On with Kara Swisher - Patrick Radden Keefe On Lies, Conspicuous Wealth & Moral Rot

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Journalist, author and podcaster Patrick Radden Keefe is renowned for writing stories about crime and corruption that expose deeper societal truths. His latest book, “London Falling,” explores the mysterious circumstances around the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler. While London police ruled Zac’s death a suicide, his parents soon learn he’d been living a double life as the fake son of a Russian oligarch and gotten entangled in the city’s criminal underworld.   Kara and Patrick talk about the book, how London changed after it became a hotspot for foreign money laundering, and how he gains the trust of sources who might not otherwise talk to journalists. They also get updates on some of Patrick’s previous stories and talk about where he draws the line when it comes to using AI in his work.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andy actually is back in prison now, but he calls me from prison. I think I'm going to go, he's organizing a reading in the prison library. I'm going to go and do a book signing in the fall. Oh, you're a lot nicer to them than I am. It'll be a story to tell. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is award-winning journalist and author Patrick Radden-Keefe. He's a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of several books. bestselling books, including Empire Pain, about the Sackler family and the opiate crisis, and say nothing about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Radin-Keefe's latest bestseller is London Falling, a mysterious death in a gilded city, and a family's search for truth.

In London falling, Patrick investigates the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zach Brettler. Zach died in 2019 after jumping from a fifth-floor balcony of a luxury building in London. After his death, his parents came to find out that he'd been pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch and had gotten mixed up with a cadre of middle-aged wealthy immigrants. Was his death a suicide or something more sinister? I want to talk to Patrick, because I always like to talk to Patrick. He's an amazing reporter. He's a great storyteller, and he's always got something interesting up his sleeve. His book, Empire of Pain, was a really important book for me to read, not just because it was about the opioid crisis, but it really spurred me

to understand how sinister the Sacklers were and how much I wish they were all in jail for what they did to this country. But he's just a great reporter, and that's why I like him. So I always like to check in with him. So let's get to my conversation with Patrick Radin-Keefe. Our expert question today comes from Tina Brown herself, a legendary magazine editor and also writer. So stick around. Recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast, and here you are. But home projects are a little different. If the podcast isn't your thing, you might lose a few minutes from your day, but if you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage. I know a guy isn't a good strategy for your home. That's why Thumbtack

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follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Patrick, thanks for coming on on. Great to be with you. You're killing me because I came back from San Francisco last night. I was there doing some interviews, some public officials. And I was going to sleep on the plane, but then I read your book all night.

It's fantastic. I had already read pieces of it, but I read all the way through because it's so good. So you're exhausted me, just so you know. This is what I want a captive audience on a plane with no Wi-Fi, you know? I was. It was great. Anyway, I want to start. with a basic question I was thinking as I was reading because I loved Empire of Pain. I think that's the last time you and I talked. And you said you're basically fascinated by crime and corruption, secrets and lies. The permeable membrane and separating illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial. And one of the interviews you said, this is a story about a boy who lies, which I loved the way you talked about it. So what draws you to dark stories and dangerous people? I don't know what it is, honestly. It's not, I don't really even think.

of myself as a crime reporter, but it is a situation where when I go out and I kind of pursue what's interesting to me in the world, it's often stories about people transgressing in one way or another. It's often stories about people kind of using their own charisma to change the world a little bit, to find some little wormhole, some loophole they can get through, or actually to kind of reorganize the world in a way that they would want. And it's funny because we talk about those stories. as if they're outliers, but I feel as though that is the era we live in. This kid, Zach Brettler, that this book is about, you know, he was a 19-year-old fabulous. But at the same time, to me, he's the most 21st century creature imaginable.

Although we've been fabulous, right? Well, there's been fabulous throughout history. We have, but it's different. You know, Zach is born in 2000, right? So he kind of perfectly tracks this millennium. And he's very much on Instagram. His favorite movie is The Wolf of Wall Street. And he grows up kind of exposed to a kind of hustle culture, a real sense that everything's all

or nothing, you bet big, push all your chips in, tell lies if you have to, you kind of fake it until you make it. And that's the culture he was immersed in, and that's the person he became. Or he immersed himself. You're talking about Zach Bratler. He went to a fancy private school in London, not the fanciest. His family was well off, but not fabulously wealthy. and at school he met kids of actual oligarchs,

which is kind of a brand for London at a time, although I understand many of them are leaving. And he becomes so enamored of extreme wealth that he pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch, which seems to be an unusual choice. It's super easy to draw parallels with Anna Delvey, the fake Russian heiress who scam people in New York or young con artists like Billy McFarlane

who co-founded the Fire Festival. Talk about why he was going for this con, because it's a little different. They were looking for money, really. They were your classic con artists, like any given venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I mean, Zach was, you know, he grew up in an upper middle class family.

Father does structured finance. Mother's a freelance journalist. He had a big brother, very loving family. And he, at 13, he goes to this school, kind of fancy private school in the outskirts of London, not the most academically rigorous place, but an expensive school. Because his brother went to the better one, correct?

Exactly. So his brother had gotten into a school called the University College School, more rigorous, more elite, and Zach doesn't get in. And so he ends up at this place called Mill Hill at 13. And a bunch of the kids who go there are the children of oligarchs, really wealthy people who've come in and found a second home in London, many of them from the former Soviet Union. And he's exposed to, you know, not just great wealth, you know, wealth that far exceeds the wealth of his own family, but also. a kind of attitude, right? There's a very sort of English perspective that his parents had, which is that it's actually pretty unclassy to have extravagant displays of wealth, you know, that there's something a little gosh about that. And these kids at the school are very kind of blingy and braggadocious. And as a teenager, he's really taken in by that. And so he starts

to tell lies about his family, about how much money they make, about where they live, about what kind of car they drive. And he kind of graduates to a point where when he's out of school, out in the kind of adult world of London at 18, he starts to tell some people that he actually is the son of a Russian oligarch. He invents this whole new persona. Isamom. Asimov. Yeah, Zach Ismailov. Yeah, sorry. And he's got a whole story. Crazily, I mean, one of the things that's so bizarre about this story, you know, it's, I've been on book tour for three weeks across the U.S. And one of the things that's fun about it is you go out and you meet people who've read

the book and sometimes they see things that are in it that I didn't even spot. But there was a woman who came up to me in Nashville. She'd finished reading. And she said, you know what's so weird about this book is that you have this kid who's kind of a compulsive liar. And the kids in this story all see through the lies. The kids who've grown up on social media and have an idea that everybody's wearing a mask, everybody's sort of putting on a face online, they can see through the BS.

but the adults buy it. And so this boy, Zach, at 18, starts telling grownups in London that he's poised to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and he's looking to make investments. Right. And a lot of these kind of vulture-ish grown-ups immediately attached themselves to him. What was he trying to achieve with the con itself?

Well, listen, I mean, the first thing I would say is when you're 18, you're not thinking three chess moves ahead a lot of the time. I think he was only thinking a step or two ahead. And I think in this case, he wanted entree. There was a life and a lifestyle. Not money. It wasn't really a typical con artist, right? No.

It's something else. No, and in fact, his whole con was he was pretending to be the guy with the money because I think he wanted to be driving in nice cars. He wanted to get into private clubs and casinos. He wanted to sort of be invited to the ball, basically. And that was as far as he'd gotten, I think. He had a notion of becoming a businessman. He was trying to get into deals with,

oil and gas and, you know, trading cars and so forth. And the guys that he became friends with were themselves a certain kind of probably familiar to your listeners. Charlotte and just like a guy who, you know, he's in crypto and now he's in AI and he's got all these ventures and he's, you know, a lot of big talk, a lot of meetings, a lot of bluster. Not a huge amount of results to show for any of it. But the appearance of a hustler on the make. It's a huge part of the manosphere, by the way. It's that idea is like if you just sell this car or do this stock or buy this coin or whatever. It is.

And I think some of that is in a kind of poignant way illustrative of the moment that we're living in. I mean, some of it is that there's a lot of BS, right? That you can kind of fake it to make it and rise to the highest levels in this country and in business. You know, if you can trick voters, if you can trick investors. There's no practical limit to how far you. you can go at this point. And so if you're a young, ambitious kid looking around, there's a sense in which you probably take note of that. You think, okay, this is the way to do it. But I think there's another thing, too, which is that there's a kind of all or nothing quality where there's a sense that you

kind of need to always be betting the house because the alternative is a totally uncertain future in which you probably won't on your own home. Right, because this is the only, it's the shortcut version of things. I'm curious, did you ever have a fake personality or did you ever try that? I don't think so. I mean, as an adolescent, I just had Scott that today on Pivot and he hadn't. What did he say? No, neither of I. Neither of I. Or thought about it. I mean, in adolescence, I think we all kind of cycle through different personalities. There were times where I was sort of, I mean, for me, it was like, what kind of music do I like? What kind of clothes do I work? What kind of kids do I hang out with? I would have these brief phases where I'd be really into something and then move on. I think

the sad thing about Zach's story is he's a kid who, I mean, we haven't mentioned it, but he dies at 19 in very mysterious circumstances going off the balcony of this luxury building overlooking the Thames. And so the thing that's so sad in his case is that he gets sort of trapped in that. He's in that sort of confusing phase that a lot of us go through in adolescence. It might even be natural for an adolescent. I mean, he takes it obviously to a very unhealthy extreme. Yeah. And he doesn't make it out.

Yeah. We mentioned the death in the intro because it's a critical part. You have to understand where it ends before you. understand how he got there because you're doing a murder investigation or a suicide investigation or a death investigation really. Of a sort, yeah. I mean, it's also, I think the weirdness of it, right, is after he dies, his parents have to figure out what happened to him, but they also have to figure out who was he. Right. I mean, it's that sort of strange experience of there's somebody that you raised that you give birth to that you lived with. You don't recognize. Yeah, you have to

sort of figure out, get to the bottom of who he was. It's interesting. I've done a lot of interviews with the parents of kids who have died when these relationships they didn't know with chatbots, and it's the same thing because these kids changed. Is it? Yeah, it's really interesting when you do these interviews, because they thought they knew the kid and then the kid was changed by the chatbot or whatever. They had no idea.

They had this other life happening to them, which is interesting. But one of the things that informed Zach in this case is you said, Wolf of Wall Street, which is very resonant with young man, I can tell you. I had to get my kids off of it. But the movie War Dogs is another one. It's about two young friends. Yeah, that was another of his favorites. Yeah.

He was obsessed with Ephraim DeViroli, the Jonah Hill character in that. Right, exactly, which you were unlikely arm stealers on the make. And you've pointed out in other interviews that he saw the films like an instruction manual rather than cautionary tales, which they were. And I would agree, they sometimes don't see the point of it. They sort of think, you know, Jordan and Wolf of Wall Street as a hero in some ways. Is it a hunger to get rich or appear rich reveal something about Britain or the world in general? Because I think it applies very much in the U.S. too.

I mean, it's funny. On the one hand, this is a very specifically English story in the sense that Russian oligarchs just play a very particular role in the culture there. Yes, they do. Zach was obsessed with Roman Abramovich, who at the time owned Chelsea Football Club. And that aspect of it you don't really see here as much. But I'll tell you, I mean, I've been traveling around talking about the book. You know, I was down in Miami talking about the idea that Zach, growing up in certain parts of London, you know, it's supercars on the street everywhere. It's this kind of blingy, ostentatious sort of over-the-top displays of wealth.

There's a sense of a kind of roguish wealth, a kind of gangster capitalist thing going on. And there were all these heads nodding in Miami. Oh, yeah. That's the dead center of that, yeah. You know, I went to Seattle, and you go to Seattle, and you start talking about oligarchs in the way they transform a city. And, you know, the oligarchs there aren't Russian. But boy, Bezos and the way in which he has changed that place. Paul Allen, yeah, absolutely.

And so. For the good in that case. I think there are aspects of it here as well. I think so. It is just the culture. Yeah. And they did in San Francisco until they all left, which we were thrilled when they did. And the reinvention of London was based on a lot of sort of sketchy foreign money, correct?

Yeah, which they welcomed in. I mean, this is the thing that's so fascinating about the Trump administration now touting this golden visa program, right? Is that London did that two decades ago. They did. And it did bring billions of dollars into the economy, which they felt like they really needed. But the upshot is that London's a very eerie place. I mean, it's gone to an extreme that really no place. I mean, no place maybe Barr Miami in the U.S.

Has gone where if you walk around upscale neighborhoods in London after dark, the buildings are all dark because nobody's living in the apartments. They have these massively expensive apartments which are bought by people essentially as a kind of real estate speculation. And you have another thing going on too, which is that there's a kind of criminal class. There's a whole story I outline in the book about how you get all these Russians who come. They start buying these big properties. They send their kids to the private schools. They do things like buy Chelsea Football Club. And then one by one, you get these people starting to die in mysterious circumstances in London.

Business people who've had connections with the Russians or crossed them in some way. And you get all these people falling off of buildings or falling in front of tube trains. Right. And the police, rather than be very aggressive, and try and get to the bottom of it, have a tendency to just sort of say, nothing to see here, looks like a suicide, looks like an accident.

And that eerie feeling, which Matthew and Rochelle, Zach's parents, who are really the main characters in the book experience, where there are these people who sort of grew up in this city, they think they know it, and then suddenly they realize that actually, just beneath the surface, there's all this pretty dodgy stuff going on.

And there's been a kind of decision by the authority, just to look the other way and sort of conclude, listen, it's good for us that all this has happened. There's a quote in the book from Boris Johnson when he was the mayor of London saying, London is the natural habitat for billionaires. He said, London is to the billionaire, what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.

We're proud of that. This is where they should feel most at home. Right. And in a way, also, this is a story about parenting in the digital age, right? because of the ability to be fake. You're the father of two teen boys. I have older kids and younger kids,

but the older ones are in their 20s and their early 20s. It must have been, first of all, tough seeing parents dealing with the grief of losing a son. I can't even imagine. You talked about going to therapy for the first time when you're finishing this book, although it didn't take long term. Talk about this idea of parenting in a digital age

and how it affected you when you were looking at this story because it's sort of like there but for the grace of God kind of thing. Yeah, listen, it's hard. I mean, I don't think, I think anyone who's a parent these days, particularly a parent of an adolescent, will relate to the sense in which you have these dilemmas, right? I think there's a kind of natural American tendency, probably a natural human tendency, but particularly pronounced in America because we love a silver bullet. We love innovation. We love a new technology. And something comes along and we have a tendency just to let it kind of wash over us. You know, we, when there's a new G-Wiz kind of tech, we tend to just kind of adopt it, you know, to sort of swallow without chewing.

And I think that happened with phones. It happened with social media. And I, you know, my kids, my older boy was born in 2010, right? So I'm sort of, I'm right there in the generation of parents who at a certain point, all the kids had phones. and you would really be putting your kid at a pretty significant social disadvantage to not let them have phones. My kids go to a big public school, and then they get the phones, and it's really hard to regulate, right? And we as adults experience it. I mean, they are addictive.

These technologies are addictive. I think what I found with Zach was, I guess I'd say two things. One is, yeah, for me, as a parent of two adolescent boys, it took a toll to spend a couple of years. years talking, you know, a few times a week to a couple who'd lost a child when he was an adolescent. It doesn't, you know, there's no way not to open your heart to people like that and really try and understand their story at a bone deep level and have it not affect you as a parent. And yet where I came out was not with any sort of parenting lesson. I think I came out of it more with a sense of humility, honestly, a sense that I think it's a fantasy to think that our kids

are clay, and we can completely control who they become. I think it is kind of true in a weird way when they're really little, which is why you know, you get people obsessing over organic food and all the rest of it. It's like a little chemistry experiment, right? It's like, I'm going to control all the inputs here, and then I can maximize the output. And I think in a kind of strange way for a lot of parents, there's a sense that people don't usually say it this way, but I think it's a little like, you know, they're going to be like me, but better. I'm going to kind of tweak the next generation. Right. And they start to change.

And I think that happened before phones, but I think phones really make it much more dramatic. Right. But it also, in this case, allows Zach to transform himself, right, and put on a new suit, which kids tend to do, and so do adults, by the way. Everybody has some sort of mask in some way. I know this is going to sound weird, but if you could talk to Zach, what would you have wanted to ask him? Oh, wow.

Carrey, nobody's asked me that yet. I'm a professional. Yeah. I mean, there are a bunch of parts of this story that I still don't understand even now. And so there are certain details that I'd want to know. There are certain deals he was doing, and I still don't understand what was kind of happening under the hood of those deals. There are certain episodes I'd want to better understand. I think the biggest thing, and it actually goes to a question you asked earlier, would be just what was the plan?

You know, what was the longer-term plan? Where was this going? Because there are these moments in this story where he seems almost like the talented Mr. Ripley. It seems like he's playing some kind of slow-burn, long-game con. But I don't think he actually had a plan like that. I think he was, like a lot of kids who are 18, 19 years old, I think he was just thinking one or two moves ahead.

So I think that's what I would want to ask him. You know, where did you see this going? Now, it doesn't come to a necessarily conclusion, but when you think about sort of the repercussions, because his parents didn't, for people who don't know, London is a notoriously tabloid place, that everything goes into these tabloids and this story didn't, which is, of course, it seems like it's fantastic for the tabloids, right? What was the impetus for the parents? Why did they talk to you and what were the tradeoffs you had in that? regard, because I'm assuming it was in your mind. Oh, every day, yeah. So, Zach died in 2019, and his parents kept it quiet. They,

you know, I think they're both very private people and also pretty sophisticated people, and I think that they very quickly were able to see if the Daily Mail got hold of this story, they'd have a field day, and it would be really unpleasant for our family. And so when I actually first heard this story, I heard it totally by chance, I was producing this Hulu series, Say Nothing, Based on my book. And I was on set one day, and I fell into conversation with a guy who knew the family, and he said, I might have a story for you.

And when I went back to my apartment that night, I googled Zach Brettler, death, balcony, and there was nothing. So that was, you know, years after his death. It wasn't on the internet anywhere. It just interested you. The story just interested you. Like, huh. In a second. I mean, when he told me the bare outlines of the story that there was this family had a kid who died in mysterious circumstances, and it turned out he'd been pretending he was the son of a Russian oligarch. Oh, yeah. Hello. I was in.

Right. You know, it was an open question whether the family would talk to me. And so we had a series of conversations totally off the record. I didn't even bring a notebook. And it was just fortuitous that the police who really bungled this investigation had kind of botched the whole thing. And the formal process had kind of just run its course at the point where they happened to meet me. Right. So they were frustrated.

Yeah, they were frustrated. I think they had an appetite to push a little harder in the investigation. I think they also, frankly, felt a little gaslit by the police because the Metropolitan Police in London had basically said, you shouldn't expect anything more from us. And their perspective was, well, there are all these really key people you never called. You know, there are these rocks you didn't look under. And so when I came along, they ended up welcoming the idea of me diving into it.

Now, to your question, it was. It was a tricky one because I felt enormous compassion for this family, and I had a huge amount of access to them, not just in conversations, but they gave me text messages and emails and all the files that the police gave them. And they, when Zach went missing, they would, Matthew and Michelle, the parents would record the conversations they had in real time with people when they were looking for him. They gave me all those recordings. But what I said to them from the beginning was, you know, I've written a bunch of books, and I worked for The New Yorker, and my North Star is always the truth, and the truth will probably be somewhat uncomfortable for you. It won't be the daily

mail version of the story. But you'll find out what happened. Yeah, if you let me loose on this story, there will be elements of what I publish that in a perfect world you might wish weren't out there. And there are, if you read the book, there's a bunch of family secrets that come out. There's really unpleasant stuff about Zach and his parents and his relationship with them and things that happen. You know, there are his private Google searches. There's a lot of stuff in there that I think if Matthew and Rochelle had editorial control wouldn't be in the book. And so what I had to do was sort of manage both my impulse to be compassionate to them as people who've lost a child and the terrible tragedy very recently.

And then my impulse as a reporter, my imperative as a reporter, which is to get to the bottom of the story and tell it in a really fulsome way and write a book, you know, that frankly it's not written for them. No. I'm not in PR and I'm not a therapist. I'm, you know, I'm kind of answering to a different master. Absolutely. And I feel good about where we came out.

And when we launched the book three weeks ago at the 92nd Street Y in New York, they came over as did Joe's ex-brother. they were all in New York for the launch. So I feel good about that. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Trust and Will. Figuring out an estate plan can be a lot of stress at a very tumultuous and unfortunate time.

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And it really needs me thinking again, as I often do when I read you, just about your methods, really. In say nothing, you were able to penetrate the really sort of scary world of the IRA. And you got deep into those relationships, which were all built on, decades of secrets. Then in Empire Pain, your book about the Sacklers, you were also, again, you know, extracting information from a world which was so low. litigious. I mean, there's nobody more difficult and scary than the Sacclans, because they had an army of lawyers and a ton of money, and they had suppressed the truth for decades. But they couldn't beat you back. And now in this London falling, you stumbled into this very sinister world of the London underground culture that really, none of us have really read about before. And I wondered how you earned their trust. You know, I wondered why they talked to you, frankly, because, you know, again, there are people who held their secret close.

And that also actually includes the family who certainly were prone to just chatting the strangers. So you have an extraordinary way of getting into people's heads and worlds. And I was very interested particularly in this new book about how you did that. A good question. She is. Well, she's one of the best, right? She is. She would have immediately published this story.

She had her own Wrangles with Epstein, by the way, and others. Oh, I know. I know, I know. And, yeah, she's one of the few people who comes out of those files smelling good. No, she kicked him in the nuts is what she did, which is her favorite thing. Exactly. Yeah, you know, so we already talked about the Brettlers. I will say with the underworld folks, it's part of what I love about this job is I, you know,

I get to sort of move through the world and talk to all kinds of different people, and I have to find a different wavelength to appeal to everyone. There is no one approach. I will say that sometimes the fact of my earlier work helps. The nice thing about doing this work over a period of time. This is my sixth book. I've been writing for the New York over 20 years. And so I have a track record.

You can Google me and get a sense of how I work. And that works in funny ways. So there's a guy who's a minor character in the book. There's a big character in the book who's a gangster named Indian Dave, very scary guy who, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't talk to Indian Dave. but I was tracking out people who were associates of his in the underworld. And there's a guy, a fairly notorious English gangster named Andy Baker.

And Andy Baker had recently got out of prison. He's never talked to a journalist before. And I made an overture to him through intermediaries. And he ended up agreeing to talk with me. And he became a really critical source. And to this day, I don't know why Andy decided to talk to me. But I think I have a theory, which, is that Andy knew that I had written not once but twice big articles about Chapo Guzman.

And I think these guys all have an ego. I'm sure you've encountered this too, Carla. Oh, hello. Why haven't you called me? Why haven't you called me? Exactly. And so I think there was a little bit of a sense maybe for Andy of, you know, finally a journalist worthy of my stature in the criminal underworld comes knocking. And it's the guy who wrote about Al Chapo. So my story must be told by the finest reporter in the land. By somebody who was worthy of, you know, whoever else it is. And so I think it was probably something like that. But, you know, that became a really important relationship for the book.

Andy actually is back in prison now. But, you know, he calls me from prison. I think I'm going to go, he's organizing a reading in the prison library. I'm going to go and do a book signing in the fall. Oh, my God. Oh, you're a lot nicer to them than I am. It'll be a story to tell. But, see, you know, I'm going to contrast this.

You're doing that. And I was thinking of going, I was in San Francisco yesterday and the day before, and I was thinking of going down to the trial and just waving at Elon to fuck with him. Like, hi, hi, dude. What's up, girl? You should have done it. I know, he would have erupted because he and I don't speak anymore. Imagine the drama.

Just for me. That was just for me. That's my inclination. So, but go ahead. But it would have been for the rest of us, had you only gone. Correct. I thought about it. I just thought, I just can't.

There's too much Caroswisher out there. right now. So anyway, so go ahead, finish what she was asking. Like, so. Yeah, so you don't, I think that helps sometimes. I will often, you know, I'll sometimes send people articles I've written just to say, like, here, you know, this will give you a sense of the kind of work that I do. But, you know, I published a piece in The New Yorker, um, just as the book was coming out about this crazy fraud conspiracy in New Orleans involving people crashing into tractor trailers, totally different world. That was the world of kind of scuzzy personal injury lawyers in New Orleans.

And then a lot of people in New Orleans East, you know, living in generational poverty and risking their lives to make money in these schemes. And it's just a different approach. That's part of what I like about it is that there is no, I don't have a beat. I sort of move from one world in the next night, always have a little bit of a sense of vertigo trying to figure it out. Sure. But what do you do, would you say you do to earn their trust? She's asking specifically. What do you think you do?

I ask good questions. I try to listen well. But honestly, the biggest thing, and this is annoying, sometimes I think for other journalists to hear, because I am speaking from a position of, you know, what these days counts as rare institutional privilege in the sense that I can keep coming back because when I'm writing for The New Yorker,

like the piece I just published on New Orleans, I started working that piece in 2021. one. So it just, you've got time. And with a book, I've got time and I keep showing up. And that kind of persistence, and I think in a kind of strange way, you know, that sort of novelty of you begins to disappear a little bit when they see you keep hanging around. Another thing that I've always done is if you won't talk to me, I'm going to call the 10 people you talk with all the time. And all I need is a few of them. And if I talk with them for a couple hours, they'll come back and say, actually he's pretty serious.

You know, it's not, he's really trying to understand this, and they'll report back to you. It doesn't always work. Or it scares them. That worked with Steve Case. I talked to 25 people around him, and he wasn't talking to me, and then he's like, I guess I have to talk to you now. And I go, I guess you do.

I mean, I think that's the, you know, the line I often use, which is slightly obnoxious, but gets the point across is I'll say the train's leaving the station. Like, you can get on it or not, you know. I say I'm inevitable, so you might as well start. Yeah, I haven't quite summoned the confidence to put it in those terms. I'm ruder than you are. Patrick, I'm sure you're charming. I'm not charming. There you go. I like it. I like it. I could learn from you.

I also nag, interesting when she was talking about this, I find nagging a lot of these billionaires yields a lot of things, you know, because... Well, they're also insecure. Yes, so they'll go, well, you don't want to ask me about it. I go, not really. I'm not interested in what you have to say. and then I leave. Like, I actually go, and then they always come back. I shouldn't say this because now they'll figure it out, but they'll never figure it out. But the thing is, so many of these people, I mean, I don't know. You've spent more time around these people than I have, but I've written about billionaires over the course of my career. And so often, I mean, the inherited variety is like a different kind of pathology.

But the self-made ones, I think almost without exception, these are people who have some hole they're trying to fill, that they're never going to fill. A deep hole. I always say their mothers didn't hug them. enough, but I would say their parents didn't hug them. Yes, or whatever it is. But there's just, there's a thing motivating them. And I wrote a big piece a few years ago for The New Yorker about Larry Gagosie and the art dealer. I remember.

You know, as the dealer for all those types of people. And I swear Larry's great genius is realizing that at a certain point, you've got all the boats and all the houses and you're trying to find some other way to measure yourself worth vis-a-vis your peers. and if it's the best Picasso and you're worried that your rival is going to get it, you'll spend any sum. Well, look at what's happening in Open AI right now, the trial with Musk and Open AI and Sam Wollman.

Why are they there? Why are they exposing themselves? And you think it's that? It's just a kind of... It's a dominance game. It's a dominance. They can't stop them. It's not good for anybody.

They should have settled, you know? I don't know. I think it's a deep, deep. deep insecurity and a sense of victimization then manifest itself. I think you're right. That's another story, but you're right. Larry Goghian took advantage of that. So one of the things you've said after you publish, quote,

the story keeps moving, unfolding, fluttering its wings. So I'm going to check back on some of your other stories. Now, I interviewed you for your book in 2022, your Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and their role in the opioid crisis. I am still incandescent after reading that book, I have to say. Not incandescent, someone pointed out I wasn't using it. I'm furious. Their company, Purdue Pharma, finally received its sentencing in the federal court for fraud and kickback charges. They ordered to pay over $8 billion in criminal penalties, but none of the Sacklers faced criminal charges,

which kills me. How did you react when you heard about the ruling? Well, I mean, I knew it was coming. It was not a, it was, at this point, it was sort of a formality of something that we, that had been in the works for years. Listen, to me, it's, it is, it is, it. It is, it is, it is, it is, a really lamentable feature. I mean, never mind the fact, there was a story, I think, in the Financial Times a few weeks ago about how all the big white-collar

criminal defense firms are out of work. They're all, because there's no white-collar criminal defense prosecutions under the Trump administration. So, you know, it's open season now, I guess. Right. But even in earlier eras, I think there's this crazy thing

about the way in which we prosecute corporations where you can have a situation like this where the corporation pleads guilty and pays fines, but no individual go to prison. It's like you treat the corporation like a driverless car. And I just don't know

as a kind of broad, systemic matter, that we are going to solve these kinds of problems of like corporate malfeasance of the highest level that in this case spurs a public health crisis that ends up killing hundreds

of thousands of people. I don't know that it's going to end up being anything but a speeding ticket if people don't go to jail. And so to me, it was... Parking ticket. Yeah. Yeah, just, I mean, it was kind of a sad outcome, but a sadly predictable one.

Yeah. Do you imagine that will change? I mean, one of the reason I was interviewing all these parents so much as I was hoping lawsuits would incur, right? When people hear this or that federal regulators would finally pay attention or politicians. And one of the companies, I think I've done two of the parents, but I talk about it a lot. Like, this was years ago, I started doing this on these chatbot suicide things. And one of the companies, said to me, when are you going to stop? And I said, when you go to jail, I'm hoping. That's my goal, really, for one of you to go to jail. But it didn't happen in this case when there's so clear a line, a bright line that you drew and many others did between the Sacklers and what happened.

Yeah, but again, I mean, I think the thing that's so frustrating, right, is that we have, if you look at the chatbots, right, in theory, I don't know, I want to live in a society in which we sort of learn and improve over time. And when you have certain forms, of corporate transgressions in which people are making decisions on the basis of their valuation or ROI or shareholder value or whatever these considerations are where they say, okay, I'm going to do the wrong thing. We're actually going to sell out the country. We're going to sell out families like that. They were all at the White House for King Terms. Well, that's the thing. But this is, it's funny, this is a thing I come back to a lot recently. There's a friend of mine.

a guy named David DeYoung, who wrote a terrific book that came out a few years ago called Nazi billionaires. And it kind of is what it says on the tin, right? It's like a story about the generation of German industrialists who weren't ideological Nazis, but kind of made peace with the third right, because they realize it's good for business. And they said, you know, we are running these corporate empires. And actually, that's the first and foremost, that should be our consideration is we need to protect the business. Yeah, shareholder value. And I remember thinking specifically about the tech barons when they, you know, in this new phase, when they all started, you know, with the inauguration, thinking, boy, I'd love to send them this book just to give them a sense of how their grandkids are going to think about them. But the irony, right, is that like, I don't care. Well, here's the thing. If you read the whole book, those families, like the grandkids are now the wealthiest people in Germany. That's right. That's exactly right. We'll be back in a minute.

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This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's good news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is. how much a single-sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture, think Preparation H, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that will change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going

viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you're rich BFF. I'm going to move on to your other breakout books, saying nothing is about a kidnapping that's set against the backdrop of the troubles. In Northern Ireland, the political violence we've seen recently in the United States doesn't come anywhere near what happened in Northern Ireland, obviously. But it's concerning in the recent assassination attempt of the White House correspondent feels already like old news. Do you find any parallels having written about the troubles? I do and I don't. Yeah. It's funny when I was working on the book, I guess I started working the book on the article that became the book in 2014.

And I finished the book, and it came out in 2018, 2019. And during that time, I mostly felt like I was writing a period piece about a very foreign situation that, as an American, I couldn't particularly relate to. But then, you know, you got the Black Lives Matter protests, and you got these militarized cops out on the streets and tear gas. And suddenly, just the kind of visual iconography of American life started to look a lot more like the early days of the troubles. I think that the kind of the depths of the division. And, you know, I thought about it when ICE killed those two civilians several months ago, the response by people who very quickly were looking to dehumanize them in one way, you know. Oh, he had a gun, you know, he had a concealed carry permit, or she was gay.

or whatever that, you know, immediately looking for some reason not to think of them as human beings, like fellow human beings. That's a very Northern Ireland thing, the idea that all deaths are not created equal, that they're coded differently, and how you feel about them should be really a function of the identity of the person who dies. That really worries me.

You know, I was at a thing last summer in Maine, and I saw George Mitchell speak. and he was talking about the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the troubles. And somebody asked him in the Q&A, because he was very involved in that decision, and ending this three-decade conflict, somebody asked him if he thought that there could have been a Good Friday Agreement in a world in which social media existed. And he said, I've thought about it, and I don't think so. I think if social media had existed in 1998, we never would have gotten there.

Which is why it amplifies and weaponizes everything. Yes. Even more so, because bots are in there. And, of course, it's created out of rage and desperation. Now, you also hosted a podcast called Wind of Change, where you dig into the allegation that the CIA ghost wrote a song for West German heavy metal band during the Cold War. You said that making it was the most fun you've ever had.

Why did you get out of podcasting? Why aren't you doing more? Are you doing more? I've got one in the works, actually, with the same. Yeah, I mean, in the nature of the messed up podcasting industry, the company that made that Pineapple Street doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist. There were terrific people. I did my succession podcast with them.

So great. But the two people who I worked with most closely on that, Joel Lovell and Henry Mollofsky, I am collaborating with again. It's very early stages of a new podcast. It's not about spying. It is about music. It's really fun. And yeah, I loved it. I loved it.

And I love working with those guys. You know, writing is solitary stuff. And you make a podcast, you're like, it's like running off to join the circus. It's really fun. I'm having a lot of fun. This is the best part of my career, I have to say. I can tell. We talked briefly about El Chapo.

He wanted you to write his memoir, and you turned him down, by the way, just Andy Baker. And you said access is overrated. I would completely agree with you. And Walter Eisen should have agreed with me on that issue. Where do you... Here, here. Oh, God, I don't even. I don't even.

Where do you draw the line over what stories you'll cover? And when it comes to writing someone's memoir, would you say yes to someone that might surprise me? I don't think I would write anybody's memoir. Yeah. I wouldn't ghost write anybody's memoir. I, you know, it's funny. I go back to actually a conversation I have with Larry Goghium

when we were at his beach house in Amangansett, and he has all these amazing... I mean, he's got surprise, surprise. He has an inquiry. incredible art collection. And he's been painted by all kinds of people. You know, David Hockney did a portrait of Gugosian. And we were talking about the big 12,000 word piece I was in the process of writing about him. And I think he was a little bit uncomfortable because he's so used to the art press, which is a little bit, you know, as you'll relate, it's a little bit like

parts of the tech press where the people who are just on the beat are kind of really what they're hoping is that they'll get the next interview, they'll get invited to the party. And That wasn't me. And he was, I think, becoming aware of that. And I was trying to sort of prepare him for my piece. And I said, you know, when you see the piece, it's not going to be like looking at a photo of yourself. It's going to be like looking at a painting that somebody's painted.

It's like it's all filtered through somebody else's sensibility. I meant that not in a self-aggrandizing way, but more just because he's a guy who's actually sat for, you know, David Hockney painting Larry Goghian doesn't actually look like the way. Larry Garagosian sees himself, right? It's all filtered through Hockney's perception. That's the way I see my writing. And so I think it's one thing to write a story like London following where I have a ton of access to this family. It's a very intimate account of the family. But I wouldn't make any claim for it being their story. Like if their name was on the cover along with mine and it was a

memoir, that's just not what I do. Would it be anyone you might say yes to? Like in that regard? Nobody. Nobody. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah, access is overrated. I did some of that with the journal. I hated it. I hated it. It was so, oh, I just, I'm so glad. I don't, I'm so glad they're not talking to me.

I love it. It's the best life. I mean, I think it's better. And I think that the, the story I always tell is, you know, I find out anyway. It doesn't matter. Well, you get all the, but you get better stuff. I mean, you know, with the Sacklers, none of them talk to me. And so I got, you know, I got doorman.

I got administrative assistance. I got college roommates. I got a yoga instructor who travel. because when you're to Sacklers, you know, you go on vacation and you bring your yoga instructor with you. All those kinds of people, I don't know. Would it have been better to have the family talking to me with their lawyers and their PR people? I don't think so. Yeah.

I'm always very sincere when I say to people, I want to talk, you know, like, let's hear. I want to hear what you have to say. But when they say no, that's never the end of the story for me. That's the beginning. Especially if you're a good reporter. It doesn't matter. That's the one lesson I learned far too late, I think, in some ways. Let's wrap up with some reflections on larger trends very quickly.

I'm not going to ask you out your Jay Crue ad. I'm in The Devil Wears Proto, too, so I can't. Okay, there you go. That's great. You managed to become a famous magazine writer at a time when magazines can feel like anachronisms, as you noted, with a few exceptions in New York or I would say Vogue, a New York magazine is going pretty well. Atlantic is.

Say Nothing was adapted into a, TV series for FX. A24 has already optioned the rights for two-year works, including the rights to London falling. Obviously, it's such a clear. I was like, Hello Netflix, before is even published. Do you ever feel like an entrepreneur who produces and sells IP? I've sold a lot of rights of stuff, too, so I'm super aware of this world. But it's a different world. It's sort of an omnibedia world. How do you look at it? Oh, boy. I mean, I have a bunch of feelings about this. When I first started writing for The New Yorker, I was freelance for six years before they put me on staff. And they basically would publish one big piece a year, but nothing more. And that forced me to

learn how to hustle a little bit. And so I started doing some screenwriting. I did all kinds of different things. It was a think tank, you know, various things. And I never really lost that even after I went on staff of the magazine. And I think generally speaking, you'd be crazy in this moment, even if what you love most as magazine journalism, at least for me, just in terms of the economics of it and the trend lines and so forth, I think it's good for everybody to have some kind of side hustle. I do a bunch of things. You know, I write scripts, I produce TV, I do podcasting, and they all actually kind of feed into each other creatively in a way that feels pretty healthy and useful to me. Strangely enough, for years, I was an unproduced screenwriter getting paid good money

to write scripts for studios that they didn't make. And all those years in the trenches as a screenwriter actually helped my nonfiction writing in all kinds of ways that I wouldn't necessarily have predicted. The area in which it gets tricky, I think, or the area in which I'm maybe a little bit different from other magazine journalists is,

I think there's a kind of sad trend that you've seen with the decline of the industry in general, which is that a bunch of people now when they sit down to write a magazine article or they conceive of a magazine article, What they're really thinking about is can I get an option in Hollywood? And I've been lucky in that regard. I've had a lot of stuff optioned and some stuff made,

but I never, ever, ever pick a story on that basis. I think it's a mistake to do that. As a general rule, kind of a cross-life, I think you should focus on making the thing you're doing be the best version of that thing and not, I couldn't imagine, honestly, kind of focusing on a project in front of me, but in the back of my mind, thinking how cool it would be if it was something else. If that's what you want to do, just go do that other thing, in my view. That's a good point.

I think it leads to a lot of bad magazine writing. So, yes, I've been fortunate in that regard, but I never give any thought to that. We never show things to people. I mean, there's crazy stuff that happens in this business among magazine journalists, but there are people who will, they'll cut life rights deals with the subjects of their stories before they've published, which to me feels...

Oh, wow. Like, it's just not a thing that I would do personally. Of course they would, though. Some of that comes from the desperation of people trying to make a living in an industry that's rapidly contracting. And so maybe I'm – maybe some of my virtue here is just a reflection of the fact that I've, you know, that I've been fortunate, that I don't have to make those kinds of concessions. But it would feel like a pretty distinct conflict of interest if I were trying to sign people up, you know, sign up the life rights of people who I was then going to write a magazine article about, which I hadn't published yet. Right. But you do have to think about everything I do, I'm like, is this better as a podcast, or should it be a book or should it be?

Yes. I spent a lot of time, or maybe I'll do this this way. And so it's, I'm constantly thinking about other ways to tell a story that I might have just. Yeah, I am too, but I feel as though that's the great thing about that is that. That's right. Everything has a kind of natural medium in which it wants to. So wind of change, my podcast, it wouldn't have worked as a magazine article. You certainly could have done it, but you're right.

You could, but it comes. I'm spoiling nothing here to say. It lands in a slightly inconclusive place, which I knew would be the case from the get. And I felt as though if people read a story and it takes them hours and hours to read this story and at the end you're inconclusive, they will feel frustrated

because they've given you their whole attention span for a certain amount of time and then you've gotten to the end and you haven't totally delivered the goods. If they're listening to a podcast and they can be washing the dishes or walking their dog. There's music.

you know, on the bike or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons why it worked better. Yeah, there's lots of ways to tell a story. Okay, I have two last questions. I saw a TikTok from the late show book club where you said, if you're doing your job in a way that AI can easily replicate, you're probably not doing your job well. I could not agree more. And I don't think you were saying that in a cavalier way. Your point was that journalism unerced new information by Gumpshire reporting, making calls, going out in the world to talk to people. There's also an element of creativity that is not replicable. They can do a very close facsimile.

I just made a version of myself that is pretty close, an avatar, a 3D avatar. But is there a place for AI and journalism? Because at some point in the future, AI agents could be making calls, sending emails, and potentially doing real reporting. It could even involve a con because the AI agent may not identify itself as AI. How do you look at it? Everyone sort of has a take right now. Do you have one?

I mean, I don't have a, you know, I don't have a bumper sticker take. I do use AI. It's been really helpful for me in really narrow ways. And so don't use it for anything associated with writing. And I should say I now get, as I'm sure to you, these kind of clever spam emails that sneak past my filter that are, you can immediately tell that they're written by AI. And I think it's such a mug's game to think that AI is going to help you with your write. It's one of those funny things where I honestly feel as though six months ago there were people who was a certain kind of person who thought that this was a good idea.

And now we know, like, in fact, it sort of flattens everything out. It does. You can tell when you're reading. You can tell. I don't use it for that stuff. I will tell you the area in which it's been amazingly helpful. And I want to kind of pick my words carefully because I don't want to tip too much about what this – I was working on a project. and basically what I said to Claude and ChatGPT was there's a certain kind of lawsuit that I'm really interested in.

And this lawsuit is really only about 10 or 15 years old. The law changed and suddenly there started being these new lawsuits. And I'll bet that there's the equivalent of like a big time kind of ambulance chaser who does this sort of thing. And probably among the many people who started doing this 10 or 15 years ago, there are some who are more prominent, have more prominent cases, talk to the press, and are big characters. And I want you to find me those names. And it went, took, to-took-took-took-tuk-tuk, and gave me the two names. And that's the kind of thing that it would have taken me, you know, it could have taken me a day or two in the past.

For that stuff, great. I think there are all kinds of uses for AI. But in the actual writing or worse in the, I mean, I think the point I was trying to make in that video was, your job is not to take. take shit that's on the internet and rearrange it. But you wouldn't want it to make calls or send emails or do reporting for you. I would never do that. But I mean, to go back to Tina Brown's question, why do people trust me?

Well, part of the reason is that I'm never going to lay you off on an assistant, much less than AI. I am accessible. I am reachable. I'm pretty straightforward. I try and be as transparent as possible. So, I don't know. I mean, I guess there are some people who are, I feel like I'm pretty busy. I guess there are some people who are so busy that they need to outsource in that way.

But to me, it's just like a... No, it's ridiculous. It's so lazy. I mean, to me, the thing is, what's the world you want to live in? I mean, some of this is that you're catching me after three weeks of going out and talking in rooms with people about my book and meeting with people who've read it. I think ultimately as human beings, we want to see other humans and read a human face. Yes, it's good for your health. Even in a universe in which you say, isn't it uncanny? way the avatar seems like a real human face, at a certain point, people are going to get

pretty icked out by that and want the real thing. They do, but the numbers are growing enormously. These used to be an outlier. All these chatbots used to be an out. I just interviewed Cherry Turkle about this. It used to be an outlier and strange, and now it's very common, unfortunately, and very bad for people's health. Let me ask you the last question. In the recent New York Times profile, you said everywhere you look, there were people doing morally grotesque things. that, well, you may not be part of the solution. You're not part of the problem, and that's something. I know what you mean.

You got a law degree from Yale and had a job lined up at a corporate law firm but managed to sell a book and a New Yorker article in the nick of time and never went down that path. What would your life be like if you became a corporate lawyer? Can you imagine yourself leading a morally protest? Maybe a Sackler lawyer, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, listen, I think about this stuff all the time, and if you read Empire of Pain,

the first person you meet in that book is Mary Joe White, a longtime lawyer to the Sacklers. Oh, man. I liked her. Well, that's the thing. She was a hero to a lot of people, but behind the scenes doing some pretty, and again, like, perfectly, her legal right to do that work, but the idea that we would celebrate this person seems just gross to me. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I don't, I think I would really struggle with it.

I didn't want to come off too self-righteous in that Times piece. The point that I was making was just, I have no trouble explaining to my kids, and I'll have no trouble explaining to my grandkids what I was doing at this moment in history. And I don't know that I'll be able to boast about having, you know, help turn the ship around. I wish I could. But I certainly, it hasn't, you know, it hasn't been, yeah, you know, full speed ahead. Let me contribute to the, you know, the kind of pretty dire direction in which we're going. I think what my wife, I should say, and this is maybe a good place down, what my wife would say is I would have been a terrible lawyer.

I mean, leaving aside all the kind of moral choices, right, I would have been so bad at it. Leaking everything. Oh, let me tell you about Enron reporter. Right, right, right. So, I mean, hey, I guess in that respect, maybe the way in which I would sort of sabotage the machine would just be incompetent.

Yeah, I guess. I don't know. You might have ended up like the lawyer in the Pelican brief, so be careful about that. Exactly. You are part of the solution in case you're interested, just from someone who admires you. Thank you. You're more than just not part of the problem.

In any case, it's a wonderful book. It's really a great read. It kept me up all night. I'm exhausted. But I really appreciate it, and I'm excited to see what you do next. What a pleasure. Thanks, Karat. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Roussel, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsopp,

Megan Bernie, and Kalin Lynch. Nishat Purwa is Vox Media's executive producer, of podcasts. Special thanks to Sam Lee, Catherine Barner, and Julia Sharp Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to model in a J-Crew ad or be in the Devil Wears Prada too. If not, you're part of the problem. Go wherever you listen to podcast, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.