The Louis Theroux Podcast - S7 EP6: Patrick Radden Keefe on the opioid crisis, criminal career longevity and why access is overrated

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Joining Louis in the studio today is award-winning writer and investigative journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe. Patrick tells Louis about his investigation into the Sackler family's involvement in the opioid crisis, how professional criminals keep career longevity, and why he thinks access is overrated. Plus he discusses his latest book, London Falling.   Warnings: Strong language and adult themes.     Links/Attachments:     Book: London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe (2026)  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/patrick-radden-keefe/london-falling/9781035056279     Book: Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/say-nothing/patrick-radden-keefe//9780008159269?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=259955&awc=3787_1770820651_da19805aca482f3e2f7cdd8da31aca44&utm_source=259955&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=Genie+Shopping+CSS     Book: Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe (2022)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/empire-of-pain/patrick-radden-keefe//9781529063103?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=863943&awc=3787_1770820691_38f3f451369dd9c047c37137a0cb0d42&utm_source=863943&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.octer.co.uk%2F     TV Show: ‘Say Nothing’ (2024) - Hulu  https://www.channel4.com/programmes/say-nothing     Wolf of Wall Street (2013)  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993846/     War Dogs (2016)  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2005151/     Nightcrawler (2014)  https://tv.apple.com/gb/movie/nightcrawler/umc.cmc.1h8fjzqshxpg22pa0bm7iho27?action=play     American Psycho (2000)  https://tv.apple.com/gb/movie/american-psycho/umc.cmc.4k3idfzm0x9j5okdedo2s4l50?action=play     Book: Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, Patrick Radden Keefe (2022)  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/patrick-radden-keefe/rogues/9781035001767     Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/     Article: Larry Gagosian Piece, Patrick Radden Keefe (2023)  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/31/larry-gagosian-profile     Book: Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance, (2017)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/hillbilly-elegy/j-d-vance/9780008220563     Book: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua (2012)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/battle-hymn-of-the-tiger-mother/amy-chua//9781408822074?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=259955&awc=3787_1770824539_3e1fda19a55aa22e32d76f01e79f390b&utm_source=259955&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=Genie+Shopping+CSS      Article: The Sinaloa Drug Cartel, Patrick Radden Keefe (2012)  https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/behind-the-cover-story-patrick-radden-keefe-on-the-sinaloa-drug-cartel/    Book: Nazi Billionaires, David De Jong (2023)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/nazi-billionaires/david-de-jong/9780008299798     Book: Some People Need Killing, Patricia Evangelista (2023)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/some-people-need-killing/patricia-evangelista/9781804710081      Book: Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann (2017)  https://www.waterstones.com/book/killers-of-the-flower-moon-adapted-for-young-adults/david-grann/9781398528482     TV Show: Industry (2020 – present) - BBC  https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m000pb89/industry     Podcast: Wind of Change (2020 – 2022) - Crooked Media  https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/     Song: ‘Wind Of Change’, The Scorpions (1990)  https://open.spotify.com/track/3ovjw5HZZv43SxTwApooCM     Song: ‘Piano Man’, Bill Joel (1973)  https://open.spotify.com/track/70C4NyhjD5OZUMzvWZ3njJ     Book: The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm (1989)  https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-janet-malcolm     Article: Carl Icahn, Patrick Radden Keefe (2017)  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/carl-icahns-failed-raid-on-washington     Credits:  Producer: Millie Chu   Production Manager: Francesca Bassett   Music: Miguel D’Oliveira   Audio Mixer: Tom Guest  Video Mixer: Scott Edwards   Shownotes compiled by Elly Young  Executive Producer: Arron Fellows       A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify   www.mindhouse.co.uk    __        Open a Moneybox Cash ISA at https://moneybox.onelink.me/Cqlx/y3xncge  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the Louis Theroux podcast. Today I'm joined by esteemed writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. A staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books, including Say Nothing, which explores the legacy of the troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, his deep dive into the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. Patrick's reporting often sits somewhere between investigating, journalism and narrative storytelling. He writes about, quote, I think this is his quote, crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane, separating licit and illicit worlds,

the bonds of family, the power of denial. Patrick is also the host of the popular 2020 podcast, Wind of Change, in which he investigates whether or not the song of the same name by the Scorpions was secretly written by the CIA. Personal note, I've read several of Patrick's books. I'm a reader. You know this about me. The first one was the Sackler family one, Empire of Pain. I'd made my own documentary about the opioid crisis called Heroin Town. So I was already interested. Then I read the one about Northern Ireland. Then I read the collection of profiles. And now I've read the new one called London Falling, a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family search for truth. this all comes up in the chat but he has a real gift for storytelling like his ability to unfurl a narrative in a way that's completely engrossing I dragged the book around on holiday and

it was like a little teddy bear and I'd find cracks in my day like little moments where I could just read a bit more you know that feeling when you're stuck into a book and it just you feel all day you've got that feeling of looking forward to the next bit that you can read I know it's a big nice blurb for Patrick. You can put that on the paperback. It was my teddy bear, says Louis Therou. We recorded this conversation in late January this year at Spotify HQ. He arrived fresh off the plane from New York, a little jet lagged, but ready to discuss his new book. A quick warning, this conversation contains some strong language and adult themes, all that as well as much else besides coming up. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We do a lot of our shopping these days

online. I've often thought in another life I could have had a blossoming online shop on Shopify. What would I sell? Maybe my chart-topping books, some TLTP bingo cards for the diehard podcast fans. I could finally centralize all that bootleg merch, pillows, cushions, t-shirts, cards in one place. And where would it be? On Shopify. If you want a better experience shopping online for you and your customers, Shopify is the answer. It's the commerce platform behind millions of your favorite thriving businesses like Jim Shark and even Mattel, the international toy making conglomerate. But it doesn't matter how big or small your business is. The big bonus of using Shopify is that they'll help you every step of the way. From designing your first website to finding customers, marketing new products, managing inventory, shipping internationally and beyond.

important for my many fans overseas. They're the ultimate business partner, and the best part of all, you can do all that in one place. See fewer shopping carts go abandoned on those websites. You know what I mean? I can't deal with this. I'm going to stop doing it.

And earn more with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash louis. That's Shopify.com. slash Louis L-O-U-I-S. Thank you for the pleasure of reading your book. I read it over Christmas and just parenthetically because this is how hot a commodity is.

They actually printed my name on every page. Just in case you're in any doubt. Like a Hollywood script, right? My kids are confused. They're teenagers. They're like, dad, why does it say Louis threw on all the pages? And they thought it was like a new affectation. Like I got it monogrammed.

Right, exactly. There you go. Like from now on, I only read books that have been personalized. Yeah. So I'd love to talk about that. I'd love to talk about some of your other books. Say nothing about the troubles and Empire of Pain as well, some of your profiles. But since you're here to promote a book and because it's the newest piece of work and it's so great,

let's talk about London falling. A mysterious death in a gilded city and a family search for truth. Tell me a little bit about how you came to write it and what excited you about it and what you feel would connect with people. Why you feel it's kind of worth reading? Yeah, I mean, so I found that whenever I go looking for ideas, I don't know what it's like for you,

but I never find them when I go looking for them. They tend to find me. And in this case, I had written an essay for The New Yorker, not an original piece of reporting. I was actually writing mainly about other people's books. shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine a few years ago about the oligarchs in London and the way, the sort of awkwardness for the UK when the invasion happened that it emerges that there's this group of people who are very closely connected in some cases with Putin and the regime,

who also are very kind of tied into the economic and political life here. England. So I wrote an essay about that, the awkwardness of that. And the ways in which this kind of rush of new money, new foreign money had transformed this city over the last 25 years. I lived here 25 years ago. And so I sort of knew, I knew London on the cusp of these changes. And so those kinds of things have been kind of floating around in my head. And then two summers ago, I lived for the summer in London. I was producing a television series called Say Nothing based on my book. And I was on set one day and I fell into conversation with a guy who was a guest of the director. He just happened to be visiting that day. And we got to chatting and he said, I might have a story for you.

And what he said was there's a family that I'm very close with who live in London and they had a 19 year old boy who died a few years ago. And he died in mysterious circumstances. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened to him and they made this awful discovery, which is that he had had a secret life that they didn't know about. He had been moving about London as a teenager, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And honestly, he had said about that much to me and I knew this is my next thing because it felt like a way to look at some of those kind of big 30,000 foot issues I was interested in. but through a very intimate story. And there was a question in my mind about,

will the family, do they want to tell this story? They hadn't spoken to anybody about it in the press up to that point. And so I had to meet them. And there was a whole process of kind of figuring out the degree to which they were comfortable sharing it. The Brettler family. The Brettlers. Matthew and, is it Rochelle?

Rochelle, exactly. And they've got two boys of whom the younger one is the central protagonist. And he's, well, he's dead at the start of the story. at the point you intersect with it, his name's Zach, although he's passing himself off as Zach Ismail off. There's a lot of themes, some of the themes are to do with, that I could certainly connect to as a father of three boys, kind of the control, but also the lack of control you have over your children,

the way in which they become independent people, people you don't quite recognize. And you sort of imagine that you will be a model for them in some way. This seems like the reverse, Teenage Zach seems to react to everything he feels is inadequate about his parents, his dad in particular. He feels like they're not rich enough. They're not impressive enough. And he kind of embraces a personality type.

I've found recognizable from the internet. And you touch on it, but you don't go deep into it, this sort of somewhat Andrew Tate adjacent hustle bro persona. How much of the internet is part of the story, do you think? You talk about him following that stuff on Instagram, but you don't get the sense he's been particularly radicalized by social media. Or was that present, do you think? Yeah. I mean, I think the internet is, some of this is about the way I write, but I, you know, there's certain things I just, I don't want to do in anything but a very light touch. And so I didn't want the headline here to be, you know, the internet is taking our children away from my eyes.

Exactly, exactly. But yeah, of course that's there. But it starts before that. I mean, Zach was born in 2000, right? So he comes of age at a very specific moment. It's a specific moment in London, leaving aside the Internet or anything like that, where you have a kind of, you know, certain neighborhoods in London, you walk around them and it's supercars everywhere. And just huge amounts of kind of conspicuous wealth.

And there's a kind of gaudy sort of blinginess, right, that is just part of the landscape in a way that was not, I think, necessarily always. is true in the past. And so there's that. And then there's movies. So he grows up and he loves the wolf of Wall Street. He loves this movie War Dogs. I check with my teenage boys. Apparently those are very much documents of that culture.

In other words, another one is night crawler as well. How interesting. You familiar with the Sigma thing, the Sigma archetype? Yeah. So it's this idea of having a Sigma protagonist, kind of lone wolf protagonist, who violates society's norms and might be a sociopath, but that's okay. Right, right.

Yeah, American Psycho is another one. Yeah, American Psycho, absolutely. I mean, it's a kind of... The Internet didn't invent these things in other words. No, I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at, right? And the funny thing is that the... And listen, I love The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a fantastic film.

It's doing something that I think is a little too cute, right? Which is that it's ostensibly... And this is true for any of these things, right? Like, ostensibly they are standing in moral judgment of these people that you're that they're depicting. But in fact, for a lot of people who maybe are kind of unwary or unsophisticated consumers or just teenage boys, it's an aspirational thing, right? Like when the film, particularly of American Psycho, isn't saying in any kind of explicit way,

look at Patrick Bateman, you should aspire to be him, right? And yet there is something about the nature of these things. where when it's Christian Bale and he's, you know, dressed in great suits and has, you know, terrific abs and all the rest of it, it's possible for somebody who's young and impressionable to get kind of insorseled by that a little. Where the Internet comes in is I think that there... Love that word. Ensource.

Oh, yeah. I've never heard that. I use it all. I'll probably use it again today. What does that mean? Ensorseled, just what it sounds like. That sounds like a Scientology term. It's one of my go-toes. Yeah, I can tell you what it means,

but only when you pay me to get to the next level. So I think that it's the slipperiness of the algorithm where you might have a kid who has like a bit of a penchant for that stuff. And then what Instagram does is it selects for that and it just shows you more and more and more of it. The attractiveness of the rogue is a theme across your Eurvra. Rokes is the title of one of your anthologies. It's a fine line. I think doing justice to the charisma that many of these sociopathic types may have, while not falling into the trap of glamorizing.

It's not in science, right? It's just... It's incredibly hard. You've got to find your way, to pick your way through that. It's really striking as well how you can... I often think about... This is going to seem way off piece,

but in the Lord of the Rings, Saruman, he kind of goes to the dark side because he looks too much into the Palantir, I think. And I think about something like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, which certainly in the movie, you've got this speech given by the Alec Baldwin character at the beginning. Do you remember? He goes, first prize, a new car, second prize, set of steak knives.

Third prize is you're fired. You're fired. And it's written as a kind of pastiche of a certain sales bro culture and a critique, right? But then it turns out salespeople, I've heard, would listen to that to pump themselves up. And now Mamet, the writer, has kind of gone to the other side. He's embraced a kind of pro-Trump alpha personality. Yeah, I think it's very easy to kind of pass through the looking glass. And people do this all the time. I mean, interestingly enough, that very speech you're talking about, I wrote this book Empire of Pain about Purdue Pharma, which was selling this quite addictive drug. And they had this kind of army of marketing people who would go out and try and persuade doctors to prescribe it. And there were training sessions that I found the PowerPoints of in which they would say, A, B, C, C, C, always be closing. They were quoting this satiric, what had been a satirical scene in Glenn Gregglen, Ross about the kind of moral vacuity of salespeople selling, and it's similar to Wolf of Wall Street, selling garbage properties in that case to fools, right? That's right. And saying this is what we should try and emulate.

Selling Swampland. But Mamet went full ceremony if you want that analogy to work for you. One of the deep themes across your work is that many of the institutions we rely upon, governments or panels of experts in the world of fine wine or the art connoisseur community, that they're so hollowed out or so corrupted that they've become indistinguishable from their opposite. You talk in one of your stories about Guinea, the West African nation where the national mint is printing counterfeit money, which is kind of the perfect encapsulation of

a hijacked state. But versions of that exist through lots of other of your stories. Another example is the ways in which I think it's in London falling maybe. Any long-term criminal, it's alleged, you know, involved in organized crime is going to have to be at some level an informant. Yeah. I mean, this is something that a former Matt detective told me. But the argument that he was making was that there are these relationships between cops and crooks that are mutually beneficial. The really good, like professional criminals, the ones who want to have any kind of career longevity, they figure out pretty early on that you want those relationships. That's your kind of stay out of jail card.

In a strange way, it's the kind of beginners. It's the ones who don't realize. It's the unsophisticated players who maintain their criminal principles. never do any horse trading with the authorities who flame out quickly and end up behind bars. I mean, the temptation is to fall into some kind of spirit of absolute moral relativism. Do you know what I mean? When you collapse the categories, you're like, well, it's all pointless. Like the rule of law is a fiction.

Shall we try and push back on that a bit? I mean, you're asking me at the wrong moment in recent history to push back on that. but yes. Yeah, because you, well, explain that. You know, I'm an American and it's 2026 and the last year has seen a kind of buccanol of lawlessness and sort of the kind of evisceration of one norm after another, one institution after another, a whole series of what I had grown up, you know, maybe naively thinking of as pretty bedrock principles and kind of durable aspects of the like,

institutional architecture of life that turn out to be just much more kind of vulnerable and permeable and corruptible than I would have, than even I would have thought. And I think where you're going with your line of questioning is that I was a pretty cynical guy to begin with. It's certainly the case that, to take one example, you know, if the United Nations called something a war crime or then a genocide, the situation in Gaza. And then the US says, actually, we don't really, not only do we not care, we don't really recognize the UN. I was reading this morning about, have you been following the whole, is it called the Board of Peace? Yeah. And who are they inviting? Well, Orban and Malay of Argentina, Orban of Hungary and Malay of Argentina, the two have said, we're on board, we'll do this.

No one else has confirmed, I don't think. Intriguingly, Netanyahu has some questions because I think, There's some participation from states that they're not happy about. If you pay a billion, did you know this part? If you pay a billion dollars, you get permanent membership. Tablesticks. But in the context of a kind of what, it's being characterized as an attempt to de- displace the UN and become a kind of international.

But this is, but isn't it, I mean it's funny, one of my sons over the holidays, red animal farm and we were talking about it. And I think what's so busy, bizarre is that like I grew up reading these books in school. It was part of my vocabulary. There was a sense of, you know, in kind of backwards eras in history, backwards societies. These kinds of things happen where you sort of invert the meaning of language or you create an institution that ostensibly does something. And in fact, its whole purpose is to negate the principle for which allegedly it stands. I guess I had some, again, like pretty naive sense that we'd learned. that we'd sort of moved on from that kind of thing. Or that if it was happening, it was happening kind of in the margins and we could argue about it in like the pages of the New York Review of Books, but not that it would be so flagrant.

You know, they say of politicians, as they do, of surgeons, too funnily enough, that they skew surprisingly high on sociopathy. Have you ever heard that? I hadn't, but it doesn't totally surprise me. Kind of makes sense. If you're like, well, we're going to go to war and thousands will die, but it's better than the alternative. Well, let me find another way.

You did a profile of Larry Gagosian, the art dealer, who is another of these figures, right? Yeah. How would you describe him? Very Sigma. Very Sigma. Yeah. I mean, Larry's a good example, right? Yeah, absolutely.

He's one of these characters. So this, for those who are not familiar with the name, Larry Gugosian is the biggest art dealer in the world. I argue in this New Yorker piece, probably the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He's worth billions. Yeah, and he's got this massive operation. and very wealthy clients, these kind of masters of the universe, these, it's generally men, men who want for nothing.

And Larry has somehow... David Geffin is a big one. Yeah, absolutely. The record mogul, movie mogul. I mean, as is Roman Abramovich and various others, yeah. But he's figured out a way to ensorsel these men. I've gotten what it means. I've gotten two uses in.

by the third, just by sheer context, you'll have figured it out. He's kind of figured out that you get these very, very wealthy people who want for nothing and they have all the yachts that you could want and all the homes that you could want. But eventually what happens is that, you know, there's a Picasso and there's only one of them and it's from this particular period and the other guy wants it or there's a climp that they can't have. And I think one of his secret weapons is that he just lacks introspection. Like, never mind, self-doubt. Just introspection.

Well, that was the quote we were coming to. The art critic Peter Sheldal once observed, we think of genius as being complicated, but geniuses, I think he's characterizing Gugosian as a kind of genius. Geniuses have the fewest moving parts. Goghian is simple. He's basically a shark, a feeding machine. And Gagosian has also said he avoids self-reflection

because that quote is how you lose your edge. Totally. And how many of these types of people could we say that about it? Who does that remind you of? Well, I mean, there's the obvious. Right? Yeah. Trump, right?

Just checking. I thought you were to see. But see, I guess, listen, I think that is a prevailing type in the world. I think that those types of people have really thrived in recent decades and that they're kind of over-indexed in the sort of media and social media worlds. I mean, I remember at one point my younger boy when he was probably about seven said something about Elon Musk. And I just thought, can I swear on this show? Sure. Just like, what the fuck are you talking?

Like, how do you even know the name of some? When I was... Did he say something approving? Yeah, kind of vaguely. But it was more for me just, you're seven. It's not a name you should know. There's no reason why that personality should enter your worldview. And then you have this other thing.

So I have a friend who's a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley. And he... I'm trying to think because I don't want to get him in any trouble. But he had had the experience. of working at a number of different companies where the people he was working for seemed to be lunatics. And he made a remark to me at some point about how it's not a coincidence, it's not an accident. There are generations of people who move to Silicon Valley and start companies. And they're looking at people like Musk or, you know, Steve Jobs, like whatever you think of what Steve Jobs achieved, kind of a lunatic.

Right. But they, those are aspirational figures for those people. there's a sense that actually you have to be a maniac in order to succeed. So there's this kind of strange, self-selecting, redoubling of this stuff. And listen, we, you know, in the U.S., you have people, prominent people saying essentially that, like, the notion of empathy is a kind of left-wing conspiracy. Really? Like a left-wing fabrication, you know. I think Vance has said something to that effect. I mean, there are a number of people, certainly people like Charlie Kirk.

I mean, there is a sense that kind of. having empathy for other human beings as a sort of inherently suspect. Did you read J.D. Vance's book when it came out, Hillbilly Elegie, came out like 2012 maybe? He was sort of lapping as a liberal or at least political agnostic. So can I make a confession? Please. Just you and me and everybody who's listening to this. I don't know how, Dave.

That we hate confessions. So J.D. Vance, salt of the earth, you know, skeptical of New York City and the liberal elite there. I was at the book party for Hillbilly Elledogy. Stop it. At the Upper West Side apartment of Amy Chua, Vance's Yale Law School professor and mentor. And, you know, such... Who wrote The Tiger? The Tiger Mom.

Tiger Mom book. And such, yeah, Salt of the Earth Americans as Tom Brocah and Wendy Dang were in attendance. There was kind of a lavish sushi spread. I just thought this was funny later on when Vance would talk about how, you know, New York city was a hellscape that you should avoid at all costs. You were there? I was there at the beginning. That was a different, Vance, was it?

I mean, was it? I don't know. My book is about this kid, Zach Brettler, who was a bit of a chameleon and could become different things at different moments. And I don't mean to compare them into narrow a sense, but I think that, I think Vance has always been opportunistic. And I think at different moments, he's pursued the opportunity that presented. it itself. And at that particular moment, to be the kind of Trump whisperer, you know, the sort of conservative-coded guy who could explain the sense of disillusionment that the white working

class felt to Upper West Side liberals, he seemed very comfortable in that role. I mean, we could talk about more about London for funny, but I want to leave people with the pleasure of kind of finding out for themselves. We should talk about Empire of Pain. I remember coming to it having read Say Nothing. You know, I knew about the Sacklers. They'd been quite a lot of coverage in the New York Times. This dynasty of pharmaceutical pioneers. They created various drugs the most notoriously.

It was OxyContin. And then they became clear fairly early that OxyContin was being widely abused. They used to call it Hillbilly Heroin. Yeah. And it was suggested that they'd, The family had knowingly covered this up and aggressively marketed the drug at points where they should have definitely stopped and then covered their tracks, made millions. Billions. Billions.

It's such a shocking story. And I mean, you've made this point in the past, but obviously the striking thing is in a world where we're used to seeing illegal drugs as the problem. it seemed to outstrip by far the damage that was being done, although since then it's become, it's kind of that contagion of addiction has been fed by illegal drugs. Many of them moved on to heroin after the... And eventually with fentanyl. And fentanyl after because the rules were tightened up.

How do you want to characterize that story and how are you connected with it? So I came to it in a weird way. I mean, it's funny. It's a thing that has some resonance now that, you know, the U.S. has this new colony of Venezuela. The 50-per state. Exactly. So I had written a lot about drugs for the New Yorker for the New York Times Magazine.

I wrote a couple of big pieces about the Sinaloa drug cartel. I was always very struck by there's a kind of particular idiom. I don't think the U.S. is alone in this, but we are kind of an exceptional country in that we're the biggest consumer of illegal drugs. on the planet. And we have this tendency to describe the drug trade as if it is this thing where drugs kind of come into the country. They start in the south. They flow north. They come into the country. And then we have no choice but to do them. And so it's this kind of purely supply-driven thing. Right. If we kill enough drug dealers, then the drugs- Then the problem is over. Yeah. And I was always curious. I mean, when I was doing the work on the Sinola-Dar cartel, part of what was so interesting to me was

that all those drugs come into the U.S. And they change hands and money changes hands. And then there's all this money that flows south or is laundered in the U.S. And then all the weapons. Like there's, you know, nobody knows exactly how many people have died in the drug wars in Mexico over the last 20 years. But it's like well over 100,000 people have been murdered. And statistically, the majority of those killings have happened with American guns that are

purchased in the United States and then brought south across the border. But we never talk about some crisis of. guns going south into Mexico. So all of that stuff was kind of on my mind. And then I noticed that in around 2010, you suddenly see, if you talk to law enforcement in the U.S., they'll say suddenly there was more heroin on American streets, 2010 is the year. Suddenly there's this flood of Mexican heroin on the streets of the U.S. And because of the way, the kind of myopic way in which we think about these things, kind

of hilariously, these like DEA guys would be like, you know, what are these crazy Mexicans thinking now? like, you know, why is it that they've suddenly decided to just start firehosing heroin at us without any thought to the notion that it might have been driven by demand? So it turns out it's driven by demand. They're exquisitely sensitive to, I mean, these cartels are very sophisticated organizations. And there was an uptick in demand for heroin. And the reason was there was a generation of Americans who would never have like taken, you know, bought heroin on the street and taken a syringe. People have needle phobias. Like, you know. But, you know, but. They started with FDA-approved doctor-prescribed drugs like Oxycontin, these opioid painkillers. And that was kind of the on-ramp, much more approachable. And then they became addicted. And then once you're addicted, and particularly if your source of supply starts, you know, if your doctor's not writing more prescriptions or what have you, it becomes harder to get the drugs. Then it's a kind of easy move over.

I interviewed so many people who would tell the story about how I never would have started with heroin. but when you're experiencing withdrawal from OxyContin and somebody offers you a bag of heroin, it's an easy decision. And so that was actually the way in, was finding out that the opioid crisis had started with this drug OxyContin and then learning that OxyContin was produced

by this company Purdue Pharma, which I'd never heard of. But then I learned that Purdue Pharma was owned by the Sackler family and I knew the Sackler name because I had, you know, I grew up in Boston. I took a year off after high school and I worked in Harvard Square, and there's a Sackler Museum at Harvard. And I used to go to the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I lived in London, and the Sackler name is everywhere here. Certainly historically, the Sackler name was plastered. I mean... British Museum, V&A, you name it. Talk about addiction. They had an addiction to putting their names on buildings. Yeah. And you read it with a kind of sense of growing rage.

confusion. There's this sort of what seemed to be outrageous examples of injustice or corruption on virtually every page. Nevertheless, you may disagree. You don't really think like, oh, this is all driven by the psychopathy of a single person. It feels as though it exists on a spectrum with kind of normal corporate behavior. Do you think that's fair to say? Or do you think it's something more?

My point is really that it's an example of massive wrongdoing that exists. within the framework of social norms of assault? Oh, man. I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. I think it all happens inside a system, right? In which you have the FDA, which I think has been kind of thoroughly corrupted by the industry that it's supposed to be regularly.

Food and drug administration. You have political interference in investigations, which happens. You've got, you know, essentially the buying off of members of Congress, which happens, all that kind of stuff happens, where the kind of the system itself is desiccated and not looking out for people,

kind of similar to what we're talking about in London falling. But there's something else going on where, let me analogize. It's a weird analogy, but bear with me. There's a friend of mine named David DeYoung who wrote this fantastic book that came out about probably five years ago.

It's great. It's just what it says on the tin. The title of the book is Nazi billionaires. Okay, so you can. and kind of, it's like a snakes on a plane. Like you, you know, so what it's about is these, you know, the generation of, of businessmen in Germany who they see the rise of the Nazis and they are not ideological Nazis. They're not ideological anti-Semites, but they're business people and they're thinking about these corporations that they have.

And they basically think, well, we're going to have to find a way to accommodate these people. And I remember at the point, you know, about a year ago where the tech titans were all bending the knee to Trump and showing up at the White House. It was an extraordinary moment. Incredible moment. Before that was Peter Thiel went Trump in the first term. Yeah. And there were these holdouts. But he and Teal is ideological, right?

Whereas these other guys, I mean, I don't think for a second that. Resos had even bought the Washington Post to critique Trump and then seemed to have a damascene conversion. Tim Cook. I mean, all these people were, you know. Somebody said at the time, there was some wag who said at the time, you know, what's the point of having fuck you money if you never get to say fuck you, right? Like the wealthiest people in the world all sort of cowtowing to Trump. And I remember having this kind of terrible moment where I thought to myself, God, I wish I could take David DeYoung's book, Nazi billionaires, and send it to these guys so that they'll know what their children and grandchildren are going to think of them because this is exactly the same calculation they're making. But then I remembered that if you read the second half of his book, it's about how those families, the descendants of those families, are now the wealthiest families in Germany today.

Those companies are now some of the most prosperous corporations in Germany today. And so in a kind of scary way, like if we sent Mr. Zuckerberg a copy of Nazi billioners and he read it all the way to the end, he would say, okay, note taken, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing because the answer here is you can create generational wealth for your first. family, that this is actually the shrewd tactic. And that, I think, unfortunately, is just a sort of strain that runs through not just America. I mean, it's particularly pronounced in American culture, but everywhere here as well. That kind of, I'm going to put my blinders on. What I'm thinking about is my shareholder value and my family's generational wealth and everything else kind of be damned, right? And I, listen, I grew up, you know, reading books and movies in which those people got comeuppance, but I think if recent experiences anything to go by, they don't. The Sacklers did,

but I think that was the exception. Up to a point. Because they extracted them, having been, everything kind of caught up with them and vast numbers of lawsuits were brought by local governments and others, civil suits for the cost of dealing with the epidemic that resulted. It's worth saying, in passing, I think the opioid crisis killed more people than COVID. I don't know. Do you have a number for that? I don't have the COVID number off the top of my head is the problem, but I think COVID probably killed more all in. But in the U.S., I think, I mean, so in the U.S., in terms of the opioid crisis, I mean, nobody knows exactly, but you're talking about three quarters of a million people or thereabouts. It's certainly, it's more people than have died in all the wars, more Americans than have died in all the wars of the wars.

the U.S. has fought since World War II. So there were the lawsuits. A lot of the money was put aside and won from Purdue Farmer. Perdu Farmer, I think, went bankrupt. But the family members, to a great extent, extricated themselves and their cash. A big theme across your books is the idea the phrase shell corporation comes up a lot. The idea that people can live ostensibly lavish lifestyles with hundreds of millions at their disposal. But on paper, there's no money to go after.

so they are immune, impervious to any kind of financial accountability. It's quite frustrating. It is. You know that phrase, I don't know if it's Mark Twain, it's very hard to persuade something of something if his salary depends on him not believing it, right? And I wonder if you imagine, this is going to sound weird, but if you'd been born into the Sackler family, and so the whole family culture is like this is what we do,

you know, they kind of groom themselves into a kind of pathology and not only does their salary depend on it, but hundreds of millions of or billions of dollars. Do you suppose if you'd been born into that family, you would have gone along with it? Well, this is the, I'm really interested in denial and I'm interested in the kind of the stories that we tell ourselves about the choices that we make. You're quoting yourself. And I know, I probably have stories like that about myself. You probably have stories about yourself. I mean, I think any of us, you get up in the morning, you look at yourself in the mirror. I've known some... You want to believe the best about ourselves, right?

Yeah, of course, of course. And you want to, I think in real time, we're all kind of living in our own individual virtual realities in which we're sort of tailoring the narrative. And part of the reason I think I gravitate to some of these people who I think are kind of morally monstrous is that they don't start out morally monstrous. They get there by increments. And I'm really interested in. the sort of the kind of angles of deviation and what they're saying to each, what they're saying to themselves and to other people at each step along the way. So I give you so many examples, but to take one in this case, there's this kind of amazing moment where David Sackler, third generation Sackler,

his father's Richard Sackler, who ran Purdue Pharma during the really bad years. And David's on the board. He's very complicit in all this stuff. And he gets hold on the first. He gets before Congress, and he has to, he's testifying before Congress over Zoom. He doesn't want to be there. He's a lawyer at all, whatever, whatever. And one of the Congresspeople has sort of done his homework, and he says, is it true, Mr. Sackler, that in such and such a year, that is after the company was already in trouble and already facing all these lawsuits, in such and such a year, you spent $23 million in cash buying

a home in Bel Air, California. And David Sackler very defensively says, no, hang on, that was an important. investment property. I've never spent a night in that house. And it's this thing where he thinks that that's a self-absolving thing to say. He's so out of touch that he thinks that saying like, oh, that old thing, that old $23 million house, like I just bought that as an investment. I've never spent a night there. That that'll somehow like be a form of, you know, like moral expiation. That's what I'm interested in is how people get that deluded. And listen, you don't, I mean, I don't mention Trump in that book, but he is there in the background.

And you look at Trump and sometimes he says these things that seem so totally wackadoo, but you realize it's that he's living in this little cocoon in which anybody who dares to hint at the truth gets fired. Right. And so like over time, I think that's actually quite debilitating. Like you're not a, you're not delusional in a clinical sense, but in a kind of, you've sort of socially engineered a situation in which you kind of are delusional. You're in a feedback loop. This term gaslighting, which is so overused, but you are self gaslighting. Have you met Trump? Never.

If they often, if he said, I want you, do, I like Patrick Red and Keith. I like his articles. You've lost me already in this hypothetical, but keep going. I think you didn't find a lot of interesting. things that I'm doing. Would you take the access? You know, I tend to think that access is really overrated. Access is overrated, he said.

That was the first thing I wrote in my notes. I love that. As someone who's completely dependent. I sort of live off of access for good or ill. But why is it overrated? I mean, if you take the... So if you weren't here, this would be a better interview. Yeah, could be.

Okay. Honestly, it's funny, Larry Goghian, I thought I wasn't going to get access to him. That was the whole plan as I was going to write this piece, and he almost certainly wouldn't cooperate. And then they surprised me by saying, like, oh, of course, Larry will meet with you and introduce you to his friends. And it was sort of slightly destabilizing for me. I got a moment of vertigo. Well, and in the article, the side effect is at the end of each paragraph, it says, Larry Goghian denies that he made obscene phone calls and said that he's never visited the house in question.

Yeah, he, it's funny because there's a story in that piece. My favorite parenthetical, there are a lot of parentheticals in my piece, which is where the denials come in. And you can sort of choose whether or not you believe what's between the parentheses. But in that piece, there's a story, there's a woman, young London artist, Izzy Wood, who described being at a kind of COVID-era party at Larry's house. That's right. She sounded quite wolf of Wall Street. Yeah. She sort of said he was quite drunk and was late at night.

and that he kept shouting to his staff to play Aerosmith. And then there's a parenthesis that says Larry Gagosian denies that he was drunk or requested Aerosmith. Trump. Access. I wrote a piece during the first Trump administration about Mark Burnett, who was the reality TV producer who made The Apprentice. Which was how Trump came to fame famously.

And persuaded people that he was like a credible guy and not just a joke. For some reason, I was just listening. to the Zelensky encounter that he and Trump and Vance had in the White House. And you realize it's a bit like a scene from The Apprentice. It's like when, you know, it's like a year-fired boardroom scene. But this is the whole, so what I came out of that piece, and I wrote that piece, I think, in 2017. And the sort of, to me, kind of devastating revelation that I came upon along the way was that politics was just entertainment by other means. now and that there was a kind of infernal, weird, unholy thing.

And listen, the New Yorker was not exempt from this, I don't think. But in which the press, like Trump was great for business. It was great copy. People would read it and get outraged. You'd sell more magazines. You'd get more clicks than newspapers. But there was this thing happening that was kind of... Well, we were being groomed.

Yeah, a little bit. But I guess what I'm saying is that if you told me tomorrow, you can come in and get a long interview with the president, and he's going to sort of ramble at length and he'll say quotable things and maybe he'll mean some of them and maybe he won't and some of them won't become policy but some of them he's just trying it out and some of them it's almost like a stand-up routine I think I would just feel like I was being used it's like all heat no light I don't I don't know like people sometimes say to me oh I wasn't able to I wasn't able to interview Jerry Adams for say nothing and they say oh wouldn't it have been great what would you have asked Jerry Adams

and I don't I just don't think that um I don't think Jerry Adams is a very interesting It's like interviewing an answering machine. You know, you just, you get the kind of outgoing message. What's the downside, though? Oh, nothing. I mean, just a few hours of my time. I guess the downside is I would feel like at the tail end of the first Trump administration, I pulled the plug on a piece.

I was supposed to be writing a piece about Jared and Ivanka and the kind of weird role that they occupied. And I got a bunch of great interviews. and I was working away on it. And then I thought, I was just sort of looking at the way the culture metabolized stories about the Trump administration. And I just thought, what's the point?

You know, I'm going to write this thing. Nobody who's persuadable is going to read it. You know, the people will either not read it on principle because it's the New Yorker and it's fake news, you know, liberal New York media. Or they'll read it and they'll essentially already agree with the premise. and then I'll just be kind of,

there'll be something almost sort of pornographic about, and they'll kind of get outraged. It all just felt a bit kind of unholy to me. What's the 10 or 20-word version of what the article would have said? Here is this couple that is sort of playing an interesting game in which they handle the media in a very shrewd way and are forever thinking about their kind of public persona, not just in this moment, but actually beyond the Trump administration.

They want to sort of remain kind of credible adults in the room, grownups, don't want to necessarily be associated with the worst accesses of the Trump administration. Do want to be perceived as the people who were the kind of responsible checks on his worst tendencies. And all the while in the background, you know, I think I forget what the statistic is, right? but it's like during the first term they made something like $600 billion or something. You know, and boy, since then, I mean, you look at the deals that Jared Kushner has made. It almost seems quaint now to talk about the family of the president making deals and enriching themselves while also being these ostensible kind of roving peacemakers and policy advisors and what have you. And then, of course, they end up in Miami, the last refuge of scoundrels, right?

I think I had a question about can they come back. Are they going to be re-accepted into New York society? And I think I may be, certainly in 2019, I probably overestimated New York society. I think I'd read that for what it's worth. But maybe I'd be guilty of just self-eastern. You know, in some way, yeah. It's a wank. I was going to say, masturbating my sense of outrage.

Yeah. And I don't, I mean, I don't have the answer. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think. You said wank, right? I don't think that's, yeah, right exactly. You don't hear that for Americans very often. Yeah, that's because I didn't want to say masturbating. But you know what I'm saying?

I don't, I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like it's not that. At least for me, it's not that. I did a public conversation with this amazing woman, Patricia Evangelista, who's a Filipino journalist who wrote this incredible book called Some People Need Killing about the Duterte regime. And she talked about how the thing with a certain kind of strong man is that when you see somebody transgress in a kind of colorful public way, there's an almost physiological response you have to it. So she talked about how Duterte was this politician, but he would swear. And people in the Philippines, a very Catholic country, would be kind of titillated by the,

The fact that this is unusual, we don't see politicians swear, what's going on here? And you're kind of drawn to, you're sort of repelled, but you're also attracted. And then Duterte kind of... He's also the guy who said, I want to be the Filipino Hitler. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah, for sure. But I mean, here we are, right?

What's something you hear from politicians very often? But part of that, I think, is actually that he... So he graduates from that to then, eventually he's saying, like, fuck the Pope and stuff. Clearly, having to kind of up the rhetorical ante because everybody's, like, chasing that feeling that they had the first time. And now, I don't, I mean, we're hopping on. over the map here, but like Kanye West, you know, releases a song called Hal Hitler because he's kind of in the same business, right? It's like, where do you go rhetorically?

They call it the final boss of taboos is to go full Hitler, anti-Semitism. But not even anymore. No. I mean, that's the thing. I don't really know where you go from. I do think that in some corners of the right, Nick Puentes actually just had this thing where There's the, um, Jeffrey Epstein, not that bad. Jeffrey Epstein, kind of a baller. Yeah. Like that I think is a, to me is a kind of a, it's the same. It's thinking, it's thinking, gosh, well, everybody's a Nazi these days.

Like, what does a guy have to say around here? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We do a lot of our shopping these days online. I've often thought in another life I could have had a blossoming online shop on Shopify. What would I sell? maybe my chart-topping books, some TLTP bingo cards for the Die Hard podcast fans. I could finally centralize all that bootleg merch, pillows, cushions, t-shirts, cards in one place.

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freedom, freedom to enjoy your life. We're now in a new tax year, and as long as you're in the UK and over 18, you have a brand new ICER allowance. So you can save up to £20,000 and not pay any tax on the interest you earn. This is the last year that your cash ICER allowance is £20,000, before it's reduced for under 65s in April, 2027. Handy to know. To make the most of it, check out Moneybox. Moneybox is trusted by over 1.5 million savers, and their cost. customers rate them excellent on trust pilot. So if you've been putting off, sorting out your savings, now's the time. Open a Moneybox Cash Issa in the app or at Moneybox app.com. It takes just a few minutes. Issa and tax rules apply. So you write for the New Yorker.

But you don't go into the office there or do you? I used to. Nine to five there? No, no, no, no, no. I used to have an office at the New Yorker, which is great. It was heaven. And I was young when I got it And there were older writers who I

In some cases people I'd been reading for years and years Before I met them and I Like who? Larissa McFarcar Really? Yeah Who I just She's not much older than you are

She's not but she started really young I was kind of a late bloomer And she was You know, an early bloomer And I Studied her pieces And then to have her just down the hall Or David Gran

Used to be in the office next to me Killers of the Flower Moon Yeah That's an amazing book. It's an incredible book. It turned into a Scorsese movie. It's a great example of, I mean, I suppose structure, which is something you're often complimented on your ability to unfurl a story,

to build suspense by withholding critical details until the right moment. Such a strange, shocking story. I think people will be familiar with that, maybe just from the movie. The world in which a community of Native Americans were vastly wealthy based on oil money and some savvy legal deals that their assets weren't. taken from them. They got the oil that was under their land and then as a result, they start dying. They start dying because they've got these cars and fortunes and then the women are suddenly married off to these predatory guys. It's really odd. It's an astonishing story. It's funny to my

point earlier about how when I go looking for stories, I never find them, they sort of have to find me. So when David Gregg goes looking for stories, he finds them. The story of the origin of that book is amazing. He, David somehow heard that the FBI, that there was a person who was a full-time employee of the FBI, who was the FBI historian. And he somehow got this guy's phone number and called him up and said,

what's the craziest story of the FBI you've ever heard? And the guy said, well, I'm glad you asked. You know there was this case. And told the story, and David was off to the race. It's the closest thing. I think I'm the only person to notice this. I don't know. But to a Scooby-Doo story that I've seen in the real world,

where the person you last expect metaphorically rips off his mask and he's like, it's Mr. Jenks, the old... And it's funny, actually, speaking of suspense and withholding information, a reveal that in the book hit me like a ton of bricks and in the movie, maybe because I'd already read the book,

but I felt as though in the movie they didn't actually... It's an interesting thing, the difference is between kind of drama... It's a different mood. It's actually less propulsive the movie. You've become a celebrity. Celebrity journalist. If we can stipulate that celebrity journalist is probably an oxymoron.

Are we going to talk about the J. Crew? Oh, boy. Modeling. We've gotten this far without doing so. I feel remiss if we didn't bring it up. Celebrated New Yorker writer enlisted as model, the New York Times reported. How do you follow up a couple of bestselling books if you're Patrick Redd and Keith you star in a J. Crew ad? Yes.

Yes. I will never live this one down. Yeah, that was a weird one. But I'm just, I'm in a place in my life where, you know, if some kind of larky thing falls in my lap and it seems fun, why not? Well, what if it turns out that they have horrific workplace practices and then you can't report on that? Exactly, the sweatshop, the sweatshop factor.

Their clothes are made in Bangladesh. Now that you mention it, this could be their long play, you know. I had another thing. which was that the... Do you know this show, industry? Yes, I've never seen it. I hear good things about it. There is this show.

And there is a character in the new season, who is a journalist named Patrick Radden Keefe, and the opportunity came up to play myself. And I... And I said yes. But to the point that I think you're making, I think there's some magic number of things like this that you can do.

And then when you... You do one more than that magic number. You're like Wolf Blitzer. You become somebody who's, or sats. You're sort of playing, you're playing a version of yourself. You become a simulacru. Yeah. And I, um.

You're printing counterfeit money. Maybe you've become like a, you're printing counterfeit money. Yeah, exactly. What am I going to do? Um, so it's kind of, it's kind of an open question. We'll see, we'll see, uh, we'll see how it goes with this industry thing. I look forward. I'll look out for that with great pleasure.

Joan Didian apparently did a advertising campaign. Yeah, for the gap. I think I didn't know about that until I was told about it afterwards. If I had known about that, that's how I would have justified it in my mind. Good enough for Didion. Exactly. Should we touch on Wind of Change? Yeah.

Your amazing podcast. Most fun I've ever had. Set it up for me. So I was years ago, I was living in Washington, D.C., and there's a guy who is one of my closest friends, who is a kind of great, great New York character, my friend, Michael Arbach. And Michael is often the source of my stories.

He's just one of these people who kind of has, he's lived many lives, he has fingers and a lot of pies, and he's always feeding me great stories. And he called me up and he said, I've just heard the most amazing story. Do you know the 1990s power ballad from 1990 by the West German hair metal band of the Scorpions, Wind of Change? And I actually, when he initially mentioned it, I sort of vaguely remember. Remember the song? Followed the Moscow.

Down to Gorky Park. Exactly. There you go. You know. I don't need to tell you. I listen to it on the way here just so I can do that. I mean, this is the problem is that I can sing into my sleep at this point. So this was the song that was released in 1990.

Just as the Cold War starting to end, you know, came out just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it becomes kind of the soundtrack to the dissolution of the USSR. Young people in Germany and Soviet Union, singing. the song in the streets. It's this kind of anthem of peace and change. And my friend Michael called me and said, so, you know, that song wasn't actually written by the Scorpions. It was written by the CIA. And that sounded so bananas on its face. Initially, I was skeptical. But then as I looked into it, there were these little indications that actually maybe it was true. And it turns out that for decades during the Cold War, the CIA had done all this kind of propagandistic stuff with culture, pop culture.

It's a while since I listened, but I recall they'd funded a, was it a jazz tour of West Africa? Yeah, they did. I mean, Louis Armstrong went to Africa, but also kind of more interestingly, Nina Simone, who was like no friend of the United States and ended up actually living out her days in Switzerland, very, very critical of the U.S. unwittingly was sent to Africa to do a tour. And this is sort of in this period during the Cold War when you get these African nations

that are sort of throwing off the colonial shackles and deciding who are we going to throw in our lot with the Soviets or the West. And so one element of Soviet propaganda was that it was pretty tough if you were black in America. I mean, and so then they would send these black American musicians. Amazing stuff. Kind of soft diplomacy?

Yeah. I mean, it seems tenuous, doesn't it? Like, as a use of money, you'd think, is it going to make any difference? Oh, but see, with pop culture, I could kind of buy it. The really interesting thing is when you go earlier, 50s and 60s, you have to remember that the CIA at this time is like all these guys who went to Yale, right? It's like all these men named Prescott. And initially their whole thing was like abstract expressionism they thought was going to be what would change hearts and minds like Robert Rauschenberg and whatever.

And they... It's a reach. It is. But they had this notion that high art was the way in which you would... If anything, it was stonewashed jeans. Levi's, big time. I'm old enough to remember, you know, my brother was a Russianist, is a Russianist, and he made a couple of trips to the Soviet Union. And the big thing was, bring a pair of jeans.

Totally. And then it always seemed like post-89, when the wall came down, whenever you saw someone from Eastern Europe, they were wearing stone-washed jeans. Their tasted jean seemed to be like a year or two out of date. And the cliche was, when the wall came down, they came, they saw, it was a slogan for a movie called Morons from Out of Space. They came, they saw they did little shopping. But that was kind of the experience.

It wasn't, we crave your freedom. It was like, wow, those jeans look pretty cool. I mean, isn't this the way it all goes? So it makes a kind of sense, I guess, that Scorpion singing about Wind of Change might have had some cultural effect. Is that the premise? Yeah, I mean, I think there's another little important bit of background here, which is that rock and roll was outlawed in the Soviet Union. Right.

And so there was a kind of sort of wonderful sense in which rock music, which always claimed to be transgressive, and I guess was somewhat transgressive here or in the United States. In the Soviet Union, it really was like you could get arrested

for having rock records. There was a whole kind of underground tape thing. There was an underground rock scene, which is its own really cool thing. We went to St. Petersburg, and we're talking to people who had been part of the kind of underground Leningrad rock scene. And so it's against that backdrop as well. It's funny because there ends up being, it's a big thing in the podcast,

but there was the Moscow Music Peace Festival in, I think it's summer of 89, where all these heavy metal bands come. You know, it's like the Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crew. And it was sort of a big indication of like the Soviet Union opening up because they were willing to have all these people come in the stadium. We interviewed all these people who had gone to the show, and it was this kind of life-changing experience. But it's funny to think about it from the perspective of the KGB

because he sort of wondered, well, what were they thinking? And I do think for some of them it was like, if this is the West's best advertisement for the West, you know, Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah. Let him come. Yeah. Maybe they loved it.

Do you remember Billy Joel did a tour of the Soviet Union? Yeah. And he got into a rage with the audience. Do you remember that? Oh, that I don't. Oh, I do. Yeah. Remind me, though. Because they weren't giving enough. They were just sort of standing there. I guess they were used to the Bolshoi or... And they would sit, yeah, 100%. They would do this in rock concerts. This was the whole style. Yeah, they would all sit down. And he's giving his full piano man and they weren't doing much. Yeah, nothing was coming back. He kind of had a tantrum.

Nothing upsets Billy, like when you don't return serve. Forget about it. You know, you've had so many storied successes. Like, you know, you've had so many storied successes. Your tenacity is formidable. And at points in the story where you think, is this going to arrive anywhere? It feels riddled with false leads or intriguing and entertaining red herrings. And then you kind of always seem to get there.

It's quite amazing. In this new one in particular, where to some extent it's unknowable, but I feel like you do by the end know what's happened. I feel like you do. Yeah. It's hard because with my book Say Nothing, it's about this murder in 1972.

And at the end of the book, you should say of her, like Gene McConville. So there was a woman named Gene McConville who was a mother of 10 in Belfast in Northern Ireland. Single mother. Her husband died. A widow. So single mother of 10. And in 1972, there's a knock on her door one night and a gang of masked intruders come in.

And this is at the kind of the height of the troubles, early in the troubles, but in the most violent period. In fact, in the most violent year of the troubles, full stop. This gang comes in. They're armed. they say to the kids, we just want to talk to your mother for a few hours. The kids are clinging to her legs. They're screaming. They take her away and the children never see their mother again. And they're orphaned. They grow up. In orphanage is a terrible story and there's always this

mystery of what happened to Gene McConville. And it was a real, it's a well-known story that took place during the troubles. Absolutely. And I spent, you know, I started working on a piece in 2014, published the piece in 2015, published a book at the end of 2018. And three, a kind of crazy set of circumstances. At the very end of working on that book, I figured out who killed her in 1972. And it was a person who was still alive, who had never been charged, who had never been questioned or identified in any way with this killing. I mean, I take these things very seriously. I would not have made such an allegation unless I was 100% certain. And then, obviously, I had to work with lawyers in New York and Dublin and London and Belfast to be.

make sure that we were on very solid ground before I made this accusation, but I did at the end of the book. I think in a way that is convincing. So that book has this kind of, it like snaps shut at the end with a kind of a satisfying click. Very, very satisfying click that I'll never be able to repeat in my career. And this, I would say, the click is not as satisfying, but I do think that I get there in terms of sort of figuring out roughly what happened. Do you have advice for young journalists? I do with a caveat. I mean, the caveat would be, I'm speaking to you from a position of unbelievable privilege, right?

Like, I don't, it's hard for me to point to my books or my articles and say, hey, kid, here's how you do this, because I'm writing at the New Yorker. I have terrific fact checkers. I can spend eight months on a piece if I want. I can write it at 15,000 words. These are all, like, in a kind of rapidly contracting industry. There's a sort of last of the dinosaurs quality where there are certain kind of structural luxuries that I can take advantage of. Like being a New Yorker writer, it's so atypical of the way so much journalism is practiced.

It happens now. And all of the kind of industry pressures. I say this in part because I know loads of younger journalists and people who are freelance journalists and it's a tough racket and tougher now. having said all that, the advice is this, find a way to do it. In a way, I think the truth is kind of the coin of the realm. So a lot of the time I'm asked this question apropos AI. And my feeling is, if what you're doing is something that AI could replicate, then you're doing it wrong and you should stop doing it that way. And the way to AI proof your job and also do the job well and write things that will endure is to pick up the phone, to knock on doors, to go out in the world and find stuff that's not already on the internet and tell a story about it. Think of a kind of way to present it as a narrative about people that has a certain drama where you can.

I think that's the way to do the job. And I think that's the way to do the job, honestly, if you're writing like an 800-word newspaper article, as much as it is if you're writing a 10,000-word narrative feature. The key to me is don't be inhibited as people so often are. I don't think that the truth is, like, exists on Google. Go out there and get it. Push back. I know.

I think I'm going to agree with that. I think I spent so many years growing up wanting to make something of myself in journalism. And I think I'm saying something similar, which is getting in amongst it was a big difference, just sort of leaving the room. Like, instead of marinating in the feedback loop of anxiety and second guessing, suddenly if you're out in a story, You're discovering things in spite of yourself. You're taken out of yourself. Certainly for myself, it's been massively helpful to go among people, you know, speaking as a sort of self-questioning person. When I'm in the world of people who aren't who are in some way antagonistic to that,

or, you know, whether they're active wrongdoers or just big, unselfconscious personalities, that's been massively rewarding. And if you wanted to put it very crassly, I'd say, like, I've made a living out of spending time with people I profoundly disagree with. Now, that's a kind of journalism that's practically on TV, like kind of just where you spa and, you know, obviously character. Drama is conflict. And nevertheless, in the print medium, and in a way it's spoken to by the subtitle of rogues, true stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks, whether consciously or unconsciously, you've plowed a furrow that's ever. involved being among people unlike you, being among people whose questions, whose choices require some sort of interrogation. Yeah, and being and sort of remaining, and it sounds like this is kind of similar to you. I don't, there's a sort of weird thing that you do. I mean,

it's different, right, in the sense that the, I know you do documentaries, but in an interview like this, your questions are what is kind of driving the car. And I'm, I'm giving my answers, but that's sort of the extent of it. Documentary is obviously different because there's a lot of selection that's going on and you're kind of able to put more spin on the ball. For me, it's that thing where you sit down with people and you just have to stay curious. And in a way, it's not that you're not going to render judgment, but there has to be a kind of openness to hearing them out, even if they're awful people describing awful things that they've done, a sort of willingness to say, I really want to understand this from your perspective. I may think

your perspective is bonkers. And in my case, I'll express that when I sit down to write. But it's in that moment where you're kind of meeting people where they are. I mean, you know, there are people I interviewed for London Falling who are gangsters or gangster adjacent people. I've interviewed a lot of people who've killed people. In some cases, multiple people. It's a strange thing, right, to sit with somebody like that and make yourself open to hearing them and sort of persuade them in a way that it's truly not disingenuous. I want to hear how this seems to you. But also to make clear that that doesn't mean I'm just going to be your ventriloquist, right?

I am going to, there is going to be my own sort of filter of judgment here. But in the conversation, you know, it can go wherever it goes. Well, it's reminded me of the criminal versus informant dichotomy. You have a friendly relationship with some of these gangsters, but I think you'd stop short of calling them friends. Yeah. I mean, it's hard because some of these people have done really awful things. And I have a kind of, if you heard me on the phone with them,

in some cases I have a sort of jocular banter with them. Andy Baker, who's a fairly notorious longtime London and Bristol gangster. He's in the book. He's in the book. Is he alive? He's alive and back in prison. So he was in prison and then he got out of prison and I got to know him when he was out of prison.

And then as I was working on the book, he went back in prison and he calls me from prison. And we have these, I mean, they're monitored phone calls, but he keeps up. If he came out, would you go for coffee with him? I would. I've gone for coffee with him before. Would you have him around to the house? Probably not.

I mean, I tell a story at the end of the book. about how the first time I met Andy, I went to see him and a friend of his was sort of orchestrating this thing. He brought me to this coffee place. I went into the back of the coffee place. Andy's a big man physically with a very kind of firm handshake and these kind of very intense blue eyes. And he sort of shook my hand, very pleased to meet me. would I like a coffee?

Are we all set? And we sat down. And he said, and how is Chopin? So Chopin was the name of a dog that I had that died. And immediately I'm thinking, how does he know my dog's name? And I realized I wrote a line or two

in the acknowledgments to rogues about how I'd had this dog that used to sit at my feet when I would write and who died. And I said, oh, or, He said, he's not on how I was Chopin. He said, what kind of dog was Chopin? I told him. And then he said, and how's Justina?

Justina's my wife. And I said, she's all right. And he said, and what about Lucian and Felix? And those are my sons. And I say at the end of the book, he's not threatening me, but it's also not totally benign what's happening. And in a way, it gave me an insight into the kind of person he is and the kind of person that Indian Dave was, right? that this is sort of the way they operate. So he'd got my book, he'd read the acknowledgements,

he'd put to memory the name of my wife and my two sons and my dead dog, and within 30 seconds of meeting me, he just wants me to know. I know. Quite alarming in a way. It is. Now, I don't think that Andy Baker wishes any harm to come to me, and I'm pretty careful about these things. But no, I wouldn't have him around the house.

Did you take a view of Michael Wolfe coming out in the Epstein emails as a kind of what appeared to be an informal conciliary? Yeah, I don't, that to me crosses a line. I mean, one of the things that I said to Andy Baker when we first met was just to be very, very clear because I try to be transparent with everyone. I can never give you anything. I can never pay you money. I can buy you a meal. That's sort of within the rules. I can pay for a meal.

But I can never give you money. I can never cut you in on any deal. And the funny thing with Andy Baker is that we then went to have lunch and we went to this Chinese restaurant in Swansea. And he ordered like the whole menu and left with bags of food. Right. But that's legit. I can do that. But I try to make clear.

You know, I can't do any of those kinds of things. So Michael Wolfe offering advice, real kind of counsel to. Jeffrey Epstein, you know, listen, there's all kinds of people who horse trade in weird ways, and I'm not investigative. There's a certain kind of investigative journalist who does things I wouldn't do. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist in the world. And sometimes they, through that kind of thing, they're able to get stuff out there that I'm not. I personally, I wouldn't do that. I mean, as a general matter, like, I try not to send texts or emails to people I'm writing about that I couldn't ultimately live with the consequences

if they became public. Yeah. But that's kind of the job on some level. I mean, I don't mean in the sense that you're, famously Janet Malcolm said that we're all kind of con artists, right? In the first line of the journalist and the murderer, her essay on the ethics of journalism, long form immersive journalism, is along those lines.

It's any journalist who's not too full of himself to see the truth or too stupid, knows that what he does is morally indefensible. Yeah. Now, the little caveat I would put there is a seduce and betray transaction. Yes. There are, what's the best way of putting this? There are people I've written about who I think feel like I betrayed them. I don't think I betrayed them.

And I do everything I can to kind of manage people's expectations along the way, precisely because I think there's a tendency. I mean, I'll give you an example. So the Brettlers, whose story I tell in London falling, when they initially, they hadn't gone public. Nobody had ever written about Zach Brutler's death. It was not a thing that was kind of widely known in London. And when we first started talking about me writing about them, they had a real sense of grievance about the Metropolitan Police and the way the thing had been handled. And they, I don't know if they'd already read it or they started reading it once we started talking, but they knew about say nothing.

and they knew about the way it ended with this kind of, with that satisfying click. And I said to them, I would love it if you open up and talk to me. But I also can't have a situation in which implicitly you think that in exchange for that, I'm going to crack the case. I'm going to get the Metropolitan Police to reopen the case or to apologize to you. You can't have in your head some unspoken expectation that there's a kind of quid pro quo here and that in exchange for opening yourselves up in this very intimate way, I will deliver the goods for you

because it's unfair to you and it's unfair to me and so I try and be as honest about that stuff as possible. Sometimes people still feel burned. I think I read it in an interview with a New York writer where they said

in that kind of intimate journalism if you're not making very hard decisions about what to leave out you're probably not doing it right which is less about investigative journalism but that kind where a family says brings you into the home to document horrific things they're going through, and you're balancing the right to report

versus invasion of privacy? I don't know that I would put it in those terms. I mean, I don't, you know, listen, there are things in this book that the Bretlers are quite uncomfortable with. They're okay with it. I think they're remarkable people, and they've now read the book. So if they'd said to you, like, we really don't want you to put this thing about, for example, one of the most painful things to read is the relationship between Zach and his older brother and the way in which they were estranged. They were so different. The older brother was sort of studious and quite orthodox in his approach to life, going to university, and then his younger brothers become this sort of sigma kind of wannabe, I don't know,

gangster or hustler. And so they have this estrangement. And you read it thinking, that must be painful. You know, the intimate family dynamics, if they'd said, like, this is terrific, but actually just don't put that, that's too painful. I would have made the case that that stuff should be in there and that you have to, particularly given that this is a story about lying, to me, the truth has to be kind of unblinking. I mean, I'd go even further and say, even when I write a profile of someone who's cooperating and who I maybe even have high regard for, I want them to feel a little bit uncomfortable when they read it. If they don't, if I create a portrait that looks like the portrait that they have in their mind, I feel like I've, I kind of haven't done my job. You know, I said to Larry Kikosian when I was writing about him, because he has these portraits of him, you know, like Hockney did a portrait of him, right? And I was trying to sort of prepare him for the piece.

And I said, this is not going to be like looking at a photograph of yourself. It's going to be looking like at a painting that somebody's done of you where there's a clear kind of. interpretive lens. So it's not going to be the way you see yourself. And so I think there should always be a little bit of discomfort. I'm not saying that you do things just to make the person uncomfortable. But I think if it's real journalism, as distinct from like PR, there has to be a little bit of a sense of, huh, you know, in the same way that you don't, I mean, you're a broadcast professional, right? But it's like for normal people, if they hear their own voice sometimes, there's that moment where they think, well, I don't sound like that, you know.

But if they said, if Larry Kogosun and said, I want to tell you something off the record, what would you say? Of course. And then he tells you something and you think, this is absolutely. Then if it's off the record, it's off the record. I mean, I will try and persuade him. And I don't want to get into it, but there were certain things that I was told by the Brettlers off the record that eventually got on the record after a much conversation. But the rules are the rules and I have to live by them. The harder thing for me is when, to give you another example, from a piece I wrote in The New Yorker, it's not in rogues, but I wrote a big profile of Carl Icon, who's this kind of ridiculous American financier, one of the original corporate raiders, went to work for Trump in the first administration, as his sort of deregulations are.

And Icon had this whole thing where he didn't want to talk on the record. He only wanted to talk off the record with his lawyer on the call. and he wanted to do that for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And at a certain point, I just had to say, listen, I'm done. I'm not going to keep talking to you where you're trying to kind of shape the story, but you're not giving me anything that I can use. So that kind of thing I'll object to. But if you and I are doing a long interview and there's three moments in the interview

where you say, can I tell you something off the record? That's inviolate. I used to have a thing where I would say, again, it's TV, so it's different, but I would say, don't tell me anything off the record. record. Like, it's either on the record or I don't care because I don't want, it's like double entry bookkeeping. It's like a version that we're agreeing on and then there's a real version. 100%. Well, and this, to my earlier point about why I think access is overrated, so there's this whole thing that the consumer, the person who reads journalism in places like the New York Times or

the Guardian or the telegraph or what have you, isn't aware of, which is that the sophisticated repeat players, it's even more pernicious, right? So it's like, if you came, say I'm profiling you, and you say, as powerful people often do, yes, you can profile me on the condition that I get quote approval, that anything I say, before it goes in the article, you have to show it to me, and I can sign off on it the way I would a press release, right? I would say, no, I have, you know, a sense of professional ethics and my personal dignity, and I would never prostrate myself in that way to your demands. So what does sophisticated people do?

And this is business people, political people, actors. Anyone who's like a prominent repeat player who deals with the press a lot, they'll say, okay, I'll tell you what, we're going to talk just off the record. But if there's anything you want to use, you can come back to me. And journalists all the time, including at times myself where I've had no alternative, will say, well, if that's all I can get, then I guess I'll do that. Yeah. But that's also, I think, kind of betraying the reader, right?

Like, the reader doesn't know that that transaction has happened. No. I feel like we've used up a lot of your time. We ended on a kind of esoteric point of journalistic ethics. I was going to say, this is like the end of the movie where it's sort of interesting to wonder how many people are in the audience at this point. Is anybody out there? If some of these people have stayed to the end of the credits. Brilliant.

Nice one. Such a pleasure. Thank you for giving us the time. I appreciate you having me. And seen, welcome back. Thank you for joining us, Patrick Raddenkief and you, the listener slash viewer. In Sourcell, embarrassing this late in life to have a word that's freely used by your interlocutor and not to know what it means. A little embarrassing.

It means to bewitch or enchant. I thought it might be from like the French. I was getting French etymology, but it's actually, I think, old English. Sorcery is maybe a cognate? What is a cognate? We'll be looking that up next week. We spoke about Kanye West, releasing his song Heil Hitler. A few days after we recorded, Kanye took out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal,

apologising for his anti-Semitic behavior. I've been saying Kanye, I think he prefers yay. Anyway, noted. Some legal notes regarding the Sackler family's alleged involvement in the opioid crisis in the U.S., It's worth noting that Purdue Farmer pleaded guilty to charges over its marketing of Oxycontin. The Sackler family entered into a $6 billion settlement protecting them from lawsuits and has denied any wrongdoing. I teased Patrick a little bit about having done an advert for a clothing brand. And surprise, surprise, a few weeks later on my social media feed, I appeared seemingly doing a kind of promotion for a clothing brand.

or at least JD Sports. And I think there was a maybe certain brand of sneakers slash running shoes that I was wearing. And you could say, I should be gently ribbed for that. Consider me ribbed. Happy to be ribbed. And so did Joan Didian. Joan Didian. Let's find some more.

Which other? Who else? I know that Sergio Leone famously directed. adverts. He's a movie, obviously, he directed Good, the Bad and the Ugly and many other movies. Orson Wells did his fish finger adverts, didn't he? Or was it peas? He did peas and fish fingers. So anything that puts me in the same company as Sergio Leone, Austin Wells, Patrick Radden, Keith, and Joan Didion, and Gary Linneker, fellow podcast host, fellow podcast host, Gary Linneker, Gary Linneka advertises Walker's Crisps.

Hey, if you're not doing it, why aren't you doing it? That's not a catchphrase. Louis has written, I've added my own notes, Louis has written, has Mamet gone to the dark side? Quite a big statement to say someone's gone to the dark side. He's just become a Trump supporter. So if that's dark to you, then yes. I said that he was like Saruman looking into the Palantir too much,

if you're familiar with the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, written by J.R.R. Tolkien. And then I thought, was it the Palantir? I looked it up. Yes. I heaved a sigh of relief. He looked too much in the seeing stone known as the Palantir. And it was a bit like the Nietzsche quote, he who stares into the abyss. The abyss stares also into him.

There was that idea of like, if you keep engaging with super dark stuff, it is going to rub off on you. And in Saruman's case, it led him to believe he could control the one ring and eventually supplant Sauron as the ruler of Middle Earth. So the parallels with Mamet are very precise. Couldn't be more resonant. Is there anything else on Lord of the Rings? I think that's a good amount. That's it for this week. Apart from the credit, the producer was Millie Chew,

the production manager was Francesca Bassett, the music in the series was by Miguel Di Olivera, the executive producer was Aaron Fellows, this is a Mindhouse Studios production for Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. We do a lot of our shopping these days online. I've often thought in another life, I could have had a blossoming online shop on Shopify.

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