The Decibel - Patrick Radden Keefe, in conversation at The Globe

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

Patrick Radden Keefe, investigative journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker, is best known for his narrative non-fiction true crime stories and deep dives into history. His best selling books include Say Nothing, Empire of Pain, and The Snakehead, as well as the podcast Wind of Change. Keefe visited The Globe and Mail’s Toronto offices in June 2026 to talk to Globe feature writer Ian Brown about his latest work, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City And A Family’s Search For Truth, along with insights into investigative writing and reporting and what it takes to unearth stories from the criminal underworld. This recording of that interview has been edited for length.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, it's Cheryl. This week at the Globe and Mail, we welcome to guest into the newsroom, investigative journalist and writer Patrick Radden Keith. He's a celebrated author known for narrative true crime stories and deep dives into history. Keith is a staff writer for the New Yorker, but you may know him from his bestselling works, like Say Nothing, a history of the troubles in Northern Ireland and the legacy of the IRA, Empire of Pain, an investigation into a pharmaceutical family dynasty blamed for the opioid crisis. Or his podcast, Wind of Change, on whether a 1980s pop song helped topple the Soviet Union. Keefe sat down for an interview with the Globe's feature writer, Ian Brown,

in front of a live audience of Globe reporters and editors. Some of their conversation is about Keith's latest book, London Falling, a mysterious death in a gilded city, and a family's search for tree. truth. But a lot of the talk was about our shared work of journalism, how stories are found, and what it takes to dig up the truth. We thought it was a fascinating talk with real insight into the nitty-gritty work of investigative writing, and one we thought you should listen to. So here's that interview now that we've edited down for length. Hope you enjoy. Patrick Radinkeef, I think is arguably the most celebrated journalist of his

his generation. He's been contributing for 20 years to the New Yorker, where he's a staff writer. He's written about everyone and everything from Anthony Bourdain, the late celebrity chef, to El Chapo, the head of the Sentinel of Drug Cartel. He's also the author of six books, at least three of which have been bestsellers? Four. Okay. But who's counting? Yeah, but who's counting, really? Four of which have been bestsellers. They include the Snakehead, which is about human trafficking in Manhattan's Chinatown, among many, many other things. Say nothing about Jerry Adams and the struggles in Northern Ireland, lately made into the TV show we've all watched. Empire of Pain, which is about the Sackler family and how they addicted

quite a big chunk of the world's population to OxyContin. His most recent book, and the reason he's in Toronto, is London falling, a mysterious death in a greek. Gilded City and a family search for truth about that city's morally elastic embrace of money, criminals, oligarchs, all told through the story of Zach Brettler, a 19-year-old who jumped to his death from a luxury apartment building in 2019. Patrick is famous for the depth of his reporting, but also for his brilliance as a storyteller. And he agreed to take time in an incredible, busy schedule at which he is the end of. Almost done.

Almost done. As soon as this introduction is over, in fact. He came to talk to us at the Globe about long-form writing, which also means he'll be talking about the exotic requirements of long-form reporting. And it's an honor, but a huge pleasure to have you here. Thank you. So, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

So welcome to the big chairs. as well. And just before we start, I just wanted to ask you for practical purposes, have you come across any good stories here in Toronto that we should be covering?

Well, I only just got here, and if I came across anything really good, I would never tell you guys. That's what I thought you'd say. It's actually not such a silly question, because you do write about an amazingly diverse range of people and subjects, you know, from Mark Burnett,

who invented, one of the inventors of reality TV who turned Donald Trump into a reality TV star to Zach Brettler. We were just talking about. First of all, how do you find and choose your stories?

I mean, for an instance, your story about wine forger's, like, how do you come across that? Well, it's funny. I feel as though it's funny that you mention that particular story because the some of you probably have a person like this in your lives.

There are certain people that I know who are friends or sources who just, they just generate ideas. It's like they talk to more people. They read more widely. They just, ideas just kind of spin off of them. And one of them is this friend of mine, this guy, Michael,

who if anybody here is listening to my podcast, Wind of Change, Michael is a character in Wind of Change. And there's a kind of running gag in that, which is that he's always giving me shit because he says that most of my good stories come from him. And indeed, the wine fraud story came because Michael called me up one day and said, did you know that there's counterfeit wine?

And I said no, and, you know, that was the beginning of that one. I worry that if we actually went through and audited my stories, you know, maybe 30% of them came from, and the, it's just, anyway, it's too funny. He cracks me up. He sent me a link yesterday. to something which I'm not going to tell you about.

And he said, this is really fascinating. Somebody should do a story about this. And he had recently been to a birthday party of mine, and he met my colleague Rachel Levive, who is one of the greats. And he said, maybe Rachel? And I wrote back and said, I am not going to introduce you to my friends if this is what you're going to do. You know, this is not, this is my resource that I need a monopoly on.

No, listen, I try to read widely. I think with every passing year, I think you're not going to find the best stories on the internet. I try and just kind of go out there and talk to people. Sometimes in a way that can feel almost dumb, like almost juvenile. I always think about my colleague David Grant, who wrote this, I mean, he's written a number of amazing books, but he wrote this incredible book, Killers of the Flower Moon, that got turned into the Martin Scorsese. film. The way that came about was that David learned that the FBI had an in-house historian.

And he thought, huh, that's interesting. They have a historian on staff at the FBI. And he somehow got this guy's phone number. And he called the guy up. And he said, what's the craziest story you've ever heard about the FBI? And the guy said, well, as it happens, there's this. And essentially then narrates to David, Killers of the Flower Moon. But that's such an obvious move. It almost seems too obvious, right? And I think sometimes I've been doing this 20 years now, and I feel as though one of the things I've learned is to,

I think in the early years I was always trying to show how smart and prepared and sophisticated I was. And I have realized along the way that it's much better if everybody just assumes that you're dumb or like a simpleton, you know? Right. They're a laboratory retriever or something. Absolutely. Yes, yes.

Can you tell me about your your process. Well, before you do that, did you always want to be a writer? I mean, you went to Columbia. You went to Cambridge. You went to London School of Economics. And then were you going to become a lawyer? You went to Yale. Yeah, I mean, yeah.

So I knew from the time when I was a teenager that I wanted to write. And I actually read the New Yorker. in high school and I knew I wanted to be a New Yorker writer. And I started pitching the New Yorker when I was in college. I tried writing fiction. I wasn't very good at it. I was pitching articles by the time I was a senior in college. I pitched and pitched and pitched and they wouldn't take any of my pitches.

What were you pitching? All kinds of stuff. It's like in the summer of 99, I went to Cambodia. And, you know, I had some kind of story. I don't remember if it was about landmines or, you know, there were various things that I would pitch. I didn't really know what I was doing. And I pitched for seven years before they eventually took a piece.

And, I mean, if I'm being really honest, I feel as though the truth is, as adults, we look around and most people that you know aren't doing the thing they dreamed of doing when they were teenagers. And I think I was, I was sort of audacious enough as a, teenager to think I want to write for the New Yorker, I want to write books, I want to write articles, but also realistic enough by the time I was in my 20s to realize just statistically there's like a decent probability that this is not going to work out for me. And I was risk

averse enough that I wanted a backup plan. And so I went to law school thinking if the writing thing doesn't work, I need to be able to pay the rent. And it was kind of a cover story, honestly. It was like a thing I could be doing so it looked like I had a plan in life, even though I was secretly nurturing this other ambition, which at that point was not showing any real results. And then it took a long time. I finally, I published a book before I got a freelance assignment. So I sort of did it backwards. I published a book while I was in law school. And then I was two weeks away from going to work at a law firm when I got an assignment at the New Yorker. But even then, I wasn't home free because that was a freelance assignment and they didn't put me on staff for the next six years basically they published one story a year really by which time you had kids and i had kids i had a mortgage yeah yeah um just very quickly has that fancy education uh come in handy to you as a reporter Columbia Cambridge LSC yeah but not in a way that I would like counsel doing it as a as a you know I mean it's yes of course in a

in unpredictable ways. I could give you any number of examples, but it pays off in the ways you least expect. So like my second book was called the Snakehead, and it was about Chinatown in New York City, but more specifically it was about the Fujinese community in Chinatown. And I was a white guy who didn't speak Mandarin, much less Fujinese, which these people did.

and I really wanted to sort of understand this community and I was struggling with the reporting and then I met this guy I'm sure you've any reporter in this room has probably had some version of this experience where sometimes you meet somebody who's just like the Rosetta Stone, they like unlock everything so there was this guy who's still a very dear friend of mine

20 years later this guy William Chan who is an accountant. And he's Fuginese. And he actually had known Sister Ping. It was the woman that I was writing about. And William had grown up in Fujan province. And then he'd ended up in Hong Kong.

And then he like met some Mormon missionaries. And the Mormon missionaries basically said like, hey, if you'd like to, you know, if you consider converting to Mormonism, like we might be able to get you a visa to come to the United States. And so he was like, sure, I'll be a Mormon. And he ended up in New York as an accountant for all of the Fujinese businesses in Chinatown. So he knew everybody in the community. And William was obsessed with the Ivy League. And so when he learned that I had gone to Yale Law School, this was like he wanted to sit down and talk with me purely on the basis of the fact that I'd gone to Yale Law School.

And he had a son at the time in a kind of fancy private school. and he was, you know, wondering about his son's college ambitions. And so perversely, William then became the person who opened all the doors from me in Chinatown. Like when I went to China, William came with me and spent two weeks interpreting for me and using it, like flexing his own sort of Guangxi

to like basically force people to talk to me because they knew him and they didn't want to disappoint him. And it all happened because I went to Yale law school. So there you go. I mean, that's not why you should. should go to your law school, but it helped. So tell us about your process. Once you have spoken to your pal, Michael, and he's given you your subject, where do you start? How do you organize your material? These are all questions people have asked me to ask you. Do you have a whiteboard? Do you use an

outline? Do you have one of those picture maps on your wall, the way they do on, you know, on the cop shows? Do you use scribe, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. I mean, I should say I've been on book tour for like eight weeks now. These are my favorite kinds of conversations I have. I love the kind of crafty, the crafty questions more than anything. So I'm happy. I can talk about this stuff all day. Yeah. So I mean, there's a kind of, I think a challenge that I don't know the way it works for you guys. I'm sure it's slightly differently than it does for us. But like I get paid by the word. I don't get paid by the words that I write. I get paid by the words that the New Yorker publishes. So if I write 14,000 words and they decide they're going to run it at eight, I'm getting paid for eight. And I don't get paid for the reporting. And this is sometimes frustrating if you're somebody who reports a lot because there are other people who might write a beautiful essay.

And they also get paid by the word. And what they did was like read three books and thought about them. You know, like no. Sounds ideal. Yeah, no disrespect. Like, there's no moment where, for the people who report, you know, my friend Rafi Kachedorian will talk to 70 people for a piece. And, like, he's not getting paid for those interviews. The challenge for me is that I love reporting.

I feel as though I have to have a kind of level of mastery before I'm ready to sit down and write. But left to my own devices, it'll just kind of proliferate outward. And I'll always do that thing. Young reporters are always hearing this from old reporters. and editors, and I think it's great advice that you get to the end of the interview and you say, who else should I be talking to? And the person tells you three or four names. And then you interview all of them and you get to the end of those interviews and you say, who else should I be talking to? The trouble is, you can see that, like, you know, this just kind of expands and expands

and expands. So the key thing for me was a realization at a certain point that I had to impose a discipline, that my job is not just a report. And so I started outlining early. I started outlining during the reporting. So there would be a point, you know, maybe even a few weeks in where I'll just sort of sit down. I do it on the back of an envelope because I think it's actually helpful to have space constraints. And I'll just say, what is this story? What is the story that I'm telling? Where does it start? Where does it end? What are the big beats along the way? Who are the major characters? And I have this kind of, again, important for me that it's like constrained on a little piece of papers.

There's only so much I can do. And I'm sort of figuring out, what are the big story beats? Who are my characters? And that then becomes this kind of wonderful disciplining mechanism on, there's like a point where if you imagine the reporting goes like this, and then there will be this point where I start outlining and it starts to go like this. And I'm still reporting. But now I can see what the holes are, who I need to talk to.

And it's liberating for me because I have that experience that I'm sure you've all had where you kind of encounter some fast. side character and you're kind of drunk in the moment and you think like, God, you know, I can do a whole digression about this guy. And suddenly it's four days later and you've spent all this time learning about that person. And then you have that awful thing where then you're thinking, well, I spent four days learning about him. So of course I now have to shoehorn him into this story that it often turns out he doesn't belong in. And so then you spend all this time forcing him into the story because you have all this kind of sweat equity from the reporting you did.

And then your editor, smartly, cuts him out. And then you're pissed at your editor. And it's like a whole. And so I try and just avoid a lot of that stuff because I'll often encounter that person on the side. And I'll say, fascinating guy doesn't really fit in the framework that I have. I don't have a whiteboard. I do, I have used Scrivener in the past, but I don't use it now. I have a very rudimentary system both in the physical world with printed stuff and then also on my desktop, on my computer, where I basically have an inbox and an outbox.

I have usually huge numbers of, usually thousands and thousands of files, either in a physical stack or in just PDFs on my desktop. And I will work my way through my inbox. And each time I take the material that I need from something, I'll move the document to the outbox. and what happens is that the outline on the back of an envelope becomes a word document, which is like initially it's just eight, it's eight bold-faced things. This is the intro. This is the section where we do this. This is the big hinge where this happens.

This is the final section. And then I start populating that so that I'm literally taking things out of my notebook, out of the conversations that I've had out of these files, and plugging them sort of roughly where they go. So all the writing for me happens very quickly at the end in a kind of mad fugue. But the really helpful thing is when I sit down to write, it's not a blank page. It is this highly populated. Like I'll sit down to write with an outline that is incredibly detailed.

And then it's almost just like you're somebody doing construction or your painting, a room where the rough work is kind of done. And what you have to do is come in and just sort of do all the finishing. Which part do you hate the most? I love all of it. Really? I think this is like the sport of kings. I love it. I love it.

Well, you write as if it is the sport of kings. But sometimes it takes a long time. I mean, your most recent piece in The New Yorker is about a band of people in New Orleans who stage car accidents with trucks to get the insurance money. You said that was in the words for five years. What were you waiting for?

Yeah, you might ask. So that was a story where it came to me in 2021. During the pandemic, my editor called and said, there's this crazy fraud scheme happening in New Orleans where there are these people, poor people, poor black people, cramming into, like, whole families, cramming into cars, going out on the highway and at speed at like 70 miles an hour, getting into deliberate car accidents with 18 wheelers.

And they're doing it because they are in legal. with wealthy white personal injury attorneys who are putting them up to these accidents. And then, I mean, it's so outlandish. But then, like, after the accidents, they would then, the attorneys would, in collusion with dirty doctors, they would actually have the people that are in the cars get elective spinal surgery in order to drive up the price even further. And so, like, for my first conversation with him, I knew it was a perfect story. because on the, it's like, it has this, on the front end, it's this, like, fun Elmore Leonard kind of bonkers crime story.

But in a deeper way, it's about, like, how fucked up is the American economy in 2021 that this is what people are doing in order to, um, to make ends meet. And, um, the problem is nobody wanted us to talk. Nobody. Nobody. None of the lawyers, men of the defendants, none of the prosecutors. But half of your stories are write-arounds from what I... I know, but with a write-around, you need some... You had somebody's got to talk, you know.

And in this case, there was just, like, no link on the chain. And I kept... I kept thinking there would be a trial. I love nothing more than a trial. But then all these people kept pleading guilty, which means no trial. And it was guilty, guilty, guilty, plea, I mean, dozens and dozens of guilty pleas. And finally a trial happened in March.

And I do think that one of the great... I mean, and I should say, given that you guys are writing for newspaper and often on deadline, and I should just sort of acknowledge that one of the luxuries of doing this work for the New Yorker is that sometimes you can just wait five years and everybody's cool with it. And like, you know, that I mean, okay, so your reactions would indicate that it is not this way everywhere. But I do think that that kind, like, I think a reporter's best friend is strategic patience and like having the kind of, having the ability to like just let something sit on the back burner and not forget about it and just watch it and wait for the right moment. One last question about your process, if you don't mind. I read, I think, in the New York Times that you still read a draft of every story you write.

And these are sometimes 10,000 words stories on speakerphone to your mother and father. Yeah. What the hell? Yeah. Okay, so it's funny. I told, you know, listen. I'm not, I was profiled by this guy in the New York Times. I'm not naive about these things.

I knew when I told him this on the record that he would put into the piece and it would make me look goofy. But I would say a couple of things in my defense. One is like, my parents are in their 80s. They're amazing people. I feel, you know, they're old. I'm old. I still have a great relationship with them. I feel very, very lucky.

I feel very fortunate in that. And so I sort of don't. I think I've kind of aged. At 50, I'm not worried about being called a mama's boy, you know. But more to the point, and this wasn't in the article. When I was a kid, my dad would read aloud. He would read aloud to us. And he read, like, I remember him reading The Hound of the Baskervilles,

and he would, like, do the, like, the roar of the dog. And he would read a Christmas Carol. and he'd like do the noise of Marley's ghost and and we would be terrified. He, I mean, it was really a kind of very vivid exposure to literature for these kids who had big imaginations in the 80s. And as long as I've written, I will read aloud to myself. So when I'm writing, I'm reading aloud a paragraph to myself. I'm reading aloud a section to my wife. and I

when my kids write their essays for school I'll often say like read it aloud because your eye can glide over these little infelicities that if you say it you can sort of hear the music and I think you can kind of occasionally you can hear like a little sort of hairline fracture that your eye is passing over

and so for that reason my parents are I mean my parents are also like retired with nothing better to do than sit and listen to me, you know, read a lot of them. But I will absolutely sit for an hour and read to them. And they have amazing, they don't just, I should say, I hasten to say they don't, they're not like, honey, it's brilliant, you know. Like they have very incredibly pedantic and have like very, very minute notes that are helpful,

which is why I do it. Right, right. I thought it was a great story. So, but in London falling, this book, this new book, it's not. a right around. In fact, it's the opposite. In London Fallen, maybe you should explain how you came upon the book and tell us about your relationship with the main character, Zach Brettler's parents, who, who cooperate more than you've ever been cooperated. So how did that come about? Yeah, I mean, this one didn't come from Michael. I'm pleased to say. I was, in 2023,

I was living in London. We were making a TV drama based on Say Nothing. And, I was on set one day and a guy sat down next to me and I started chatting with him, which is a thing that I do. I try and engage strangers in conversation. And I had literally been doing the wordle and he sat down and I just sort of said, you know, who are you? Like, what brings you here? And we started chatting. I told him what I do. He said, I might have a story for you.

I'm sure you've all had this experience. Somebody says I might have a story for you. start talking and your heart slowly sinks and you're like arranging your face into a kind of polite expression and wondering like how can I tell them that this is not a story for me. And what he said was, I know this family here in London. I'm very close with them. They had a terrible tragedy in 2019. So this is 2023 when we're having the conversation.

They lost a son, a teenager in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Tem. and after he died, his parents made this shocking discovery. They learned that he had had a secret life and that unbeknownst to them, he had been moving around London as a teenager, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And I don't know about you guys, but I heard that much, and I knew this is my next story.

I just, like, I knew in that moment. There was a question of whether the parents would talk. It would have been a tough story to do if the first. family hadn't cooperated. About a week after that encounter, I met with them. We talked for two hours with the understanding. It was all off the record. No commitment in either direction.

I didn't bring a notebook. I just listened mostly. And I had questions. And then we met again about a week later. And, I mean, I'm happy to walk out on this stuff as much as you guys want. but just briefly, like, I didn't. It was actually, if anything, it was me giving them all these reasons why they shouldn't cooperate with me. It was me telling them basically, I'm not trying to get you to yes today.

Like, here's what you need to know about what it would entail if you decided to open up to me. Because I think that that level of transparency on a project like this is important. And eventually they came around. You're used to people hanging up the phone. on you. You phone up. I want to do a story. No. Larry Gogian tells you to go to hell for months before he agrees. And you've talked of 7,000 people that he hears about before he finally says yes. So is there, were there perils to parents suddenly saying, we'll tell you everything? I mean, I would think I'd start to get nervous. And maybe because I'd worry about betraying these

people. I don't know. Did that come into it? Or I mean, it did in the sense that the, I think this thing about kind of repritorial transparency has become more important for me over the years, but I was very, very frank with them at the outset saying, you know, I'm not a therapist. Like we would do these sessions sometimes where we'd talk for hours and then Rochelle would say, she'd kind of let out a sigh and she'd say,

God, that felt good. That felt like a good therapy session. I would say, but it wasn't a therapy session because I'm going to go away and write about this And when I do, I'm not going to be writing for you. And I had to kind of police my relationship with them carefully over a number of years. And if I had a – I think the thing that's interesting is if you'd asked me – not six months ago, but like, say, eight months ago, if – if you'd asked me eight months ago, I would have told you one of two things is going to happen. Either I will write a book that they are perfectly happy with and feel really good about, and I will have pulled a few punches and essentially betrayed my reader and myself and the truth.

Out of my compassion for them and my desire for them to feel good about the book. Or I will write a book I feel good about and they will not feel good about it. And somehow miraculously, I ended up writing a book I feel perfectly. good about I didn't hold back a single thing. And they, I think if they had editorial control, the book would look much different. But to their great credit, they see why things are there. So if you want, we can get into it. But like, there are family secrets that came up when I was working on the book that I immediately knew had to be in the book. And they really didn't want in the book. And in fact, it wasn't just Rochelle and Matthew. It was also Rochelle's siblings. Didn't

want them in the book. And it took me. a year and a half of behind the scenes kind of arm wrestling with this whole family to make sure that all that stuff got in and it's all in there. And so it wasn't a thing

where I do sometimes get vertigo when people cooperate when people want to talk. I sort of think, what am I how do I deal with this? What's in it for them? Yeah, exactly. But in this case or like with Larry Goghia and your fear is

this guy is actually capable of being quite charming, and I don't want to be swayed by his charm. But in this case, no, I mean, I think it was okay in the end. Is he a money launderer? Larry Yugosian? I mean, he's selling $150 million paintings. I mean, what is that all that? Yeah, I mean, it's the last great unregulated marketplace.

I think I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I think we probably... probably. I want to ask you about, you write about some incredibly unsavory people, including Andy Baker, who basically threatened you when he first met. So, like, how do you deal with that? What precautions do you, you better tell that story because it's a pretty gripping story? Yeah, I mean, with Andy, bless you, the, the, with Andy, there's a guy in the book named Andy Baker. He's a minor character, but he was, great friends with a major character

of this guy. He was known as Indian Dave, this gangster. And I couldn't talk to Indian Dave. And so I wanted to talk to Andy Baker. Andy Baker had just gotten out of prison. He's a very violent guy. There's a story in the book about him castrating someone. Like he's not a

he's not a warm and cuddly guy. And he'd just got out of prison. I managed to get a message to him. I still don't really know why he agreed to talk. He'd never talked to a journalist before. I think that what it is is that he knew I had written a big piece about Chapo

Guzman. And these guys have egos. And so I do think for Andy it was a little bit like finally a journalist worthy of my stature has like, has presented himself. And as I was, I was working through an intermediary, a guy who's a friend of his, who's like a civilian, regular guy, but a friend. And what was proposed was that I had to go to, it was complicated. Andy couldn't leave Wales, which is in and of itself crazy because he's not Welsh.

So he's this like, he's this like very violent, notorious gangster who was released early from prison on the condition that he not leave Wales. It's just reminiscent of like Trump talking about, you know, like the Trump being like, you know, they send their rapists, they're criminals, you know, is that idea? You can imagine if you're whales, right? You're like, thanks, England, you know. But so he had to stay in Swansea and wasn't supposed to be meeting with me because he didn't have permission from his parole officers.

And so there was a whole arrangement where I was supposed to get in the back of a car and drive. And as any journalist in the room will know, like, never get in the car, you know. When journalists get kidnapped or killed, it's always because they got in the car. And but I felt I didn't have a choice. And so in terms of precautions, I had a friend who had a pin on my phone. I had two other friends who had instruct a kind of set of people that they were supposed to call if I hadn't checked in by a certain time. And what you're alluding to is I met Andy in a coffee shop in Swansea in the back room. And he's this like big guy who does that Trump thing where it's like he shakes your hand and he immediately gets into your physical space.

He kind of pulls you in and big smile, lots of eye contact, and he asked after my wife and children by name. And I hadn't told him their names. I wouldn't call it a threat exactly, but it was him just telling me, you know, I know. But it was fine. It was... And you later met his children. I met his children later, which was a wild... I mean, just, I couldn't put this stuff in the book because it didn't feel fair to them.

But he has a son who's the age of my younger son. And he's this beautiful kid who's just so achingly wants his dad to be a decent man and stay out of prison. And yeah, I went back. I saw Andy twice for long sessions. I was very transparent with him about from the get, from like within the first 20 minutes, I said, just so you know, I can never give you any money. I can never enter into any kind of partnership with you. I can never like ghost write your memoir.

I can never. There is going to be no thing where I provide you any service or anything. The only thing I can do is buy you meals and that's kosher. So here's the funny thing. We then proceeded to go to the most expensive restaurant in Swansea, which is this like high-end Chinese place. And Handy ordered like truly. I mean, just a magnificent amount of food

and left with these big bags of takeout to go back to the halfway house where he was staying. But he ended up getting thrown back in prison and we're still in touch. I'm doing a reading at the prison in October. Oh. At his invitation. At his invitation.

I mean, what he said to me was, I'm not even going to do the accent, his Bristol accent, but he was like, he said, you know, have you ever, have you ever, have you ever been in a room with 10 murderers? This was his pitch to me. Yeah.

According to him, they're all reading. Actually, we can bring it full circle. He said they're all the young guys. He said they have these young murderers there, all these young guys. And the thing that's hilarious, he's like, it's so funny talking to him about this stuff because he's like, and the thing is, you know,

like, all they were doing was defending their families. And I'm like, I'm sure, Andy. I'm sure they were all defendants. their families, these poor guys. And they're all reading rogues. My book, my collected New Yorker pieces, I think because Andy forces them too. But what was hilarious is he was like,

yeah, they couldn't really relate to the wine story. He said they skip over that one. I want to ask you two last things, and then we'll throw it open. You, London Falling, which is a book, not a magazine story, or the book rather than the magazine story, is filled with digressions.

It is a book of digressions, a fantastic digressions, pages long, about the history of the Thames, about the history of criminality in East End London since 1980, all this kind of thing, about movies, about who owned what. I think it would be fair to say that we are often told, fairly steadily told, to write shorter and shorter and shorter. And you seem to believe that the, From what I can see, the digression is essential to the way you're writing

because it takes you down and deep and it brings that the much larger world closer. It makes the universal seem very particular. And then you can get out of it and return to narratively driving things along. And then you can drop down again. It satisfies your curiosity. You're obviously, you know, pathologically curious, you know, and you're going down. What's the value of writing long then? I mean, and how do we do it in this world that's,

we're told that readers don't, that they have the attention span of two Nats. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. I'm gonna, you guys ready for some Bible thumping here. Okay, so I think this whole thing where we, um,

listen, on the one hand, yes, unquestionably, attention spans have shrunk, right? And you can probably see it when you look at, you know, you guys have the data. You can see who's reading how far and a long,

piece. And so I'm sort of ready to concede the problem. I don't think that the answer is that we need to contract and contract and contract and everything should be a TikTok. I think that for a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that I actually have a kind of optimistic case in which I think that we, I think we're hitting a little bit of an inflection point with AI where I do think that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that they are unhappy with this suite

technologies and the way in which they have hijacked our brains and our attention spans. It's interesting. Social media, I think, had this long honeymoon before we realized that it could actually be quite pernicious. And AI is not having that. You're seeing people turn pretty quickly on it. I think that is an opportunity. First of all, I think it's an opportunity for legacy media, like the Globe and Mail.

I think that increasingly, anytime people look on a screen, it's all, everything just feels kind of uncanny. you don't really know what's what. Things are coming at you with no provenance. You don't know what to believe. You see videos and you don't know what to believe. I'm just chuckling because a friend of mine sent me a video of Mamdani dancing in New York after the next victory. Or I sent it to two friends of mine and I said, I love this guy.

And they wrote back and said, that's not Mamdani. You know, like this is, we're all kind of living in this weird kind of uncanny moment. which feels to me as though it represents an opportunity for legacy media, for a situation where you see a masthead, you see a byline, and you think, okay, there is a kind of provenance here. It may not be that they get it 100% right every time, but there are procedures in place and they are trying to get it right. And if they make a mistake, they're going to run a correction.

And I actually think strangely that the kind of value of what all of us in this room do, which has been sort of steadily undermined in the discourse anyway, for the last 20 years, I think we're kind of poised to make a little bit of a comeback because there's just, everybody is kind of drowning in this like sewer of ambiguous kind of misinformation and uncanniness. And I honestly, I do truly believe that like the kind of work that we do can be a bit of a ladder. It's like a way to kind of climb out of it. In terms of length, originally this was a piece in the New Yorker is 15,000 words long and it was the most red piece of the entire year.

the New Yorker. People will... Which piece was that? This is the piece that became London falling. Oh, yeah. People will engage with a story that is a long story. It has to be a long story that feels like it's well told. I think the bar is very high for us because we are all competing with these little

distraction machines that everybody has in their pockets where, you know, it's like Phantom Limbs syndrome. You're kind of reaching for it. And so I think we have to kind of put in a huge amount of effort into telling a story that feels compelling and is surprising and goes places you don't expect and has a kind of nutritional content where there's enough new reporting in it where you feel like you're not just, it's not just doing what AI can do and taking stuff that's already in the internet and kind of rearranging it into a narrative. And I guess the last thing I would say is there's, there are things. that you can do in a longer narrative. Are there people in the room who've read London falling? Anybody?

Okay. Great. Amazing. All right. So you folks will know what I'm talking about. There are certain secrets that are revealed in the book that only work because you've spent hours reading the book. Like you're invested in, you've sort of seen things one way.

And then I suddenly spin you around and I say, actually, no, you're wrong. or here's this other piece of information about this person that you didn't know. If I told you all that stuff in 750 words, you would not care. It wouldn't matter. And I think that the kind of withholding of information so that you can kind of deal the card out at the perfect time, sorry, I always mix my metaphor is terribly here, requires a bigger canvas. So you're dealing the card out on the big canvas. You know, it's like a you need to be able to kind of tell the story over a longer period of time to have that really satisfying effect.

And I'm evangelical about this stuff. I think that I think the thing we don't want to do is kind of read the worrying indicators about people's attention spans and all the rest of it. And then think, okay, the answer is for all of us to just dumb down what we do spectacularly and give in. I think it's more find the version of this thing that can actually trick people almost into forgetting to check their phone. To me, that should be the highest aspiration for us now. And I think it's possible to do. I think we should all be doing it. Do you think that requires two kinds of reporting, both?

No, I was just going to say, you know, so the way to solve the AI problem is to have longer stories. Here, here. That's good. So is that two kinds of reporting? Is there information reporting and then storytelling reporting? Are they separate? I mean, just to pick up on the joke you made there, I do think that the thing that, to me, that seems essential in an age of AI,

is to remember that what we do is not just rearranging stuff that's already in the Internet, the kind of, the sort of killer app, if you're a reporter, is your telephone. It's your, like, your ability to go and knock on somebody's door. It is the ability to elicit information or find stuff that's buried in records that aren't online. And as long as you can do that, I think we are, I truly think we are kind of AI proof. In terms of different kinds of reporting, I don't know. I mean, I, I should confess, like, I don't, I can't, I would struggle to write short pieces. I've written a few talk of the town pieces and it's hard. But I do think that there are ways, even with a short piece, to sort of think in terms of narrative. It's also tricky because

I mean, for me, I will only write a big piece about people. I need a little opera. I need some drama about humans. And this is tough too because some stories are not stories about people. Like, some stories are inescapably. Like, I've always wanted to write about climate change because nothing feels as important, but I've never found the right sort of dramatic lens to do it in. And it doesn't mean that I don't think it's a hugely important story. It's just like some stories are inescapably's systems stories. There are people who do that much better than I do. So I don't know that everything needs to be a story.

But I do think that the, every morning I wake up and I read The New York Times. And if I'm being honest with you, I realized at a certain point that I'll open an article and there's this kind of meta thing, which is that I'm actually looking for the first off ramp. I'll read like four paragraphs or six paragraphs or eight paragraphs. And I'm looking for the point, the kind of inflection point in the article where I'm like, I got this.

I know where this is going. Okay, I've got it. And then I bail and I read the next article. And it happens again. And so as a writer, something that I'm always doing, and I think everybody should do, is anticipate that your reader is a jaded reader.

who's trying to check out at the first off ramp and find something to just kind of destabilize them a little bit, some way, so that they suddenly have a moment where they're like, oh, wait, maybe I don't know where this is going. Maybe I need to stick around. I can't take this off-ramp. Yeah, right, exactly, because, and it's tiny things, but, like, the, I mean, it's stupid things.

But the, like, I wrote that piece about Chapo Guzman, and I knew that there was a certain kind of jaded reader who had read 100 stories about, Mexican drug cartels. And I was defensively thinking about that reader. And I stumbled on this one little anecdote in the story about this. A guy who was an assassin who worked for Al Chapo, but he loved to take European vacations.

And he actually had an Instagram account, and he would go on these vacations and post pictures of himself. And one day he was transiting through Shippold Airport in Amsterdam, and he was arrested on an Interpol red notice. This guy's a minor character in the story. He doesn't really matter all that much. but I thought, what if I start my Mexican drug car shell story at Chippole Airport in Amsterdam? And it's like a small thing, but I knew that there would be readers who would see the headline, see the art, think like Mexican drug cartel tell a story, you know, like I watch Breaking Bad, I don't need to read this or whatever.

And then I dropped them in the first paragraph into Amsterdam. And then the question for them is, wait a second, what are we doing in Amsterdam? Like, how are we going to get back to the story that I know? And so it's those little tricks. Okay. Thank you very much.