some crisis of guns going south into Mexico. So all of that stuff was kind of on my mind. And then I noticed that in around 2010, you suddenly see, if you talk to law enforcement in the US, they'll say suddenly there was more heroin on American streets. 2010 is the year. Suddenly there's this flood of Mexican heroin on the streets of the US. And because of the way, the kind of myopic way in which we think about these things, kind of hilarious ly, these like DEA guys would be like, you know, what are these crazy Mexicans thinking now? Like what you know, why is it that they've suddenly decided to just start fire hosing heroin at us without any thought to the notion that it might have been driven by demand. So it turns out it's driven by demand. They're exquisitely sensitive to I mean, these cartels are very sophisticated organizations . And there was an uptick in demand for heroin. And the reason was there was a generation of Americans who would never have like taken a, you know, bought heroin on the street and taken a syringe. People have needle phobias, like they're, you know, but they started with FDA-approved doctor -prescribed drugs like oxycontin, these um opioid painkillers. And that was kind of the on-ramp, much more approachable. And then they became addicted. And then once you're addicted, and particularly if your source of supply starts, you know, if your your doctor's not writing you more prescriptions or what have you, it becomes harder to get the drugs. Then it's a kind of easy move over to I interviewed so many people who would tell the story about how I never would have started with heroin. But when you're um experien cing withdrawal from oxycontin and somebody offers you a bag of heroin, it's an easy decision. And so that was actually the way in, was finding out that the opioid crisis had started with this drug oxycontin, and then learning that this, the OxyContent was produced by this company, Purdue Pharma, which I'd never heard of. But then I learned that Purdue Pharma was owned by the Sackler family, and I knew the Sackler name because I had, you know, I grew up in Boston. I used to, I took a year off after high school and I worked in Harvard Square, and there's a Sackler museum at Harvard. And um I used to go to the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I lived in London, and the Sackler name is everywhere here. British Museum, V A, you name it. Talk about addiction. They had an addiction to putting their names on buildings. Yeah. Um and you read it with a kind of sense of kind of growing rage, uh confusion. There's this sort of what seem to be outrageous examples of injustice or corruption on virtually every page. Nevertheless, you may disagree. Like I you don't really think like, oh, this is all driven by the psychopathy of a single person. It feels as though it exists on a spectrum with kind of normal corporate behavior? Do you think that's fair to say? Or do you think it's something more? My point is really that it's an example of massive wrongdoing that exists within the framework of uh social norms of a sort. Oh man. I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. I think it all happens inside a system, right? In which you have the FDA, which I think has been kind of thoroughly corrupted by the industry that it's Got, you know, essentially the buying off of members of Congress, which happens, all that kind of stuff happens where the kind of the system itself is desiccated and not looking out for people, kind of similar to what we're talking about in London Falling. But there's something else going on, um where let me analogize. It's a weird analogy, but bear with me. There's a friend of mine named uh David De Jong who wrote this fantastic book that came out about probably five years ago. It's great. It it's just what it says on the tin . The title of the book is Nazi billionaires. Okay. So you can kind of it's like a snakes on a plane. Like you you sort of you know So what it's about is um these um you know this the generation of of businessmen in um in Germany who they see the rise of of the Nazis and they are not ideological Nazis, they're not ideological anti-Semites, but they're business people and they're thinking about these corporations that they have. And they basically think, well, we're gonna have to find a way to accommodate these people. And I remember at the point, you know, about a year ago where the tech titans were all bending the knee to Trump and showing up at the White House. It was an extraordinary moment. Incredible moment. Yeah. And there were these holdouts. But he and Teal is ideological, right? Whereas these other guys. Totally to critique Trump and then seem to have a damas ine conversion. Somebody said at the time, there was some WAG who who said at the time, you know, w w what's the point of having fuck you money if you never get to say fuck you, right? Like that the the wealthiest people in the world all sort of kowtowing to Trump. And I remember having this kind of terrible moment where I thought to myself, God, I I wish I could take David De Young's book, Nazi Billionaires, and send it to these guys so that they'll know what their children and grandchildren are going to think of them because this is exactly the same calculation they're making. But then I remembered that if you read the second half of his book, it's about how those families, the descendants of those families, are now the wealthiest families in Germany today. Those companies are now some of the most us prospero corporations in Germany today. And so, in a kind of scary way, like if we sent Mr. Zuckerberg a copy of Nazi Billionaires and he read it all the way to the end, he would say, okay, note taken, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing because the answer here is you can create generational wealth for your family. That this is that this is actually the shrewd tactic. And that I I think unfortunately is is just a a sort of strain that runs through not just America I mean it's particularly pronounced in American culture, but everywhere here as well. That kind of I'm gonna put my blinders on what I'm thinking about is my shareholder value and my family's generational wealth and everything else kind of be damned, right? Um and I listen, I grew up, you know, reading books and movies in which those people got comeuppance, but I think if recent experience is anything to go by, they don't. The Sacklers did. Up to a up to a point. Up to a point. Yeah. Because they extracted them having been everything kinda caught up with them and uh vast numbers of lawsuits were brought by r local government s and others um civil suits for the cost of dealing with the epidemic that resulted. Worth saying in passing, I I think I think the opioid crisis killed more people than than COVID. I don't know. Do you have a number for that? I don't have the COVID number off the top of my head is the problem, but I think COVID probably killed more all in. But in the US, I think. I mean sorry I meant US So in the in the US, in terms of the opioid crisis, I mean, nobody knows exactly, but you're talking about three quarters of a million people or thereabouts. It's certainly it's more people than have died in all the wars more Americans than have died in all the war wars that the US has fought since World War II? So there were the lawsuits, a lot of the money was put aside and won from uh Purdue Farm. Purdue Farm, I think, went bankrupt. But the family members to a great extent extric ated themselves and their and their cash. A big theme across your books is the idea that the phrase shell corporation comes up a lot. The idea that people can live ostensibly uh lavish lifestyles with hundreds of millions at their disposal, but on paper, there's no money to go after. So they are immune, impervious to any kind of financial uh accountability. It's quite frustrating. It is. You know that phrase, I don't know if it's Mark Twain where it's like it's very hard to persuade something of something if his salary depends on him not believing it. Right. And and I wonder if, you know, if you imagine, this is gonna sound weird, but if you'd been born into the Sackler family. And so your the whole family culture is like this is what we do. You know, it they kind of groom themselves into a kind of pathology. And not only does their salary depend on it, but hundreds of millions of uh or billions of dollars. Do you suppose if you'd been born into that family you would have gone along with it? Well this is the um I'm really interested in denial and I'm interested in the kind of the stories that we tell ourselves about the choices that we make. And I don't know, I probably have stories like that about myself. You probably have stories about yourself. I mean, I I think any of us, you you get up in the morning, you look yourself in the mirror, I've I've known to believe the best about ourselves, right? Of course. Of course. And you you want to I think in in real time , we're all kind of living in our own individual virtual realities in which we're sort of tailor ing the narrative. And part of the reason I think I gravitate to some of these people who I think are kind of morally monstrous is that they don't start out morally monstrous. They they get there by increments. And I'm really interested in the sort of the kind of angles of deviation and and and what they're saying to each what they're saying to themselves and to other people at each step along the way. So I give you so many examples, but to take one in this case, um there's this kind of amazing moment where um David Sackler, third generation Sackler , his father's Richard Sackler, uh, who ran Purdue Pharma during the really bad years. And um David's on the board, he's very complicit in all this stuff. And he gets hauled before Congress and he has to, he's he's testifying before Congress over Zoom. Does he want to be there? He's a lawyer at all, what have you ? And um one of the Congress people has sort of done his homework and he says, um, is it true, Mr. Sackler, that in such and such a year, that is, after the company was already in trouble and already facing all these lawsuits, in such and such a year you spent twenty-three million dollars in cash buying a home in Bel Air, California. And David Sackler very defensively says, no, hang on, that that was an investment property. I've never spent a night in that house. And it's this thing where he thinks that that's a self-absolving right thing to say. He's so out of touch that he thinks that saying like, oh that that old thing, that old 23 million dollar house, that guy, I just bought that as an investment. I've never spent a night there. That that'll somehow like be a form of um you know, like moral expiation. That's what I'm interested in, is how people get that deluded. And listen, you don't I mean-, I don't mention Trump in that book, but he is there in the background, and you look at Trump, and sometimes he says these things that seem so totally wackadoo, but you realize it's that he's living in this little cocoon in which anybody who dares to hint at the truth gets fired. Right. And so like over time, I think that's actually quite debilitating. Like you're not a you're not d delusional in a clinical sense, but in a kind of you've sort of socially engineered a situation in which you kind of are delusional. You're in a feedback loop. This term gaslighting which is so overused, but you are self gaslighting. Have you met Trump? Never. If they often if he said I want you to I I like Patrick Redden Keefe, I like his articles . Uh You've lost me already in this hypothetical, but keep going. Um I think you'd find a lot of interesting things that I'm doing. Um would you take the access? You know, I um I tend to think that access is really overrated. Access is overrated, it said. That was the first thing I wrote in my notes. I love that. As someone who's completely dependent. I I l sort of live on off of access, for good or ill. But why is it overrated? I mean if you take the So if you weren't here, this would be a better interview. Yeah, it could be. Could be. Um I it's honestly I have it's funny, Larry Gagosi and I thought I wasn't gonna get access to him. That was the whole plan was I was gonna write, and he almost certainly wouldn't cooperate. And then they surprised me by saying, like, oh, of course, Larry will meet with you and introduce you to his friends. And I it was sort of slightly destabilizing for me. I kind of got a moment of vertigo. Well, and the weird and in the article, the side effect is at the end of each paragraph it says Larry Gagosian denies that he made obscene phone calls and said that he's never visited the house in question. Yeah. He it's funny because there's a story in that piece, my favorite parenthetical there are a lot of parentheticals in my piece, which is where the denials come in. Um and you can sort of choose whether or not you believe what's between the parentheses. But um in that piece there's a story, there's a a woman, uh yo ung London artist, Izzy Wood, who described being at a kind of COVID era party at Larry's house. And she talked about how ful of Wall Street. Yeah. She sort of said he was quite drunk and was late at night and then he kept shouting to his staff to play Aerosmith . And um and then there's a parenthesis that says Larry Larry Gagosian denies that he was drunk or requested Aerosmith. Um Trump. Access. I wrote a piece during the first Trump administration about Mark Burnett, who was the reality. And which was how Trump came to fame famously. And persuaded people that he was like a credible guy and not just a joke. For some reason I was just listening to the Zelen sky encounter that tr that he and Trump and and Vance had in the White House. And you realize it's a bit like um a scene from The Apprentice. It's like when, you know, it's not a your fire boardroom scene. But this is the whole so so when I came out of that piece and I wrote that piece I think in twenty seventeen and the sort of to me kind of devastating revelation that I came upon along the way was that politics was just entertainment by other means now. And that there was a kind of infernal, weird, unholy thing. And listen, the New Yorker was not exempt from this, I don't think. But in which the press like Trump was great for business. It was great copy. People would read it and get outraged. You'd sell more magazines, you'd get more clicks than newspapers. And and but there was this thing happening that was kind of Yeah, a little bit. But I guess what I'm saying is that if you if you told me tomorrow you can come in and get a long interview with the president and he's gonna sort of ramble at length and he'll say quotable things and maybe he'll mean some of them and maybe he won't and some of them will become policy, but some of them he's just trying it out and some of them he's it's almost like a stand-up routine. I think I would just feel like I was being used. It's like all heat, no light. I don't I don't know. Like like people sometimes say to me, Oh, I wasn't able to introduce Jerry Adams for for say nothing. And they say, Oh, wouldn't it have been great? What would you have asked Jerry Adams? And I don't I just don't think that um I don't think Jerry Ad am is a very interesting interview. It's like interviewing an answering machine. You know, you just you get the kind of outgoing message. And what's the downside though? Oh, nothing. I mean just a few hours of my time. I guess I guess the downside is I would feel like at the tail end of the first Trump administration, I was I pulled the plug on a piece. I was supposed to be writing a piece about Jared and Ivan ka and the kind of weird role that they occupied And I got a bunch of great interviews and I was working away on it. And then I thought I was just sort of looking at the way the culture metabolized stories about the Trump administration . And I just thought, what's the point? You know, I'm gonna write this thing. Nobody who's persuadable is gonna read it. You know, the people will either not read it on principle because it's the New Yorker and it's fake news , you know, liberal New York media, or they'll read it and they'll essentially already agree with the premise, and then I'll just be kind of there'll be something almost sort of pornographic about and they'll kind of get out raged and it all just felt a bit kind of unholy to me. What's the ten or twenty-word version of what the article would have said ? Here is this couple that is sort of playing an interesting game in which they handle the media in a very shrewd way and are forever thinking about their kind of public persona, not just at in this moment, but actually beyond the Trump administration. They wanna sort of remain kind of credible adults in the room, grown-ups, don't want to necessarily be associated with the worst excesses of the Trump administration, do want to be perceived as the people who were the kind of responsible checks on his worst tendencies. And all the while in the background, you know, I think I forget what the statistic is, right? But it's like during the first term they made something like six hundred billion dollars or something. You know, that all the w and and boy, since then, I mean you look at the deals that Jared Kushner has made. Um it almost seems quaint now to talk about the family of the president um making deals and enriching themselves while also being these ostensible kind of you know roving peacemakers and policy advisors and what have you. Um and then of course they end up in Miami, the last refuge of scoundrels, right? I think I had a question about can they come back? Are they gonna be reaccepted into New York society? And I I think I may be certainly in twenty nineteen I probably overestimated New York soci ety. I think I'd read that for what it's worth. Uh but maybe I'd be guilty of just self you know, in some way yeah It's a wank. I was gonna say masturbating my sense of outrage. Yeah. And I don't I mean I don't have the answer. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think that's I don't think that's for Americans very often. Yeah, that's because I didn't say masturbating. But you know what I'm saying? I don't, I don't, I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like it's not that. At least for me, it's not that. Um I did a I did a public conversation with this amazing woman, Patricia Evangelista, who's a Filipino journalist who wrote this incredible book called Some People Need Killing about the Duterte Regime. And she talked about how the thing with strongmen, a certain kind of strongman, is that when you see somebody transgress in a kind of colorful public way, there's an almost physiological response you have to it. So she talked about how Duter te was this politician, but he would swear . And people in the Philippines, a very Catholic country, would be kind of titillated by the fact that this is unusual. We don't see politicians swear. What's going on here? And you're kind of drawn to you're sort of repelled, but you're also attracted. And then do of the guy who said, uh, I want to be the Filipino Hitler. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah, for sure. But I mean, here we are, right? That's what you hear from politicians who are not. But part of that, I think, is actually that he so he graduates from that to then eventually he's saying, like, fuck the Pope and stuff. Clearly, having to kind of up the rhetorical ante because because everybody's like chasing that feeling that they had the first time. And now I don't I mean, we're hopping all over the map here, but like Kanye West, you know, releases a song called Hal Hitler because he's kind of in the same business, right? It's like where do you They call it the uh the final boss of taboos is is to to to go full Hitler anti-Semitism. But not even anymore. No. I mean that's the thing. I don't really know where you go from. I do think I do think that um in some corners of the right, Nick Puentez actually just had this thing where there's the um Jeffrey Epstein, not that bad. Jeffrey Epstein, kind of a baller. But like that, I think is a to me is a kind of a it's it's the same it's it's thinking it's thinking, gosh, well everybody's a Nazi these days. Like what does a guy have to say around here? Yeah . This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We do a lot of our shopping these days online. I've often thought in another life I could have had a blossoming online shop on Shopify. What would I sell? Maybe my chart topping books, some TLT P bingo cards for the Die Hard Podcast fans. I could finally centralize all that bootleg merch, pillows, cushions, t-shirts, cards, in one place. And where would it be? On Shopify . If you want a better experience shopping online for you and your customers, Shopify is the answer. 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Well because it means freedom, freedom to enjoy your life. We're now in a new tax year, and as long as you're in the UK and over 18, you have a brand new ISA allowance. So you can save up to £20,000 and not pay any tax on the interest you earn. This is the last year that your cash I CER allowance is £20,000 before it's reduced for under £65 in April 2027. Handy to know. To make the most of it, check out Moneybox. Moneybox is trusted by over 1.5 million savers, and their customers rate them excellent on Trustpilot. So if you've been putting off sorting out your savings, now's the time. Open a Moneybox Cash Isa in the app or at moneyboxapp.com it takes just a few minutes. ISA and tax rules apply . So you write for the New Yorker, that's your but you do you don't you don't go into the office there or do you? You're not like nine to f I used to. To n you nine to five it there? No, no, no, no, no, no. I used to have an office at the New Yorker. Which is great as heaven. And I was young when I got it, and there were older writers who I in some cases people I'd been reading for years and years before I met them and I Like who? Larissa McFarcar. Really? Yeah. Who I just She's not much older than you are. She's not, but she started really young. I was kind of a late bloomer and she was , you know, an early bloomer and I studied her pieces. Really? And then to have her just down the hall. Or David Grant used to be in the office next to me. Killers of the Flower Moon. Yeah. That's an amazing book. That's a great example of I mean I suppose structure, which is something you're often complimented on, your ability to unfurl a story, to build suspense by withholding critical details until the right moment. It's such a strange, shocking story. I think people will be familiar with that, maybe just from the movie . The world in which uh a community of Native Americans were vastly wealthy based on oil money and some savvy legal deals, that their assets weren't taken from them. They got the oil that was under their land and They start dying. They start dying because they've got these cars and and and and fortunes and then the women are suddenly married off to these predatory guys. It's really odd. It's an astonishing story. It's funny to my point earlier about how when I go looking for stories, I never find them. They sort of have to find me. So when David Grind goes looking for stories, he finds them. The story of the origin of that book is amazing. He David somehow heard that the FBI that the there was a person who was a full-time employee of the FBI who was the FBI historian, and David somehow got this guy's phone number and called him up and said, What's the craziest story of the FBI you've ever heard? And the guy said, Well, I'm glad you asked. You know there was this case. And told the story, and David was off to the races. It's the closest thing. I think I'm the only person to notice this. I don't know, but to a Scooby-Doo story that I've seen in the real world where the person you last expect metaphorically rips off his mask and you're like, it's Mr. Jenks, the old And it's funny, actually, speaking of suspense and withholding information, a reveal that in the book hit me like a ton of bricks, and in the movie I s maybe because I'd already read the book, but I felt as though in the movie they didn't actually it's an interesting thing the differences between kind of moves. It's actually less propulsive, uh the movie. Um you've become a celebrity journalist. If we can stipulate that celebrity journalist is probably an oxymoron Are we going to talk about the J. Crew modeling? We've gotten this far without doing so. I'd feel remiss if we didn't bring it up. Celebrated New Yorker writer enlisted as model, the New York Times reported . How do you follow up a couple of best selling books? If you're Patrick Red and Keith, you star in a Jay Crew ad ? Yes . Yes. I will never live live this one down. Um yeah, that was a weird one. But I'm just I'm in a place in my life where, you know, if some kind of larky thing falls in my lap and it seems fun But what if it turns out that they they have horrific workplace practices and then you can't record on it? But their clothes are made in Bangladesh. Now that now that now that you mention it, this could be their long play, you know. I had another thing, which was that the Do you know this show Industry? Yes, I've never seen it. I hear good things about it. There is this show. And um there is a character in the new season who is a journalist named Patrick Radden Keefe and the opportunity came up to play myself and I propose and I said yes. But to the point that I think you're making, I think there's some magic number of things like this that you can do. And then when you do one more than that magic number, you're like Wolf Blitzer. You become somebody who's yeah, or s ort of playing playing you're playing virtual. Yeah. And I um You're printing counterfeit money. Maybe you've become like a counter- I've printing counterfeit money. Yeah, exactly. What am I gonna do? Um so it's kind of it's kind of an open question . We'll see we'll see uh we'll see how it goes with this industry thing. I look forward I'll I'll look out for that with great pleasure. Joan Didion apparently did a advertising campaign. Yeah, for the gap, I think. I didn't know about that until I was told about it afterwards. If I had known about that, that's how I would have justified it in my mind. Good enough for Dideon. Exactly. Um should we touch on Wind of Change? Yeah. Your amazing podcast. Most fun I've ever had. Set it up for me. So I was um years ago, I was living in Washington, D.C., and there's a guy who is one of my closest friends who is a kind of great, great New York character, my friend Michael Auerbach. And Michael is often the source of my stories. He's just one of these people who kind of has, he's lived many lives, he has fingers in a lot of pies, and he's always feeding me great stor ies. And um he called me up and he said, I've just heard the most amazing story. Do you know the 1990s power ballad from 1990 by the West German hair metal band , the Scorpions, Wind of Change. Um and I actually when he initially mentioned it, I sort of vaguely remembered the song. Follow the mosque for down to go down to Gorkipa. Exactly. There you go. You know. I don't need to tell you. I listened to it on the way here just so I can. Okay, well you go. I mean this is the problem is that I I can sing it in my sleep at this point. But the um so this was this song that was released in nineteen ninety, just as the Cold War is starting to end , you know, it came out just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it becomes kind of the soundtrack to the dissolution of the USSR. Young people in Germany and Soviet Union singing the song in the streets, it's this kind of anthem of of peace and change. And um my friend Michael called me and said, so you know that song wasn't actually written by the Scorpions, it was written by the CIA. And that sounded so bananas on its face. Initially I was skeptical, but then as I looked into it, there were these little indications that actually maybe it was true. And it turns out that for decades during the Cold War the CIA had done all this kind of propagandistic stuff with culture, pop culture. It's a while since I listened, but I recall they they'd funded a jazz tour of West Africa. Yeah. They did I mean they Louis Armstrong went to Africa, but also kind of more interesting ly, Nina Simone, who was like no friend of the United States and ended up actually living out her days in um in Switzerland, very, very critical of the US, unwittingly was sent to Africa to do a tour. And this is sort of it, you know, in this period during the Cold War when you get these African nations that are sort of throwing off the colonial shackles and deciding who we're going to throw in our lot with, uh, the Soviets or the West. And so Kind of soft diplomacy? Yeah. I mean it seems ten uous, doesn't it? Like as a use of money, you'd think, is it gonna make any difference? Oh but see with pop culture, I could kind of buy it. The really interesting thing is when you go earlier, 50s and 60s, you have to remember that the CIA at this time is like all these guys who went to Yale, right? It's like all these men named Prescott. And um initially their whole thing was was like abstract expressionism, they thought was gonna be what would change hearts and minds, like Robert Rauschenberg and whatever. And they It's a reach. It is, but they had this notion that high art was the way in which you would um if anything, it was stonewashed jeans. I'm old enough to remember w you know my brother was a Russianist, is a Russianist, and he made a couple of trips to the Soviet Union, and the big thing was bring a pair of jeans. Totally . And then it always seemed like post-89 when the wall came down, whenever you saw someone from Eastern Europe, they were wearing stonewashed jeans. Their taste in jeans seemed to be like a year or two out of date. Yeah. And the cliche was when the wall came down, they came, they saw it was a s it was a slogan for a movie called Morons from Outer Space. They came, they saw they did little shopping. But that was kind of the experience. It wasn't we crave your freedom. It was like, wow those jeans look pretty cool. I mean, isn't this the way it all it all goes? So it it makes a kind of sense, I guess, what that um that the score that Scorpion singing about uh wind of change might have had some cultural effect. Is that the premise? Yeah, I mean I think there's a there's another little important bit of background here , which is that rock and roll was was outlawed in the Soviet Union. Right. And so there was a kind of um sort of wonderful sense in which rock music, which always claimed to be transgressive, and I guess was somewhat transgressive here or in the United States, in the Soviet Union, it really was true. Like you could get arrested for having rock records. There was a whole kind of underground tape thing. There was an underground rock scene, which is its own really cool thing. We went to St. Petersburg and we're talking to people who had been part of the kind of under underground Leningrad rock scene. And so it's against that back drop as well. It's funny because there ends up being, it's a big thing in the podcast, but there was this the Moscow music piece festival in uh I think it's summer of 89 where all these heavy metal bands called. Um, you know, it's like the Scorpions, Ozzy Osborne, um, Motley Crew. And it was sort of a big indication of like the Soviet Union opening up because they were willing to have all these people come in the stadium. We interviewed all these people who had gone to the show and it was this kind of life-changing experience. But it's funny to think about it from the perspective of the KGB because you sort of wonder, well, what were they thinking? And I do think for some of them it was like if this is the West's best advertisement for the West. You know, Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah. Let him come. Yeah. Maybe they loved it. Do you remember Billy Joel did a tour of the Soviet Union? Yeah. And he got he got into a rage with the audience. Do you remember that? Oh that I d oh I do, yeah. Remind me though? Because they weren't giving enough. They were just sort of standing there. I guess they were used to the Bolshoi or And they would sit, yeah, 100%. They would they would do this in rock concerts. This was the whole style, is that they would all sit down and he's giving his full piano man and and they weren't doing that. Yeah, nothing was coming back. Nothing upsets Billy like when you don't return serve. Oh, forget about it. Um you know, you've had so many storied um successes. Like your tenacity is formidable. And at points in the story where you think, is this gonna arrive anywhere? It feels uh riddled with false leads or or intriguing and entertaining red herrings, and then you kind of always seem to get there. It's quite amazing. In this new one in particular, where it to some extent it's unknowable, but I feel like you do by the end know what's happening. Like you do. Yeah. It's hard because with my book Say Nothing, it's about this murder in nineteen seventy two. And at the end of the book, you should say of her like Jean McConville. There was a woman named Jean McConville who was a a mother of ten in Belfast in Northern Ireland. Single mother . Her husband's dying. So single mother of ten . And in nineteen seventy-two, there's a knock on her door one night, and a gang of masked intruders come in and that this is at the kind of the height of the troubles as a early in the troubles, but in the most violent period, in fact in the most violent year of the troubles, full stop. Um this gang comes in, they're armed, they say to the kids, we just want to talk to your mother for a few hours. The kids are clinging to her legs, they're screaming. Um they take her away and the children never see their mother again. And they're orphaned. They grow up in orphanage is a terrible story and there's always this mystery of what happened to Gene McCondell But it was a r it's a well-known story that took place during the troubles. Absolutely. And I spent you know, I started work on a piece in twenty fourteen, published the piece in twenty fifteen, published a book at the end of 2018 . And through a kind of crazy set of circumstances, at the very end of working on that book, I figured out who killed her in 1972. And it was a person who was still alive, who had never been charged, who'd never been questioned or identified in any way with this killing. I mean, I take these things very seriously. I would not have made such an allegation unless I was 100% certain. And then obviously I had to work with lawyers in New York and Dublin and London and Belfast to make sure that we were on very solid ground before I made this accusation. But I did at the end of the book. I think in a way that is convincing. But so that book has this kind of it like snaps shut at the end with a kind of A satisfying click. Very, very satisfying click that I'll never be able to repeat in my career. And this I would say the click is not as satisfying, but I do think that I get there in terms of sort of figuring out roughly what happened. Do you have advice for young journalists? Aaron Powell I do with a caveat. I mean the caveat would be I'm speaking to you from a position of unbelievable privilege, right? Like I don't it's it's hard for me to point to my books or my articles and say, hey kid, here's how you do this, because I'm writing at the New Yorker. I have terrific fact checkers. I can spend eight months on a piece if I want. I can write it at 15,000 words. These are all like in a in a kind of rapidly contracting industry , there's this sort of last of the dinosaurs quality where there are certain kind of structural luxuries that I can take advantage of. I say this in part because I I know loads of younger journalists and f you know people who are freelance journalists and it's a tough racket and tougher now. Having said all that , the advice is this find a way to do it. In a way, I think the truth is kind of the coin of the realm. So a lot of the time I'm asked this question apropos AI, and my feeling is if what you're doing is something that AI could replicate, then you're doing it wrong and you should stop doing it that way. And the way to AI proof your job and also do the job well and write things that will endure is to pick up the phone, to knock on doors , to go out in the world and find stuff that's not already on the internet and tell a story about it. Think of a kind of way to present it as a narrative about people that has a certain drama where you can. I think that's the way to do do the job. And I think that's the way to do the job honestly if you're writing like an eight hundred word newspaper article as much as it is if you're writing a 10,000 word narrative feature . Um the key to me is don't be inhibited as people so often are. Don't think that the truth is like exists on Google. Um go out there and get it. Push back. Uh no, I think I'm gonna agree with that. I think I spent so many years growing up wanting to make something of myself in journalism. And I think I'm saying something similar, which is getting in amongst it uh was a big difference, just sort of leaving the room, like instead of marinading in the feedback loop of anxiety and second guessing, suddenly if you're out in a story, you're kind of uh you're discovering things in spite of yourself, you're taken out of yourself. Certainly for myself, it's been massively helpful to go among people, you know, speaking as a sort of self-questioning uh person, when I'm in the world of people who aren't who are are i in some way antagonistic to that or or or or you know whether they're active wrongdoers or just big unself-conscious um personalities, uh that's been massively rewarding. And to e I mean, if you wanted to put it very crassly, I'd say like I I've made a living out of spending time with people I profoundly disagree with. Now that's a diff that's a kind of journalism that's practiced on TV, like kind of just where you spar. And you know, obviously character And and nevertheless, in the print medium and in in in a way it's spoken to by the subtitle of Rogues, true stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks , whether consciously or unconsciously , you've ploughed a a uh a furrow that's involved being among people unlike you, pe being among people whose questions requ whose choices require some sort of interrogation. Yeah, and being and sort of remaining um and it sounds like this is kind of similar to you. I I don't there's a sort of weird thing that you do. I mean it's different, right, in the sense that the I know you you do documentaries, but in an interview like this , your questions are what is kind of driving the car? And I'm I I'm giving my answers, but that but that's sort of the extent of it. Documentary is obviously different because there's a lot of selection that's going on and you're kind of able to put more spin on the ball. For me, it's that thing where you sit down with people and you just have to stay curious and in a way, it's not that you're not going to render judgment, but there has to be a kind of openness to hearing them out, even if they're awful people describing awful things that they've done, a sort of willingness to say , I really want to understand this from your perspective. I may think your perspective is bonkers. And in my case, I'll express that when I sit down to write. But it's in that moment where you're kind of meeting people where they are. I mean, you know, there are people I interviewed for London Falling, who are gangsters or gangster-adjacent people. I've interviewed a lot of people who've killed people, in some cases, multiple people. It's a strange thing, right, to sit with somebody like that and make yourself open to hearing them and sort of persuade them in a way that it it's truly not disingenuous. I it's I want to hear how this seems to you. But also to make clear that that doesn't mean I'm just gonna be your ventriloquist, right? Like I am going to there is gonna be my own sort of filter of judgment here, but in the conversation, you know, it can go wherever it goes. Aaron Powell Well, it's reminding me of the criminal versus informant dichotomy. You have a friendly relationship with some of these gangsters, but I think you'd stop short of calling them friends. Yeah. I mean, um it's hard because the um uh some of these people have done really awful things and I have a kind of if you heard me on the phone with them, in some cases I have a sort of jocular banter with them. Andy Baker , who's a fairly notorious longtime London and Bristol gangster. He's in the book. He's in the book. Is he alive? He's alive and back in prison. So he was in prison, and then he got out of prison and I got to know him when he was out of prison. And then as I was working on the book, he went back in prison and he calls me from prison. And um we have these, I mean they're monitored phone calls, but but he, you know, he keeps up . Um If he came out, would you go for coffee with him? I would have gone for coffee with him before. Would you have him round to the house? Probably not. I mean I tell a story at the end of the book about how the first time I met Andy, um I went to see him and a friend of his was sort of orchestrating this thing, he brought me to this coffee place. I went into the back of the coffee place. And he's a big man physically with a very kind of firm handshake and these kind of um very intense blue eyes. And he sort of shook my hand, very pleased to meet me. Would I like a coffee? Are we all set? And we sat down. And he said , And how is Chopin ? So Chopin was the name of a dog that I had that died. And immediately I'm thinking, uh, how does he know my dog's name? And I realize I wrote a line or two in the acknowledgments to rogues about how I'd had this dog that used to sit at my feet when I would write and who died. And I said, Oh, or he said, he's not on how I was Chopin. He said, What kind of dog was Chopin? And I told him. And then he said, and how's Justina? Justina's my wife. And I said, She's all right. And he said, and what about Lucian and Felix? And those are my sons. And um I say at the end of the book, I he 's not threatening me, but it's n also not totally benign what's happening. And in a way it gave me an insight into the kind of person he is, and the kind of person that Indian Dave was, right? That this is sort of the way they operate. So he'd got my book, he'd read the acknowledgments, he'd put to memory the name of my wife and my two sons and my dead dog. And within 30 seconds of meeting me, he just wants me to know. I know Quite alarming in a way. It is. Now I don't think that Andy Baker wishes any harm to come to me. And I'm pretty careful about these things. But no, I wouldn't run the house. Did you take a view of uh Michael Wolf uh coming out uh uh in the Epstein emails as a kind of what appeared to be an informal conciliary? Yeah, I don't that to me crosses a line. I mean one, of the things that I said to Andy Baker when we first met was just to be very, very clear, because I try to be transparent with everyone, I can never give you anything. I can never pay you money. Um, I can buy you a meal. Um, that's sort of within the rules. I can I can pay for a meal. Um, but I can never give you money. I can never cut you in on any deal. And the funny thing with Andy Baker is that we then we then went to have lunch and we went to this uh Chinese restaurant in Swansea and he ordered like the whole menu and left with bags of food. Um Right. But that that's legit. I can do that, but I try to make clear. Um you know, I I can't do any of those kinds of things. So Michael Wolf offering advice, real kind of counsel to Jeffrey Epstein , you You know know., listen, there's all kinds of people who horse trade in weird ways, and I I'm not investigative journalist. There's a certain kind of investigative journalist who does things I wouldn't do. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist in the world. And sometimes they through that kind of thing, they're able to get stuff out there that I'm not, I personally I I wouldn't do that. I mean gen as a general matter, like I'm not gonna I I try not to send text or emails to people I'm writing about that I couldn't ultimately live with the consequences if they became public. Yeah. But that's kind of the job on some level. I mean, I don't mean in the sense that you're, you know, famously Janet Malcolm said that we're all kind of con artists, right? That we In the first the first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, her essay on the ethics of journalism, long-form immersive journalism, is along those lines. It's any journalist who's not too full of himself to see the truth or too stupid knows that what he does is morally indefensible. Yeah. Now I th the little caveat I would say. Because it's a seduce and betray transaction. Yes. There are what's the best way of putting this? There are people I've written about who I think feel like I betrayed them. I don't think I betrayed them. And I do everything I can to kind of manage people's expectations along the way, precisely because I think there's a tendency. Um, I mean, I'll give you an example. So the Brettlers, who whose story I tell in London Falling, when they initially they hadn't gone public, nobody had ever written about Zach Brettler's death. It was not a thing that was kind of widely known in London. And when we first started talking about me writing about them, they had a real sense of grievance about the Metropolitan Police and the way the thing had been handled. And they , I don't know if they'd already read it or they started reading it once we started talking, but they knew about say nothing and they knew about the way it ended with this kind of, with that satisfying click. And I said to them, I would love it if you open up and talk to me. But I also can't have a situation in which implicitly you think that in exchange for that, I'm gonna crack the case, I'm gonna get the Metropolitan Police to reopen the case or to apologize to you. You can't have in your head some unspoken expectation that there's a kind of quid pro quo here and that in exchange for opening yourselves up in this very intimate way, I will deliver the goods for you. Because it's unfair, it's unfair to you and it's unfair to me. And so I try and be as honest about that stuff as possible. Sometimes people still feel burned. Aaron Powell I think I read it in a s in an an interview with a New York writer where they said uh, in that kind of intimate journalism, if you're not making very hard decisions about what to leave out, you're probably not doing it right. Which is less about investigative journalism, but that kind where a family say brings you into the home to document horrific things they're going through, and you're balancing the right to report versus invasion of privacy? I don't know that I would put it in those terms. I mean, I don't, you know, listen, there's there are things in this book that the Brettlers are quite uncomfortable with. They're okay with it. I think they're remarkable people and they've now read the book. And um So if they'd said to you like uh uh we really don't want you to put this thing about for example, one of the most painful things to read is is the relationship between Zack and his older brother and the way in which they were estranged. They were so different. The older brother was sort of studious and quite orthodox in his approach to life, going to university, and then his younger brothers become this sort of Sigma kind of wannabe , I don't know, gangster or hustler. And so they have this estrangement and and you read it thinking that must be painful . But actually just don't put that that's too painful. I would have made the case that that stuff should be in there and that you have to particularly given that this is a story about lying , to me, the truth has to be kind of unblinking. I mean, I'd go even further and say, even when I write a profile of someone who's cooperating and who I maybe even have high regard for , I want them to feel a little bit uncomfortable when they read it. If they don't if if I create a portrait that looks like the portrait that they have in their mind, I feel like I've I kind of haven't done my job. Um you know, I said to Larry Kagosian when I was writing about him, because he has these portraits of him, you know , like Hockney did a portrait of him, right? And um I was trying to sort of prepare him for the piece and I said, this is not gonna be like looking at a photograph of yourself. It's gonna be looking like at at a at a painting that somebody's done of you where there's a there's a clear kind of interpretive lens. So it's not going to be the way you see yourself. And so I think there should always be a little bit of discomfort. I'm not saying that you you you do things just to make the person uncomfortable, but I think if it's if it's real journalism, as distinct from like PR, there has to be a little bit of a sense of, huh. You know, in the in the same way that you don't um, I mean, you're a broadcast professional, right? But it's like for for normal people, if they hear their own voice sometimes, there's that moment where they think, Well, I don't sound like that. You know, but if they said, um i i if Larry Kagosian and said, I wanna tell you something off the record. Yeah. What would you say? Of course. And then he tells you something you think, this is absolutely then I if it's off the record, it's off the record. I mean, I will try and persuade him. And there were- I don't want to get into it, but there were certain things that I was told by the Brettlers off the record that eventually got on the record after a l much conversation. But the rules are the rules, and I have to live by them. The harder thing for me is when, to give you an another example, um from a piece I wrote in the New Yorker, it's not in Rogues, but I wrote a big I wrote a big profile of Carl Icon, who's this kind of ridiculous American financier, one of the original corporate raiders, went to work for Trump in the first administration, as his sort of deregul ations are. And um Icon had this whole thing where he he didn't want to talk on the record, he only wanted to talk off the record with his lawyer on the call, and he wanted to do that for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And at a certain point I just had to say, listen, I'm I'm done. I'm not I'm not gonna keep talking to you where you're trying to kind of shape the story, but you're not giving me anything that I can use. So there that kind of thing I'll object to. But if you and I are doing a long interview and there's three moments in the interview where you say, can I take something off the record, that's inviol ate I used to have a thing where I would say it's again it's gift it's TV, so it's different, but I would say don't don't tell me anything off the record. Like you either it's either on the record or or I don't I don't care because I don't want it's like double entry bookkeeping. Totally it's like a version that we're agreeing on, and then there's a real version. 100%. Well, and this to my earlier point about why I think access is overrated. So there's this whole thing that the consumer, the person who reads journalism in places like the New York Times or The Guardian or the Telegraph or what have you isn't aware of, which is that the sophisticated repeat players , it's even more pernicious, right? So it's like if you came, say I'm profiling you and you say, as powerful people often do, yes, you can profile me on the condition that I get quote approval, that anything I say before it goes in the article, you have to show it to me and I can sign off on it the way I would a press release, right? I would say , no, I have, you know, a sense of professional ethics and my personal dignity, and I would never prostrate myself in that way to your demands. So what do sophisticated people do? And this is business people , political people , actors, anyone who's like a prominent repeat player who deals with the press a lot. They'll say, okay, I'll tell you what, we're going to talk just off the record. But if there's anything you want to use, you can come back to me. And journalists all the time, including at times myself where I've had no alternative, will say, well if that's all I can get, then I guess I'll do that. Yeah. But that's also, I think, kind of betraying the reader, right? Like the reader doesn't know that that transaction has happened. No . I feel like we've used up a lot of your time. We ended on a kind of esoteric point of journalistic. I was gonna say this is like the end of the movie where yeah it's sort of interesting to wonder how many people are in the audience at this point. Is there anybody out there? If someone these people have stayed to the end of the credits . Brilliant. Thank you for giving us the time. And scene , welcome back. Um thank you for joining us, Patrick Rad and Keefe, and you the listener slash viewer . In source all embarrassing this late in life to have a word that's freely used by your interlocutor and not to know what it means. A little embarrassing. It means to bewitch or enchant. I thought it might be from like the French. Oh I was getting French etymology, but it's actually I think old English. Sorcery is maybe a cognate. What is a cognate? Well we look at We spoke about Kanye West releasing his song Heil Hitler. A few days after we recorded, Kanye took out a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal, apologizing for his anti-Semitic behaviour. I've been saying Kany e, I think he prefers yay . Anyway, noted. Some legal notes regarding the Sackler family's alleged involvement in the opioid crisis in the US. It's worth noting that Purdue Farmer pleaded guilty to charges over its marketing of oxycontin. The Sackler family entered into a six billion dollar settlement protecting them from lawsuits and is denied any wrongdoing. Uh I teased Patrick a little bit about having done an advert for a clothing brand. And surprise, surprise, a few weeks later on my social media feed I appeared uh seemingly doing a kind of promotion for a clothing brand or at least JD Sports and I think there was a maybe certain brand of sneakers slash running shoes that I was wearing and you could say I should be gently ribbed for that . Consider me ribbed. Happy to be ribbed. And so did Joan Didion. Joan Didion. Let's find some more. Which other who else? I I know that um Sergio Leone famously directed some adverts. He's a he's a movie obviously directed Good, the Bad and the Ugly in many other movies. Orson Wells did his fish finger adverts, didn't he? Or was it Peas? He did Peas and Fish Fingers. So anything that puts me in the same company as Sergio Leone, Orson Wells, Patrick Rad and Keefe , and Joan Didion, and Gary Lineker, fellow podcast host, fellow podcast host Gary Lineker d ad vertises Walker's C risps . Hey if you're not doing it, why aren't you doing it ? That's not a catchphrase . Louis has written. I've added my own notes. Louis has written. Has Mammoth gone to the dark side? Quite a big statement have ha to say someone's gone to the dark side. He's just become a Trump supporter. So if that's dark to you , then yes. I said that he was like Saruman looking into the palantir too much, if you're familiar with the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, written by J. R. R. Tolkien . And then I thought, was it the Palantir? I looked it up. Yes. I I heaved a sigh of relief. He looked too much in the seeing stone, known as the Palantir . And it was a bit like the Nietzsche quote, uh, he who stares into the abyss, the abyss stares also into him. There was that idea of like, if you keep engaging with super dark stuff, it is gonna rub off on you . Um and in Sar uman's case it led him to believe he could control the One Ring and eventually supplant Sauron as the ruler of Middle Earth . So the parallels with Mammoth are very precise. Couldn't be more resonant