WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1098 - Ronan Farrow

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

Ronan Farrow needed to come to terms with a lot of things. He processed the pain and trauma that existed in his family during his upbringing. He came to an understanding with his own ambition and drive. And he realized that the deck is stacked against victims and survivors of abuse the world over. These things all contributed to his current work as an investigative journalist, his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, and his bestselling book about it all, Catch and Kill. Ronan also talks with Marc about going to college at age 11, serving in the Obama administration, working in Afghanistan, and being a Rhodes Scholar. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace and Scotts Turf Builder Thick'R Lawn. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store

and ACAS Creative. Lock the gates! Alright, let's do this. How are you what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fuck nicks? What the fucksters? What's happening?

I'm Mark Maron. This is my podcast, WTF. How's it going? How's your Monday turning out? Did you have today off? What's happening? Do you work at a bank or a government? Do you work at a library?

Are you having a nice three-day weekend from your bank job or the PO? Do you work for the PO? Anyway, I hope you're all well. I'm back. Dean Del Rey and myself were down in Florida, flew out Thursday night. Orlando, got to Orlando like 11, 1130 at night. Our hotel was actually, I believe, within the theme park. I think our hotel was part of the Universal theme park. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was owned by Universal. I tried to choose the most grown-up looking of the hotels. There was no theme to the hotel, no pirate theme, no fun and games, no animals. It was the grown-up one, kind of, but it was right within the park. I have no sense of Orlando. I don't know if it's a real city. I think it's just some sort of

corporate mirage that people go to have fun on. I don't know what it is. And I'll be honest with you. I'll say it out of the gate here. The audiences were tremendous, great audiences. I think I know why I'll go into that. But despite that, my opinions of Florida have not changed at all. The shit went down, weird shit went down, nothing violent or hostile or even painful, but Florida is Florida. And if you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about. All right. Now, my special End Times Fun will launch globally on Netflix, Tuesday, March 10th. Mark Maron, End Times Fun, global on Tuesday, March 10th. All right? That's happening. These are the last four dates of this set

before the special. I'm doing like an hour 40, hour 45, generally. Special's like 73 minutes. So there's something else to whatever I'm doing right now. Extended mix.

But these are the final dates coming up this week, this Thursday in Portland maine at the state theater february 20th providence rhode island on friday february 21st at the columbus theater i believe that's uh pretty close to sold out new haven connecticut at college street music hall saturday february 22nd and huntington new y York at the Paramount, Sunday, February 23rd. You can go to WTFpod.com slash tour for a link to all the venues. So this is it.

And I think after this tour, I'm going to change my entire disposition as I head into every aspect of my life. What does that even fucking mean? Sometimes I just let things keep going out of my mouth that have no bearing on anything. Bad food. We had bad food in Florida. We were in the theme park, I think.

I believe our hotel was a ride. I believe a family, several families came through my room to look at the sleeping comedian and waited for me to be funny. It's not a great ride. It's not even a haunted house, really. I don't know. It's kind of like the sad reality hotel. Yeah, that's the ride. Sad reality house. So look, Ronan Farrow is on the podcast today. We talked about how he grew up, who he grew up with,

his family, the journalism he's done, his education, some other stuff. I tried to get at who he is. I did not pop the Sinatra question because if you want the answer to that, you can get it elsewhere. That's all I'm saying. It's out there. there the answer is like he's not answering it but we talked for a long time about a lot of different stuff and I was really sort of trying to sort of get a sense of who this guy is I think that over the the swath of the of the conversation you do get a sense of that but Ronan Farrow is on the show he'll'll be here soon. He's got this book out, his best-selling book, obviously, Catch and Kill. It's available wherever you get books. He also did the Catch and Kill podcast, which just did its final episode last week, so you can listen to the entire series

wherever you listen to your podcasts. So as you know, I was nervous about Orlando. I'm not going to shit entirely on Orlando, but I have no sense of what Orlando is because we were there very quickly. We drove over onto the theme park, onto the city walk behind the scenes where the people working live their life. Pulled up to the Hard Rock live venue. Beautiful venue, actually. Out of the 1, 1200 sold good must've been over 900. They're beautifully filled up and a great crowd, just a lovely crowd on all levels.

And I was so excited. And I realized that, look, man, I don't go down there. I've never been there. I have people down there. I, all of them came. That's all I'm saying. And I was happy they were there. I've never been there. I have people down there. I, all of them came. That's all I'm saying. And I'm, I was happy they were there. We had a lovely show up until a woman just started singing loudly, some sort of song that is sung at soccer games. I don't know what it was, some sort of chant. It's a instrumental thing. It just happened out of nowhere. I don't know

what provoked it. It went on for a while. Uh. I tried, I drew attention to it. Obviously it was distracting. She was singing loudly to the, everyone noticed. And I tried to shut her up and I was empathetic with the fact that she probably was drunky and needed help shutting up, but never got hostile. And I don't know what happened or how it was dealt with or what, what snapped in her head, but it, it, it stopped. And I don't know what happened or how it was dealt with or what snapped in her head. But it stopped. But it was an interesting moment. And I don't invite those moments. But if they happen, always kind of exciting, man.

That's like hands-on comedy. That's the big room babysitting job. You don't always want to do big room babysitting. But occasionally you have to. And ultimately, all in all, great show in Orlando. Great people would go back to that venue and also to that town, maybe spend an extra day there to get beyond the confines of that park and maybe get into the confines of the other park, the Disney area. Maybe I don't know how to have fun. Maybe I should get involved with water parks a little more often.

There's a huge water park. There's roller coasters. Maybe I'm too old for it. Dino's back is bad. My neck is bad. I think our roller coaster days are over. But Orlando is good. Good people there.

Thank you for coming. Did not change my opinion of Florida. Actually, it gave me more resolve around it, I think, to be honest with you. Dean's mom, Del Rey, the matriarch of the Del Rey, the mommy of the Del Rey, came to the show in Orlando.

Lovely lady. Knows how to have a fun time. Sweet. Just like, you never know. You never know what you're going to get when you meet someone's mom. But it all made sense, and they get along great, and he hadn't seen her in a long time,

and she had never seen him do comedy. And that can be a tough night, you know, because early on, he's not really early on, but if it's the first time she's seen him, there is a possibility of chokage, could choke in front of the parents. Some people choke for years doing comedy in front of the parents oh you know some people choke for years doing the comedy in front of their family but dean nailed it and it was a good a good venue to for that to happen excellent good times ate a hamburger cheeseburger hard rock cafe cheeseburger and some salmon and some onion rings. Okay, so moving on.

Next day, we get up, got to get out. It's only like an hour and a half to Tampa, but there was no fucking way. There's no reason, no reason to hang around Orlando. Got jacked at the Dunkin' Donuts coffee and headed to Tampa. And we got to Tampa in the early afternoon. And we were like, well, let's just take a walk around Tampa. And we got to Tampa in the early afternoon and we're like, well, let's just take a walk around Tampa. What? Downtown Tampa. Look, again, I don't want to judge, but it looks

like it halfway happened. It looked like there was an attempt at some point in time to kind of make it hip, to do something with downtown. And it might've happened for a month or two or maybe a year, but it's definitely on the, uh, on the other side of that. So we drive in and there's literally hundreds of people wandering around the streets in costumes, uh, looking at their phones in small groups. And we couldn't fucking figure out what it was. I didn't know if it was a sporting event that had like, you know, a dozen teams involved or what, but they were dressed in period costumes. Some of the men wearing suspenders, smoking pipes, look like the 30s or the 40s. I don't know what. And then we

asked somebody, it was some sort of global app-driven clue game where people just wander around trying to solve a murder mystery on their app with hundreds of other board game nerds, I guess. So that was sort of a weird entry into Tampa. So then we got to the hotel and the Stras Center was pretty fucking nice. Great crowd. Dean did good. I got out there. It's going well, but there's a problem up front. Some more weirdness. There's a couple sitting right up front, stage right, on the aisle. They're bickering. And I can hear it. But it's difficult.

I'm on stage. They're right there. I can hear it. The people, even 10 rows back, can't hear it. 900 people can't hear it. But it's fucking driving me nuts. I get involved. What's up?

And they won't talk. And they look cranky. They look like they're fighting. And now they're mad at each other. So I do some more of my set. And all of a sudden a sudden the audience gets weird i don't know what's going on then i look down i realize the man in that couple is standing against the lip of the stage looking at her like they're having a thing he's up visible to the rest of the goddamn crowd and i'm like what what is happening are you fucked up what's going on and there clearly is a problem and no one's dealing with it security is not anywhere to be found

which is fine I tell them look if uh if it's just heckling and it's good spirited I can deal with it but you should know when to step in but this guy's standing up and I'm like what's going on and then she's like well you know he's drunk and I'm like all right well I got a show to do here and there's 949 48 people who want to do want me to do a show now I got to deal with your marital problems and she's like well I just you know it's it's I'm just mad and I'm like okay and he's like I'm not drunk I'm straight man and he was fucked up that guy and she goes I bought him these tickets for Valentine's Day and I'm like drunk. I'm straight, man. And he was fucked up, that guy. And she goes, I bought him these tickets for Valentine's Day. And I'm like, this is getting deep.

And look, you got to go. You got to go talk. You got to go resolve whatever the issue is outside. And they're both sitting there. He's standing there. They're being stubborn. And I'm like, please, just go take a walk and talk to each other. And she's like, all right, come on.

And literally pushes her man out of the room up the aisle out of the room and I was so relieved that I it was a successful mediation she stepped in she took care of it it would have been awful if the guy was belligerent had to be walked out by security or they both did and we went on with the show but that was uh that was tampa that was tampa had a couple of wooers which i don't love as some of you know but the um but i was very happy i want to you know express some gratitude for that woman managing her fucking drunk ass husband it did set the show into a weird zone but i think it pulled out okay and then right after that happens there are two empty seats

right on the aisle in the front row the guy who was sitting next to them and goes can my can my daughter move down from the balcony and that's when the people from the venue step in to tell him to shut up i'm like look he's just asking a question you missed your opportunity to do some crowd management here i had to do so another evening of big room babysitting and I'm like okay yeah man all right sure hey hey would this guy's daughter come down sit next to your old man and it turns out I get an email beautiful email from that guy the next day this morning saying how what I did was amazing because he'd gotten the tickets early on for he and his wife, I think is how it went. And his daughter who was leaving for college or somewhere, leaving the house for good. She was the last of four kids to be leaving the

next day. You know, they all went out to my show, but she couldn't sit with him. And I brought her down there and, and it was a real moment. It was the last night the family was together before she moved out and they were empty nesters. And it was a very touching email. He's very grateful. And he said that I, you know, I really made a difference in their life somehow that this memory was created. And I got a new fan with the daughter, which I guess, I guess that's good. I, you know, I hope I don't, I never know, man, you know, people bring their kids and like, you sure she was 18. I mean, she's no youngster, but like, all right. I tell you, there is something going on with this set. It gets a little heavy. It gets a little dark. It gets a little dirty. And I just, I don't always know, like, cause I see I've grown up fans, you know, I don't, I don't attract any meatheads, not too many yahoos, you know, that guy got drunk,

but I don't know what happened there. And there were a couple of wooers and one, the singer of soccer chants but but generally speaking grown-ups I saw some at the hotel people who flew in for the evening to stay over to watch my show and they were excited I'm like oh man am I am I too filthy am I too flawed am I too broken am I too weird am I too not entertaining for these folks that made this trip I'm always sort of thinking about that like I hope that it worked out for the folks that made this trip. I'm always sort of thinking about that. Like, I hope that it worked out for the people that traveled. And I hope that it did.

I hope that it did. So that was Florida. Again, I'm still wary of Florida, but I know I have people down there and I know they wanted me to come and they were happy I came and I'm happy I went. And I'm happy I was able to give you guys a show, you people, you Floridians, who enjoy me.

All right? And I think you all came out. Everyone down in the Orlando, Tampa area who likes me showed up. And thank you for doing that. So Ronan Farrow, I was nervous. I ran into him at the Vanity Fair party and I told him he could come on and somehow that happened immediately. But, you know, I didn't know, I don't know anything about that guy. I know the work he's done and, you know, the investigative journalism

he's done has made a very huge impact on our culture. And, you know, he is the son of somebody that I grew up loving and had to turn my brain around on that because of his behavior, as did Ronan. And I didn't know how personal he would get, but I think we got a little personal, and he's a very bright, overly smart guy and a great journalist. You're going to hear me talking to Ronan Farrow about his book Catch and Kill, which is available wherever you get books, and also the Catch and Kill podcast,

which just did its final episode last week. And you can get that wherever you get the podcast and about some personal stuff and about some thoughts and opinions on things and whatnot. But this is me. And he's almost like from another planet intelligent, this guy. This is me talking to Ronan Farrow. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing.

With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative.

Are you self-employed? brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. and equipment or an unhappy customer suing you. That's why you need insurance. Don't let the I'm too small for this mindset hold you back from protecting yourself. Zensurance provides customized business insurance policies starting at just $19 per month. Visit Zensurance today to get a free quote. Zensurance, mind your business. Basically, anyone who has ever worked with me knows that i'm incredibly annoying to work with in this i mean i micromanage everything i get into the on the audiobook i was like literally in the pro tools session like riding the fader on the different music cues that i had picked and oh do you you had music cues in your audiobook yeah yeah the audiobook also i just you read it all i read it all So much of the audience,

I think especially younger listeners are experiencing books that way. I listen to a lot of books now on Audible. Do you? Mm-hmm. I don't. You find it takes something away? I don't listen. I don't know where everyone finds the time, man. I just don't. It's not a matter of taking it away. Oh, so you're not reading the physical books either? I'm trying to read the physical books. That's usually what I do if I'm on an airplane or something. I've finished a couple of books lately. I guess

doing audio books would be nice, but I tend to like to think. I don't know. I listen to music when I go on exercise things and I just don't know where people find all the time. Thinking and living with my own thoughts seems terrifying. So I listen to tons of music and I mean, I'm being facetious. No, I know. No, I listen to tons of music too. My own thoughts can be awful and terrifying, but you know, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing with my time.

I feel like I'm busy, too busy to take in a lot of shit. I got to really make time to watch things, to listen to things. Don't you? Yeah. It's, it's impossible.

And I feel like often I'm drowning with my current schedule. You know, if I'm juggling a few stories, there's a podcast and there's a lot going on. And very often, I'm just numb at the end of the day. But one thing that I can be reliably dependent on for is procrastination. So I wrote two books in back-to-back years. There was a foreign policy one about the collapse of the State Department, and I interviewed all the living secretaries of state. And that was 2017? 18. 18. So the current collapse of the State Department, and I interviewed all the living secretaries of state. And that was 2017? 18.

18. So the current collapse of the State Department. Right. But involved a lot of years of research. My PhD research fed into it. It was a harrowing process. It got canceled at a certain point. But you were working on a State Department book before Trump. Yes. And then it became a State Department book about the Trump era. Because he gutted it. He gutted it. And it actually fit with a recurrent pattern that was not really about political party. It also occurred under Clinton, for instance. He sent Warren Christopher to the Hill, then Secretary of State, to demand these radical budget cuts.

Secretary of State to demand these radical budget cuts, and really sounded almost exactly like Rex Tillerson doing Trump's bidding on the Hill saying, you know, we want to slice and dice the State Department. So it is kind of an act of political expedience or cowardice that knows no party and that we see happen over and over again. And there's a tale of decades of damage that ensues when we sort of strip mine our various embassies. We don't have people in the room to say, hey, maybe we negotiate our way out of this problem instead of just the military solution. But I did that book and was like, great, no more books for a long time. But then before it was even done, I had already gotten into the catch and kill, this current book. So I was just like insensate with books in my life and book

pressures and being writing and writing and writing is the most tortured thing it's the worst man yeah it's the worst and it really it like just destroyed my life for years and years but i will tell you you do it you push through you do it you push through is it easier to write when you're writing this kind of like investigative nonfiction you know sort of you know these putting these things together than it would be to write say a memoir well both of these books actually have qualities of both yeah but but the and i'll i'll get to that in a second because that's interesting but the the point i was going to make is my procrastinating which made these books extra agonizing because I was constantly a year or years over deadline

and in a blind panic as I was writing, did have one collateral benefit, which is I, like you, like everyone, had not had a lot of space to be a reader, which was one of my first loves. And then in the name of having convinced myself that I'd be a better writer if I were reading interesting authors' voices all the time,

I just decided, especially for this last book, I am going to just read a shitload of books. Yeah. And it was like while I was doing the structure of this last one. Fiction, nonfiction, didn't matter? A mix, but almost all fiction for Catch and Kill. Because Catch and Kill is so aggressively an investigative nonfiction work that I wanted to cut against that stylistically. Yeah. So while I was developing the outline of it, you know, there's a nonfiction repertorial

part of it. This gets at your question about does it make it easier or harder, which was a long process of compiling a Bible of here's what happened every day in the real world so the book is really about the obstacles you faced in pursuing your investigative reports of all the men that you you sort of investigated yeah i mean it's it's a series of one clue leading to another one story leading to another from the weinstein story to the trump hush payment stories um to moonves to schneiderman or schneiderman to Moonves? Moonves and Schneiderman play more of a secondary role,

mostly because the book had to come down from a thousand page epic to something that would actually be digestible. But I wanted the structure to, I mean, first priority, it had to be bulletproof because there were going to be very, very moneyed and powerful interests descending on this thing, trying to discredit it, as is the case with any of my stories. So I hired one of the heads of fact-checking at The New Yorker.

We scrutinized every single sentence. And really, it's held up in the face of exactly the kind of shitstorm. How long has it been out? Like less than a year, though, right? Yeah, four months now. Now, okay, so what were you going to say about... Well, so part of the process was figuring out the outline, which had to be true first, but also I wanted to have dramatic sizzle. Sure. And mercifully, the actual facts after I spent those months laying out a Bible of a thousand pages of here's what happened every day, backed up by the documents and the texts and the emails,

then it actually did did it had like a save the cat screenplay structure that's you know all the good guys became bad guys at like right around the end of the second act kind of stuff but it's still it i wanted to seed the clues for the reader in a way that made dramatic sense so i did a lot of reading of like agatha christie going back to dashiell dashiell hammett you know um yeah I did like all the hard-boiled detective novels even up to and including

you know the kind of the detective procedurals J.K. Rowling did under a pseudonym right just like seeing what was out there

to sort of fortify your pacing right exactly to get the and that was a big part of it part of coming down from a thousand page

initial draft to a four hundred one was just making sure it moved like greased lightning or whatever. That's great. Good thinking. I hope.

I mean, the reviews seem to reflect that it worked and people have been getting something out of it. But then stylistically, as I was actually writing for voice, I was reading a lot of the postmodernists. I was reading, you know. Which guys? Like David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, Franzen even, Cynthia Ozik, Philip Roth. For tone?

For Philip Roth? Which Philip Roth? I mean, I had a little Portnoy's complaint. I wanted to be a little zany, a little funny. So hence like the Pynchon, hence the Roth. Right. So yeah, I bounced around a lot I must have read do you think 30 books but are you while I wrote this book but were you was I can understand structurally investigating you know uh mystery writing or or that kind of builder

true crime writing but uh but humorous writing do you not have uh faith in your your ability well it's not it's more than just comedic timing. It's like the texture of interesting voices bouncing around your brain. And or, by the way, this is all a ramp up to the point of the story, which is I basically devised an excuse to procrastinate more and found myself reading more than I ever have as just a consumer layperson because I finally had a professional excuse to be a reader, which my publisher will hate hearing this

because they were like, where is the draft? Where is it? You're reading Philip Roth. All right, I was reading great books. So looking at your life, it's weird because I was trying to get a handle on it. It's a lot. There's a lot going on in there.

Right. Things I'm familiar with, things that resonate or have had an impact on me personally in different ways that was your immediate life. But it does feel that most of it was sort of haunted by events. But like how often do you talk to your mom? You guys pretty close?

Yeah, we are pretty close. I mean, like I think almost all moms, her narration of this would be that I never call and it's not enough. Well, yeah, I always wonder about that with my mom. How often are we supposed to call? How often do you call your mom? Well, now my mom's getting old, and I try to talk to her once a week,

even if it's just to say hi. I think that's right. I think we should be all calling our moms more. How often do you talk to her? We probably talk around once a week, maybe twice a week. But, you know, I will say still in a moment of crisis or stress, like she's still one of my first calls. Really?

Yeah. See, that's different than me. I would never call her mom. Really? Oh, because she'll just stress you out more? Well, I don't know. She won't know what to do. But you find comfort in it.

I do. You know, my mom is someone who's really ethical and thoughtful. Yeah. She's very smart. I'm fascinated by her life story, too. She's a hell of an interview subject. No kidding. I mean, like real show business stuff.

Yeah. And grew up in this kind of golden age of Hollywood. You know, her mom was jane in the tarzan movies her dad was a huge director oscar-winning director writer crazy wrote around the world in 80 days but died pretty young right died of alcoholism i mean i guess a heart attack technically sure the family always says he died of the drink right as we say in our irish family how many of them arced out how many how of that transferred? How much of that generationally moved into? Your mom seems to avoid it.

Addiction, you mean, specifically? My mom has avoided it. I think many of her siblings have struggled. My mom seems to not have that at all. And I actually, I think I don't have it at all. As someone who has a lot of loved ones and friends who struggle with addiction, a lot of loved ones and friends who struggle with addiction, a lot of sober friends, I know what to look for and I know my relationship with habit forming

substances. And it's just, it's never something that has had that kind of hold on me. But it does seem like you are able to, like I found that, but if you, and this is a generation, but if you're the child of alcoholics, that either you're going to be that, or you're going to be a very vigilant control freaky kind of person. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess I am a vigilant control freaky kind of person. Is your mom? Maybe that's how it translates. I don't know that she is. I think, you know, my mom, what I see in her childhood, it's really interesting. She still has like all of these

old journals and notebooks from when she was seven, nine years old oh wow and in them are these incredibly intricate sketches of like christ on the cross and crown of thorns catholic stuff just more catholic than you could possibly believe you know her in in perfect calligraphy testimonials of going to lords and like bathing in holy water. All of these just signs of being incredibly devout in a way that was never a part of my life. And on top of that, I think she was like raised for a long time by nuns. She like went off to boarding school in England. Oh, yeah. You know, has all these stories of getting wrapped across the knuckles with rulers.

Yeah, yeah. Clearly then she was also, you know, a hippie in the 60s and was not as devout. But I do see in her this foundation of the kind of hair shirt, the only thing that matters is the greater good Catholic philosophy. Yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of great and a lot of very not great Catholic philosophies that we've seen in the news cycle in the last few years.

But I think she took something not uncomplicated, not unproblematic, but fundamentally pretty good from it. I mean, a real spirit of public service in a way that I don't know that I always rise to. I mean, she is very selfless.

But it inspired you, I mean, obviously. Right. That's, again, an astute way to frame it. I think I don't quite rise to it, but I'm not going to adopt 10 special needs kids. But I do aspire to it and am inspired by it. Well, yeah. I mean, service is a fairly broad, I mean, yeah, you don't have to adopt

10 special needs kids, but the idea of service and the importance of selfless service is either you got it or you don't. Right, I do, I believe that it is appropriate to have a little voice in your head at all times saying like, hey, are you making the decision that is not just right for you, but also has some benefit for the bigger world? And I don't always

make the right choice in that respect, but I do have the little voice there. So like you're growing up and the number of children that you're related to and half related to is a lot. Yeah. So when you're born, you've already got a couple of half brothers that are half brother and half sister that are what? They're like 18 already. I have. Do you know all of them? Yeah. So that's a really good question. But, you know, it's a fair question because the answer is only to a varying extent. Right. When you have an age span of, my oldest siblings are around 50 now, and my youngest sister is in her early 20s. But like, so, okay,

so your mom was married to Sinatra for a while, but Andre Previn was like- Classic music conductor. Right, but that was, they had a few kids. Yeah, they had a few kids they adopted together as well. So I had both half siblings and a bunch of adopted siblings by the time I was born. And then there were further adoptions after me. It's insane.

And then deaths as well. Yeah. Yeah. Real heartbreak, tragedy. I mean, my childhood, it's interesting. Maybe it's obviously a different kind of life story in your case, but maybe you also deal with just having a public profile and feeling a fair amount of pressure to really frame your narrative in terms of the privilege that comes with that. You know, I try to be sensitive to the fact that I've had a lot of open doors. There's lots of wonderful opportunities that

were built into my life and even my childhood. But it is also true that my childhood was about a lot of pain and trauma and literal death and destruction and, you know, crimes, sexual assaults. And there was stuff swirling around me that was some real shit. Yeah, that's what like that's why I thought haunted because even reading it, you know, because like you like Woody Allen was your dad. Yeah. In ethical terms and in legal terms. And, you know, that becomes a very complicated conversation precisely because he, in his defenses of himself for over the molestation allegations,

very often turns to kind of these tropes about, you know, what I did within that family, including sleeping with and marrying my older sister, matters less because there were adopted siblings involved, you know? Right. That he invokes, I was- A rationalization. Right. There's a rationalization based on the lack of biological ties, which is just so inappropriate and incorrect and not the way the law works, not the way basic ethics work in my mind.

But I guess my question is, do you remember a time where he was your father before the haunting begins? Yeah, yeah. I never had a bad relationship with him early on. We're talking about the first six seven years of my life yeah it then became fraught because i was like a pawn in a court case so right so all these so what happens is the the timeline is you're five or six yeah and what's revealed is your sister's uh molestation and and your father's affair with sunni right at the same time well it's that actually becomes pivotal too it's really interesting a lot of my work now as an adult

yeah has touched on these themes of how do powerful either wealthy or famous or influential people um manipulate the news cycle and people's understanding of it well this is interesting because it's almost like um it's almost like a superhero origin story, is that you're six years old, your sister reveals this to the public and to you at that point in time. As you get older and process it, you realize that for you and for from all indications, it's true, right? And then sort of of like how what that represents is because your father was insulated by this, you know, all these people that spent their lives protecting him. Yeah. And it was impenetrable other than, you know, journalism and what your sister said and what you believe. He still hasn't paid any price for it. Yep. So that that injury of betrayal and and just outright trauma. Right. You know, sets you on this course. And look, it's it's an irresistible narrative ex post facto. I thought about it. Well, some of which are about other forms of corruption and cover-ups, but all of which have a streak of wanting to set injustices, right?

My experience inside those stories is not to be conscious of that. You very much have blinders on. You're working incredibly hard. It's about a specific fact pattern that's not related to any of that. And also there's a real quality within me that cuts in the other direction, meaning I am just cynically searching for the biggest, truest, best story. You know, hopefully not cynically, also the one that does the greatest good, but also just on a career level as a journalist, like I want the big scoop, right? So that often is the overriding feeling I have, rather than like, I'm avenging childhood injustices. But yeah, I think it's fair to say

that if nothing else, those events increased my understanding of the way in which the deck is stacked against women, against victims of abuse, in favor of the haves and against the have-nots. I mean, you see in the Woody Allen allegations, not just the systemic injustice of sexual abuse, but also the cover-up culture, as you were alluding to. Which is what your new book's about. Yeah, yeah, that that basically that happened at a time where, you know, if you had a powerful enough team of publicists and lawyers, if you could hire an army of private investigators, which is now his attorneys have

admitted on the record that they did that they were, you know, going through the trash cans of the cops involved and trying to get the judge fired off the case. And it's something of a playbook that you see in these cases over and over again. And to your point about timeline, even that became something that was manipulated where there was a PR offensive, you know, basically, a physician had reported that my sister was saying he had touched her. And then he turned around and called a press conference and said, well, I'm in love with and sleeping with the other daughter who's legal. And that was a distraction. It was it was a manipulation of the timeline to suggest that. And then after that, you know, there was a custody battle. But basically, the narrative became if you look at a lot of his interviews, there is

either him or his surrogates. There's a suggestion that there was a custody case and it was bitter. And then, you know, my mother raised an allegation of sexual abuse about my sister, the younger sister that he was. That she somehow programmed your sister to believe. Well, right. And that's a whole other conversation. This idea of, you know, programming or implanted memories, which is there's in the actual literature, people are very dubious of it. And certainly, look, I was around in that setting. And I can tell you,

my mom's role in this was she ultimately did the right thing standing by my sister. And that's moving and important because there are a lot of kids in that situation who don't have that. But I can tell you, it's not like she was a cheerleader for it. And every time this comes up, the blame the mother

response is one of the easiest cudgels to use. Where were you? That kind of thing? How's the blame the mother? Well, more, you know, this is brainwashing by a disgruntled, a woman scorned. It's the woman scorned argument. You see it over and over again. In a divorce. Scorned. It's the woman scorned argument. You see it over and over again. Oh, in a divorce. In a divorce. Right, right. Exactly. And which doesn't make any sense, right? Because the allegation through this doctor, not something my mother reported, was the precipitating incident. But there has been this effort to manipulate the understanding of the timeline to suggest there was already an ongoing custody fight, and therefore these allegations were raised. But the opposite is actually true. Right. How is your sister, okay? Thank you for asking that.

She's great. So the plot of Catch and Kill, the book, deals with this intersection of motivations. It had to because Harvey Weinstein tried to use this against me. It shows up in all his legal threat letters. He had an allegation of sexual abuse in his family, so he can't be impartial on this issue, which is just, you know, you ask any journalist about this,

and it's just ridiculous. Ronan Farrow has a sister who, you know, accused a guy in Hollywood of sexual abuse. Therefore, Ronan Farrow is biased. He can't report on sexual abuse issues, which is not how conflicts of interest work. That's crazy. It's truly bananas.

And then you unfold, you revealed all the ex, you know, the Mossad guys he had working for him. Yeah, every story I report on, I get all kinds of ridiculous below the belt stuff thrown at me. It's very personal

doing these investigative stories because the first response is destroy the reporter. When you're really like in a story that is going to make an existential difference for someone's life and and in that case um you know i can honestly say and it's too silly to even really respond to legitimately but harvey weinstein was someone i only had an incentive to like and suck up to yeah i had had passing cocktail party interactions with him that were perfectly pleasant and heard kind of what everyone else had heard about him,

which was he was larger than life and had a temper and maybe some sort of casting couch stuff that there was a tradition of starlets having to put out for parts. But I had not heard any sexual abuse allegations until I started reporting on it. Well, when you, okay, so I'm going to like go sideways a little bit here, just in terms of how you assess this stuff, because, you know, it just, it seems like even in talking

about Republican senators now that when people are like, you know, what kind of men are these? And these are, these are people that want to be near power, that want to, you know, feel power. They may not have the power on their own and they're terrified of whoever the fuck they're working for. Because really the question becomes, once you identify the monster, who are these people that surround and insulate the monster? Are they just doing it for money? I mean, what do you find when you think about that? when you think about that?

You know, one of the reasons, depressingly, that the book has this, like, save the cat screenplay structure is there's all these supposed good guys, right? The executives at a news organization who are supposed to defend the story. And when you have a tape of a famous guy admitting to a serious crime, because I uncover this police tape where Harvey is admitted to stuff.

But, you know, they killed that story, the NBC executives. And then you see people like Lisa Bloom, you know, this woman's rights crusader attorney who had actually been a guest on my MSNBC show talking about the perils of protecting powerful men in Hollywood and decrying people like Bill Cosby. And even writing op-eds, you know, dissecting my sister's claim and saying she is absolutely credible. There's there's the evidence here. Yeah. And then you see her letter on her name on the bottom of a legal threat letter directed

at me as a as a lawyer representing Harvey Weinstein, making this crazy argument that I was brainwashed. My sister was brainwashed, none of which was really germane to the reporting, but it was an attempt to kind of shake me up. It's a good illustration of this question you just posed. Power seduces and fame seduces. And we have all these conversations where my sister has said, if you can trust anyone, it's Lisa Bloom. I need legal advice. I mean, I'm an attorney myself, but not a practicing one in this area. So I needed legal advice from people who deal with these kinds of non-disclosure agreements because many of my sources had these NDAs and they were Right. true double agent really pumping me for information and not being straight with me about her motivations and eventually she said i i have a conversation with her where i say lisa you promised me you

wouldn't tell his people if we had these conversations and she said well go on and it's a really awkward position to be in i am his people he optioned my book and you know, I don't know how you moral integrity of anybody. It's it's a bit of a scary series of rabbit holes to somehow have managed to rationalize that they're not infringing on that. Yeah. Because, you know, they have to think about themselves first. Right. It has to be that, you know, they don't think they're evil. It's like, hey, this is my job.

This is the way it works, man. Right. Yes. What happened at NBC is a great illustration of what you're talking about. The president of NBC during these events is a guy named Noah Oppenheim. So he's a major character. And I quote these conversations with him where he says almost word for word what you just said, you know, OK, we have this tape, we have this, we have that. But we got to decide, is this worth it? Is this really worth it? And, you know, you end up with a situation where

people don't realize it is their job to stick their neck out. It is their job to identify this is as a matter of principle. And, you know, that for that guy, Noah Oppenheim, there's a soliloquy he gives at the end where he calls me after this is starting to become a scandal for him and says, you know, please, if you ever have the chance to tell people I wasn't the villain, it was everyone. It was my boss, Andy Lack, who's, you know, it was steve berg this guy was that guy and the the problem is when you have a chain of command of people at any kind of institution news or otherwise where they all have that attitude it wasn't my job someone else right all the half of what they're

thinking half of their job is figuring out how to squirm out of something when the shit hits the fan yes who are they going to blame when it goes down? And I've had so many, since the book came out, I've had so many conversations with other top executives who were at NBC Universal at the time, you know, the parent company. Part of the process is it follows the cliche pattern of like the shutdown of the story and the insider, you know, the CBS big tobacco story,

if you ever saw that movie, where it gets kicked up to the parent company. The lawyers are all ready to go for comment to Harvey Weinstein. And then the president of NBC News says, no, no, no, we got to go to the parent company. So it goes to the parent company. And the head of the parent company, NBC Universal, is at the time, Steve Burke, who has since been shuffled out in the last few months. But so many senior executives who worked with and reported to Steve Burke have, since this book came out, told me, like, this is absolutely true. He was just openly at that point saying,

I'm getting all these calls from Harvey Weinstein. We can't run this thing. This is a shit show. And then, you know, on occasions where they'd say, like, well, is it true? He'd say, he'd, like, look at them like they were crazy. Like, what do you mean, is it true? We can't run this thing.

I'll never hear the end of it. Harvey will be calling me like this for a year. Oh, poor guy. I've heard this from so many different people who worked with him independently. And it gives you a lot of insight because what you say is exactly true. Nobody thinks it's their responsibility. And they don't even have enough of a sense of being forward looking to think someday that'll look bad. They're just openly saying, like, this is not worth the trouble.

Well, I think that, like, you know, this idea that the foresight or that someday it'll look bad to who and to what and where will these people be then? It's like we live in a culture now that moves so quickly. And it sort of dawns on me as you're talking that the litigiousness of like even the current administration sort of guarantees a sort of lawlessness for a certain class of people. I mean, that seems to be what all these lawyers do is that, you know, that it's like this whole idea that, you know, a rule of law shit is all very negotiable if you have enough money. Yeah. Yeah. And that the rule of law only applies to people that can't afford to defend themselves. And if you have the money to continue to litigate, you're probably going to get off someone.

I mean, this is a fundamental imperative for me in reporting these stories. Over and over again, you see how if you've got enough money and enough connections and you can pick up the phone and make those annoying calls, you can evade accountability in the press. You can get the story killed. You can get the criminal charges dropped. I mean, this situation in 2015 that I ultimately uncover where the cops had a tape of Weinstein admitting to this to an assault. And then Cyrus Vance Jr., still the D.A. in Manhattan, dropped the charges under a huge amount of pressure from Weinstein and an army of P.I.s. That's like that's the story of American class warfare, right? All these kids going to jail for minor drug offenses while Harvey Weinstein, when there's a recording of him admitting, gets off again and again for

years. Yeah. And you have lawyers that are proud of this, that it isn't about professional ethics or morality. It's about winning. Yeah. But let's go back to like the evolution of your investigative journalistic career. So you grew up in this household where, you know, by the time you're seven, your parents are split up. You're in the middle of this custody fight. There's a lot of other kids in the house. You know, you're developing, I imagine, the sort of mutation of your relationship with your father and whatever you can handle at seven must be fairly confusing and bizarre? Or were you just sort of isolated in your mother's house?

And how did that work? How did it unfold? You knew what happened to your sister. You heard what happened to your sister. You're too young to necessarily understand it. So how do you grow up? Well, my mom took the approach of basically just trying to shield us

as much as she could so she didn't talk about it i think she knew that anything she said would be picked apart and who's in the house at this time you and dylan and what two or three uh others it was usually like six of us at any given time at home um and, you know, my mom did, I think, a smart thing of moving us out to the Connecticut countryside. Yeah. So we were, like, on a farm. My school life was great. I started skipping grades really early.

I went to college at 11. I know. What is that about? How does one figure that out? How do you get, you know, an undergraduate degree in philosophy at 15? Yeah. I mean, what kind of...

I didn't mean to sound resentful. No, I mean, it bonkers. I was a big nerd. I was bored with my grade level work. And I think there was also a strain of ambition behind it. I think a collision of things. I think the turmoil of my childhood uh being very conscious of the fact that my mom had not only the strain of that situation to deal with trying to hold a family together right under assault from a really monstrous set of tactics yeah uh but also had these adopted special needs kids who were you know i have a paraplegic brother, several blind siblings, lots of learning disabilities in my family. So everyone required a huge emotional investment from her. And also- Isn't that interesting though, you say that she doesn't have addiction,

but there is something completely engaging about the need to feel needed and to engage, you know, with that much selflessness is almost a compulsion. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't think that there's that analysis is without merit. I mean, I, I think, you know, she would, she would say that she was truly trying to do whatever she could with the resources she had to do what was right for the world, for the world in her own little way. But like, you know, what of herself did she sacrifice and how much of that was altruism

and how much of that was avoidance? Yes. I mean, I think probably, like she's definitely someone who's rooted in an era where like psychotherapy, like the old fashioned term was like quackery,

you know, like a 70s kind of view of- Oh, really? She comes from that? A little bit. And I think like- Because you would think with the hippie thing, she would have been all in on, you know, any sort of-

Well, but that's a little bit pre, like the great renaissance of analysis, right? Oh, so you're saying the mid 70s. Yeah. I mean, I think- Something your father constantly harped on. Well, right. And I think also the fact that she, you know,

spent a long time with like a famously therapized criminal basically, you know, probably didn't inspire much confidence in the institution. But I think that you're like, I'm certainly a believer in seeking whatever kind of mental health care is appropriate for you. And I think there's probably a deep reservoir of what all of the stuff my mom has been through through the years uh fascinating character fascinating person um and a profoundly good person and a good actress too a wonderful actress people are so excited whenever she does any work i'm trying to get her to work more yeah um you know she was saying no to things for so

many years because she truly i think the experience of being just smeared over and over again in the press by a guy who is desperate to deflect from these allegations really did isolate her from the industry for a long time. She felt like she just had to retreat. It's also interesting that the guy who married his daughter is somehow, you know, worthy of kind of like, sort of like, let's listen to what he has to say. Oh, yeah. He was the only one with a microphone, and there's this strange... And I loved him. You know, like, I'm saying it's hard for me.

That was the other part of, you know, your upbringing and my experience. Like, you know, Woody Allen was my hero. Yeah, I get it. And, you know, and it took a long time to integrate the reality of what this was about for I'm for me as a guy who respected the guy yeah yeah no I completely get it and look I come face to face with this a lot um there his fans there's a there's a little niche of like Woody

Allen super fans who literally just they live on the internet and they just haze my sister all day they're just set you know the the worst misogynistic slurs you can imagine what does she not i hope she doesn't engage with i try to tell her to not look at that stuff you can't look at that i know you can't you're smart you're smart not to but it it is an interesting thing and i see it in various fan bases i see it in the michael jackson fan base There's almost a flat earther subset. I mean, when you really have someone who you idolized and tied to your own identity in a very specific way, I understand it can become really painful

to acknowledge the possibility that that person might be complicated and might have done bad things. And also that borders on sort of a belief system trip. You know, like, you know, that you don't know that person really and your belief in them or your relationship with them is completely unreal.

It's totally abstract. It's abstract, but like the human heart and mind needs to feel part of these people. They deify them. It is exactly the same instinct that leads us to religion. Sure. heart and mind needs to feel part of these people. They, they, they, they deify that. It is exactly the same instinct that leads us to religion. Sure. And, and I get it.

I'm sympathetic to it, but look, I'm actually, these are human people. They're human people. And, and I, I think that I'm actually a great example of those tensions because look,

I, I more than any super fan would love to not buy my sister's allegations and have a much simpler relationship with this part of my history. Yeah. And, you know, tried to shrug it off for years. You did? Yeah, and that...

How so? Didn't want to, never talked about it publicly. But, I mean, with her. Tried to kind of reduce it to, I could joke here and there about he married my other sister, but like not really touch the more serious. So was it because you had not connected with your empathy for your sister or it was because it was easier to look the other way. And therefore, I get the fans looking the other way. Well, when did you sort of like, you know, get fully on board with with her? My understanding of the importance of this kind of reporting on sexual abuse is informed by I reassess my relationship with her allocation.

I was kind of cornered into talking about it. The Hollywood Reporter had run like the de rigueur. They'd been doing it for years. It's a sycophantic profile of Woody Allen. You know, he's this adorable nebbish. He hates to give interviews, et cetera, et cetera. With like a truly ridiculous, it's this guy who I won't turn under the bus by naming him. He's a nice guy in other respects.

But he had also in the same time frame, like right just before the Harvey Weinstein allegations come out, at a time when everybody knows the Harvey Weinstein jig is about to be up, he writes this article called Harvey Weinstein, the comeback kid. Aren't there more reasons we should love him? So in the same time frame, he all this guy also writes a Hollywood reporter story about Woody Allen, basically lionizing him and kind of framing my sister's allegation when it gets a brief mention as like, how great that he's overcome this adversity, when it gets a brief mention as like,

how great that he's overcome this adversity, which was a real standard way of writing about people credibly accused of these kinds of crimes for years and years. And it was an interesting sign of how the cultural moment was changing that people didn't let it fly. There was suddenly this whole like the Jezebel set, you know, the feminist-

Jezebel was important. Yeah, the feminist bloggers. There was an intellectual conversation among feminist bloggers about, you know, how victims bloggers. There was an intellectual conversation among feminist bloggers about, you know, how victims are treated. That's right. So there was a lot of anger directed at the Hollywood Reporter, which at the time had a woman editor, Janice Min, who I think very highly of. So she actually called me and said, look, we want to address this kind of critique head on. I think it's valid valid would you write something about it as both a reporter and someone who's connected to this case and up to this point you had just

kind of how compartmentalize your sister's struggle or compartmentalized it i was she calling you saying like why don't you help me it all several things happened at once that was happening with the hollywood reporter kind of cornering me into talking about it in a more fulsome way. He had started receiving Lifetime Achievement Awards. Right. I think the Golden Globes was one of them. A couple of places gave him these awards where this was not mentioned. All these stars were giving him standing ovations.

And my sister was upset by this. And so I had started talking to her about it anyway and uh had started even like tweeting light references to it like hey maybe but i guess my question is like before this yeah you know you guys didn't talk about it no i mean it's not and you're only two years apart right yeah but it's a horrible so she wasn't talking about it to anybody right and she was dealing with the i mean she maintained her claim consistently.

From when she was seven. Yeah, year after year after year. And whenever it came up, she would talk about it. But it's not like the kind of thing you hang out at home and gab about. No, I get it. But so I guess my question is, throughout those years, you were just dealing with her eating disorder and her psychological problems. She was self-cutting. But knowing that it was because of

this event knowing but not thinking on it as deeply or compassionately as i should have you know she has some situation with something i'm sure something happened she's a profoundly honest person she's been consistent but like let's not peel back the layers of that onion because doing so meant that i couldn't just shrug it off as a joke i know my my father married my other sister it it meant actually a much more serious thing which is oh let's look at the evidence so that didn't happen until this happened yeah until 90 or how what year was that 2014 around that really so so you know the hollywood reporter op-ed was i think 2016 and in the two years leading up to that that was all this bubbling up of the award ceremonies, her frustration. Bear in mind, at the same time, there's all this broader cultural stuff happening.

The Cosby stuff keeps bubbling up. That Hannibal Buress joke happens. So kind of a confluence of things happen. And I actually, I think there's a fair case to be made that my sister coming forward with her claim again, which she did. With the letter. Right. In 2014. And it's still a fascinating illustration of an early point in this transformation because it wouldn't have happened the way it did if it were to occur again today. Yeah. The New York Times didn't run her story.

Right. Times didn't run her story through the traditional channels. The LA Times had fact-checked it and vetted it and was going to run it, and then the leadership people at the LA Times descended on the editor of the LA Times, who then actually called me, just journalist to journalist, and was like, look, I'm under all this pressure. We can't run this thing. I believe it. It's true. It held up in the face of this vetting. But like, I'm I am getting calls that I just I can't.

So Nick Kristof ended up kind of pasting it in like the middle of a blog post. Nick Kristof, this great Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has, I think, a similar sense of his reporting should be to the end of social justice, like basically broke through the institutional resistance of the Times and just put it up on his blog. And it was this huge shit storm and the Times turned around and gave Woody Allen like just endless space in the print edition

to just slag off her, my mom, all this not fact check, just an opinion piece with a giant picture of him holding her as a baby, like very traumatizing in many ways, not a way a journalistic outlet would behave these days, just to let someone unchallenged. But, you know, he had a long relationship with the New York Times. He's New York.

He's New York. And they did a really shameful thing there. And a lot of outlets just function that way. They would give, you know, barely and grudgingly space to an accuser without the platform and then all the space to the accused. Right. All right. So going back. So you were up in Connecticut. You're in the country. You're being a genius.

It's clear to your mother that you're accelerated. You know, you get into college when you're 11. Yeah. So I had been going to like nerd camp basically. Right. Johns Hopkins runs a program where you can be a kid and take college courses. What were you accelerating in? So early on, I tested in a way where I was supposed to be good at math, which I no longer am at all. I can like barely calculate the tip now. And I kind of didn't know what I wanted to

do. I loved math. I loved reading. I started taking all these science courses through that accelerated learning program, the Center for Talented Youth, it was annoyingly called. But you had to take the SAT to get into that. And so I took that a couple of times early on and got the kind of score where people were like, all right, we'll just go to college. And I had already started skipping grades anyway. So I was kind of already a little disconnected from my social set that I would have been in had I been lockstep with people. And I remember having all these conversations with my friends, like gathering a summit with

my closest friends when I started skipping. I had already skipped kindergarten and then I skipped, I think like fifth and sixth grade. I skipped a couple of grades. Just by testing out? Testing out and complaining a lot about being bored and wanting to read more. I was already taking all of the high school credits I needed at the local high school, like a halftime kind of skipping out on my grade school stuff. So it was already, I was already out of sync a little bit, but I did sit down with all my friends and said, Hey, I'm going to skip yet again. I'm going to do this. And they were smart kids. So it was a funny meeting where I remember my friend Rebecca Diamond, who's wonderful now a doctor, saying like, well,

I'm a little jealous of that. I want to be skipping. And also, like, what's that going to do your social life, which was a very fair question. Thank you, Rebecca. But I did it. And I think that's, you know, to go back to the observation I made before, I think that's a combination of sincere intellectual drive and being a little bored and wanting to engage in that higher level coursework. And also just relentless, like bottomless ambition, like a yawning chasm that I still have yet to fill up for sure. And, you know, I think if you look at the combination of the turmoil of the pressures my mom felt with my other siblings who demanded so much of her, I think there was just an impetus to be easier and more successful. And, you know, she very infrequently got to have, uh, you know, children with the traditional framework of success. Like for a lot of my siblings, just holding down a job is of any kind as a success.

Uh, you know, taking care of themselves is a success. And, you know, those are people I love and care about. I'm so proud of them for that. But Dylan was not that person. Dylan was not that person. I mean, Dylan had the other challenges of dealing with the trauma of this. But no one really put that together. I don't know that I can say no one put it together.

It was something that I think I didn't consider deeply enough. Well, you were focused on yourself. I was focused on myself. And I think there was a sense in which this like, go, go, go, you know, be hyper, hyper successful in a really distinguishing way that is going to stand out from everyone else was partly born of I need to be, you know, the successful one. I need to be the easy one.

But also the successful one. You need to, you know, make your mother proud. Yeah. On some level. Well, and I think also that, you know, there's a uh theory in like gay lit that sort of like the the what is it called like the best boy in the world theorem that uh you know that these gay sons uh you know become hyper successful because they they have to

compensate for they're not going to be alpha in some traditional way but they're going to be alpha in these other ways you buy into that i don know. When did you know you were gay? Well, you know, I try to avoid like the easy terms because it gets into a real hotbed of still evolving conversation here. But like, I had relationships with the guys early on and, you know, knew that I was, I was very sexually aware early on.

Yeah. And was lucky to grow up in a liberal enough setting where I felt like I could kind of bring home whoever so I had relationships with the guys I had relationships

with the girls right yeah but I do think like that doesn't mean fluid maybe sure

I mean I would I don't know what the words are I would put it this way this is where I'm old well this is the problem like I I don't know the words I don't want to get cancelled

but I would say that I would like for my children and grandchildren for them to be able to fuck everybody. Right. Right? Yeah. And, you know, even though I think I was very fortunate to grow up in a setting where I could be fairly free in my sexuality, that doesn't make it easy. fairly free in my sexuality uh that doesn't make it easy i think the story for anyone who's any kind of queer yeah um is a little bit of a story of it has ripples in the rest of your life so i think all of those things probably feed into this sort of relentless drive and unwillingness to stand still right yeah okay so as an undergrad it said you study philosophy what what can you

understand at 11 i mean emotionally what are you study philosophy. What can you understand at 11? I mean, emotionally, what are you really taking in? How are you functioning? Well, yeah. I mean, I apologize to all of my classmates at that point. Actually, I just had dinner with a friend that I was in biology class. I started as a bio major and did my first concentrate. You had to kind of matriculate into a major there and do a piece of thesis research to pick a major. And I actually, I did a bunch. I did like,

I did biology and then I did, I did philosophy. I did political science. I couldn't sit still. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Um, but I just had dinner with a friend that I was in those first biology, uh,

courses with who remains a close friend, my buddy, Carrie. And, um, I was saying to her like, God, I must've been so annoying at that point

i was just so annoying a 12 year old yeah 11 12 13 year old and um i don't know i would say i'm too close to myself to judge what i was like but i will say that um it was between bard and uh another like very large uh prestigious university at that point. And my mom was really insistent that I go to a small school. And I think that really paid off, just as moving us all to a small town kind of insulated me from... I imagine that the other students were a little more considerate.

They were wonderful. Honestly, my experience, you can be the judge of how messed up I am by all this, but I had a great time. I loved it. I loved the schoolwork. I loved the intellectual banter. I loved the people. They were very caring and sweet. So to me, that was like a wonderful and healing and fulfilling experience. And you found that you were able to sort of emotionally

kind of grow? I keep bringing up philosophy. What did you study? What the hell did I know about existentialism at 11? Well, I mean, I know there's a process to anything. You can learn anything if it's taught well. Well, I actually did a lot of work on ethics. I did a lot of Kant, and I did a dissertation that was, or a thesis that was about the intersection of foreign policy and ethics. This is undergrad? Colonialism. Yeah.

Okay. So that was sort of the drive. So that was sort of like the service-minded trajectory that your mother kind of lived for. Yeah. I'd say that's right. I'd say I took up that baton a little bit. And then you went to Yale Law School with the desire to be what kind of lawyer? So I think I was one of those Yale Law people that people in the legal profession joke about, that knew I really didn't want to be a practicing black letter lawyer pretty early on. The joke about Yale Law is always, it's an extraordinary place. I feel so fortunate to have gone there. But wait, wait, I'm sorry to interrupt. But before you went to, I'm just trying to get

the timeline right. So you got involved in between undergrad and graduate school. You did other work, right? Yeah. So I got into Yale Law. I deferred for two years. Right. And in those two years, I started working for Richard Holbrook, who was the former U.N. ambassador and kind of this storied diplomat. Doing what? I was, you know, I actually started interning him for him earlier before that period. Yeah. Last year of college. Yeah. At which point I think 14. Yeah, actually. And and he was like a roving foreign policy advisor for the Kerry campaign at that point. So it was, you know, everything from fetching coffee to drafting speeches to like organizing, you know, outreach events for the campaign and getting together foreign policy calls with him and Madeleine Albright and stuff.

You were doing that kind of stuff. Yeah. At 14. And it was intern work, but yeah. But it was mostly foreign policy. I was a college senior. So it was, I was a pretty standard internship for a college senior, but obviously not standard for a 14-year-old. Yeah, right. And then, you know, so I worked for him during that period.

I did actually other volunteer work for the UN. I was a UNICEF spokesperson and went to a couple of African countries. What was that like? Fascinating. african countries and what was that like fascinating and also something i have to credit my mom for because she had really she by that time she was spending a ton of time in refugee camps still yeah she really became passionate about darfur i ultimately went to darfur and like began writing op-eds about darfur including op-eds about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in Darfur and interviewing these women who had been raped in Darfur. Horrible, horrible stories.

And if you look at some of my early Wall Street Journal op-eds that I was writing during that period, they're kind of of a piece with the Weinstein story and some of these later stories I did. Being genuinely intrigued by the systems that support injustice. You know, the idea that there can be an entire regime using rape as a weapon of suppression. Shamelessly. Yeah. Just like as part of a military strategy, basically.

Right. As a part of how they operate. And it has been for years. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So then from there, you end up working in. How did you get the job at the Obama, in the Obama administration?

I ran into Hillary Clinton at an inaugural event, and she had gone to Yale Law as well, and probably with a similar. So you went to Yale Law. I went to Yale Law. And you did it, so this is after. This is after, that's right. So you did two years off, you did the work with Holbrooke,

and you went to Darfur, and you wrote some op-ed pieces, but then you went back and you went two years off. You did the work with Holbrook, and you went to Darfur, and you wrote some op-ed pieces. But then you went back, and you went to law school. I went to law school. For four years, two years? Three years. Three years? Yeah. And then you graduate.

And what I was going to say about Yale Law before is that the joke about Yale Law and the legal profession is they turn out all these incredible law professors and Supreme Court justices, but shit lawyers. Which is totally not true, because some majority of the every law class goes into big law. But what was your intention? It clearly wasn't to be a corporate lawyer. Right. But I do think that that stereotype, however, unfair, informed my love of the place, you know, I wanted to go to a place where I could take a ton of international law and like property is an optional course.

Tax is an optional course at Yale Law. No, understanding the law in this country is just worthwhile, I think, just as a thinker about these problems of injustice. And, you know, I did things like I worked for the immigration clinic at Yale Law, which does wonderful work. Like if anyone ever wants to support that. So like pro bono work? Yeah, they do basically, you know, for clients who can't afford an attorney, there are student lawyers who are actually like allowed into the courtroom. And one of my cases that I helped with was a case under the Violence Against Women Act, where actually a man who was in an abusive relationship was having his immigration status threatened by his abusive spouse and was like, you know, appealing, trying to get out of her attempt to get him extradited. So interesting

cases and ones I felt kind of fulfilled by. And I totally could have seen practicing that kind of law uh and have a lot of admiration for my friends who went down that road and are making very little money doing important legal work so okay so you go through all this you meet hillary at the inauguration she's x she's the yell graduate and and she offers you a gig yeah i said to her you know i've been like writing these op-eds and i'm graduating i'd met her a couple of times over the years and this is when she's secretary of state before i think she had been she had been just announced as secretary of state i mean this is literally inauguration yeah got it um and you know obviously this i'm conscious of the fact that like this is not a normal experience like running into hillary clinton at vernon jordan's inaugural ball um and she knew that i

had worked for richard holbrook yeah who she had a long relationship so she said uh well talk to holbrook like we're building this afghanistan team he's about to become the afghanistan pakistan envoy which i think had been maybe rumored but not announced at that point. So then I ended up starting on her advice, a conversation with Richard Holbrook. I had done this work in the NGO world and he wanted to have a position on his team. He was going to be the envoy for that region. And he wanted a position on the team that was about liaising with local human rights groups. So I headed off to Afghanistan, basically. How long were you there?

I was, I say headed off. I mean, I was there intermittently for two years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in D.C. a lot of the time. So I cannot claim to have really been in the trenches. I was like, you know, in bunkers deep inside embassies on and off for two years. And so how do you change course? When do you realize that that world and that life is not what you're going to pursue? Well, I came out of that experience. I was at the State Department for probably four years, three years, four years. And came out of that experience,

I was on the AFPAC team and then Richard Holbrook died in that last job system and devoting their lives to making our embassies function and yeah being the first line of defense when screening people who are going to come into the country and um being the first line of uh offense when we got to get people out of a country you know um they're the people you call when you're there's a hostage situation abroad uh and and they're the people who make our deals to keep our country safe. So that ended up being the genesis of that book, War on Peace, that we do a disservice

across multiple administrations to these public servants by not giving them the resources or authority that they deserve and the spot in the decision-making rooms that they deserve. And also in our culture, I think we do them a disservice by not telling stories about them. We have a million spy thrillers and a million dramas about the military.

I don't know that most people, including myself, really know the day-to-day work of a diplomat or even an ambassador. Well, Mark, I've got a book for you. It's called War on Peace. It's your book. And it's about the day-to-day work of diplomats and ambassadors. But that's all of that said. Let me write that down.

Yeah, write that down, folks. All of that said, I don't think I had the stones to live that life of 20 years of lockstep pay and progression. Because you had to answer to your ambition. Because I had to answer to my ambition. Honestly, I think that's the truth. I think I am not a good enough person to be the guy at the embassy for 20 years. Apparently, if you're one of them now living in this administration, it doesn't pay off. Yeah.

I mean, well, God, am I grateful for the people who are sticking it living in this administration it doesn't pay off yeah i mean well god am i grateful for the people who are sticking it out through this administration but a lot of them have left and i think it's really hard and a lot of them feel conflicted about it yeah so okay so so then how do you shift gears you look for a job in television no so i left the state department and then went to do a road scholarshiphip at Oxford. Oh, my God. Because it's just out of control, the ambition thing, I guess. But also... It's weird, though, but you still took it to the academia. Well, so a couple of things.

One is, you know, I loved the experience of, like, the Doogie Howser phase that we talked about. But it did mean, like, I wasn't doing a lot of keg stands at the point at which people usually do that you were 12 because i was 12 yeah um and i wish i could claim to have been a super cool 12 year old but i had like a bowl haircut right well you were you were like one of those like you were you must have been just sort of a a kind of obviously an anomaly but to these older kids they were probably sort of like wow look, look at this little wizard. They probably were like, as opposed to being snotty to you, you were a freak.

Yes, I certainly continue to be a freak and a nerd. They were very tolerant of me. All right, so now you're old enough to appreciate a Rhodes Scholarship? Is that what you're trying to tell me? Well, no, more than that, I think I got out of government and wasn't sure what I wanted to do and felt a little disillusioned, honestly. I think even not being on the front lines. I mean, I was like-

Disillusioned with yourself? No, disillusioned with the world. I think anyone who spends a couple of years working on issues and like you know spending various stretches of time like living in a tent at the isaf base with all the military guys like you really were in a hooch at the embassy there's those little like the shipping containers that you live in when you're there that and seeing how how cordoned off you are from the outside world and how just misbegotten the whole endeavor is and how many people are dying around you. You do feel the weight,

even when you're in those civilian roles of just war gone wrong. And I think I wanted to run away from it a little bit for a while. And then on top of that, I had this accumulated weight of lack of keg stands and youth that I wanted to recapture, I guess. Or have. Or have in the first place. Right. Totally. And so, you know, I was in this very unusual position where I'd been in the workforce for 10 odd years, but I actually was still under the age threshold for the roads. You

can only apply up to 25. So I was I I could still do these scholarships. And I figured, like, why not go back to school and be the same age as people for the first time? Wow. Yeah. And I can, like, write and maybe I'll write a PhD that turns into a book. Right. Was my, at the time, I thought, brilliant plan. Of course, that did not happen at all. I ended up in crazy deadline panics years and years later. Oh, really?

Where the book had to come out first and then the dissertation came out much later. Oh really? You wrote your dissertation after you wrote the first book? Uh-huh. I got it completely backwards. What was the dissertation? I screwed up the process so much. The dissertation was about the relationship between America's use of proxy armies, so foreign militaries and militias, and the concept of political deception. And the basic idea that I argued was, the more we lie about these relationships with proxy forces on the ground around the world, internally within the government decision making process, but also to the public as an act of political theater,

the more we lie, the more costly the relationships ultimately become, both fiscally and also in terms of the number of people that get killed and how much we fuck up these situations abroad. So it was very much rooted in the Afghanistan experience. Right. The archetypal example being, I embedded with General Dostum,

who was the head of the horseback, sword-wielding Uzbek warriors that we paid and gave guns to to rout the Taliban right after 9-11. Yeah. So I hung out with that guy and looked at, okay, all of this time we spent inside the government and outside the government calling him a hero while he was secretly filling up mass graves. Where did that get us? And also, like eventually I imagine fortifying his own tribe, getting involved with the opium business and what happened. That guy is a trip. Is that true though? I'm just speculating.

Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. Your speculation is completely correct. And by the time I ended up hanging out with him, he was like really in declining health and, um, he was always rumored to be an alcoholic and he definitely seemed out of it. Like he always had a cold where I couldn't see him until 10 PM and, and then there'd

be like, you know, dancing boys and martial arts competitions in his, in his chambers. And, um, he had like grass everywhere and reindeer in his suite. He's a colorful guy. But also he'd drink some unidentified fluid out of like a rhinestone encrusted Chanel mug. He claimed it was tea, I should say, in the interest of fairness. But it seemed like it was booze of some kind.

I don't know. Wow. So how'd your dissertation land? All right. Yeah. So actually, funny ask, uh, I finished it last year. So I was working on all of this. It's crazy. I'm so bad at planning. It took me seven years. Just shout out to any long suffering PhD student. Cause I was working several jobs. I did my MSNBC show. I kept going back, you know, even during the Weinstein story to England to kind of kiss the ring and talk to the Oxford Dons. And they'd be like, we hear you're on television every day in the States.

And I'd be like, well, while that is technically true, my main passion is proxy armies. And I'm going to finish this thing, I promise. And they'd be sort of skeptical. But God bless them tolerant. And I did finish and I went and I did my oral defense while I was in the middle of the catch and kill book deadlines last year. And now I'm going in May to do it. So I'll graduate. So does your mom go to this graduation? I will have to see. I think that that's like the one thing she's going to want to go. Well,

she went to the Pulitzer. That made her happy. But I think she'll go. I think she'll, she doesn't fly a lot. No. I keep, I flew her out. I kind of twisted her arm into saying yes to Elle magazine did a like women of the year thing last year. Yeah. And I said, come on, you have to do it. It's you and Shonda and Charlize.

Like just do it. It's amazing. Come on, you'll have fun. And she'd been so kind of isolated by all that horrible Woody Allen stuff that she honestly, she said to me, like, do you think people are going to boo me? And I'm like, what is wrong with you? Like, you're beloved. Everywhere I go, people come up to me and say, like, your mom's a hero.

And she went? She did. I got her to go and it was great. So now she's like coming out of her shell more. She's flying more. So I think she'll fly to England's so traumatized by all this. I know, I know. And, you know, it's a way we treated a lot of women

who talked about difficult issues for a long time. I see it in so many of my sources too, you know. All of these actresses, you know, Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorbino. I worked with her. It was heavy. You know, I worked with her on Glow. You know, she played, you know, a past relationship of mine. I did two episodes with her and it was heavy you know i worked with her on glow you know she played uh you know uh a past

relationship of mine i did two episodes with her and it was weighing on her i mean it was and now she's involved with the trial and like it was you know it was all pretty it stays fresh and and once you know once they they do start to be heard it's it's hard not to be re-traumatized and to speak through that i think and you know we're in a moment where I think we're doing a lot better at not just buying sight unseen the narrative of people accused of these kinds of crimes, including the part of the narrative that involves smearing women who have come forward, which— It's such a reflex with the most—I don't know most, but a lot of men. Yeah. It's a reflex. Of course.

And adjusting that reflex is— that's part of the challenge. It's a big challenge, and I think while we're doing better at sort of holding up and lionizing these women who come forward and do this difficult thing, and I think the moment of increasing celebration around my mom is part of that. I think I've been so relieved to see that people like Annabella and Mira and Rosanna Arquette, so many of my sources have been widely celebrated.

There is a deeper structural thing that I think is harder to change, which is, okay, we're going to pay lip service to celebrating them. You want to hire them? People who are in charge of these decisions? There's a couple of things I wanted to get to that I think will lead to the book. So how did the MSNBC thing happen? How did you begin that relationship with Phil Griffin? I went off to England and I was there for a year doing coursework and then found, by the way, that i was unable to capture any lost youth i was having worked on like been off to war and whatever like far too boring and right um adult in not fun ways to to actually like right right you can't go you can never go home yeah yeah i was kind of in a relationship by then i was just way too too adult. It was done. No kegging for you.

No kegging for me. Yeah. So I was never cool. I determined conclusively that that ship had sailed. And then, you know, I continued to write and do print stuff, mostly more short-form commentary, Wall Street Journal op-eds, et cetera. And I got called in.

I think the chain of conversations, as I was told it, that happened, was the Today Show leadership team wanted to call me in for a job interview and then Phil Griffin, who runs MSNBC, kind of stepped into the process and was like, I want to talk to him. So I came in for a meeting,

not really knowing what was going to come of it. And that led to me doing a show for a while on MSNBC. But isn't that interesting? You have this amazing resume of not only occupational experience, but intellectual experience. And then he decides that he wants you to be the Anderson Cooper of MSNBC. That to look at your resume and go like, you got to be a talking head on this, on MSNBC. So that's actually insightful. And I think was a root problem,

was an original sin with that particular configuration. Look, I'm so grateful that Phil gave me that shot. And I'm really proud actually of what we turned that show into by the end of it. But it didn't work out. Yeah, I say in the book, it got terrible reviews at the beginning, great reviews at the end of it. But it didn't work out. Yeah. I say in the book, it got terrible reviews at the beginning, great reviews at the end, and no viewers throughout. And on the one hand, that's

just midday cable is a brutal wasteland. Sure. Of course. There's no such thing. There has never been a hit 1 p.m. cable show. It's not a thing. But but on the other hand you've hit on something that is real which is like i constantly was trying to cut against the grain of that and when we got the good reviews it was because i was just saying fuck the ratings i'm gonna run a 20 minute taped investigative piece on opioid over prescription at va hospitals like i'm gonna go out in the field and oh yeah so once you started but that's i that was my question is that once he sort of moved you into that investigative segment, and once that became your thing, was that really the beginning of your career in that type of journalism? Yeah, it was, it was me being, realizing the truth that you just said of like, if you, if you care about the issues, you don't

really, I say this with huge respect for the people who are excellent at talking heads and reading the headlines it is i learned because i put in the years becoming a good broadcaster like it takes time and it's a hard it's a dying discipline because tv is going away and changing into other things but it's a hard one you really have to train to be like good on a morning network show um so i say this with all respect but but for me as someone who was invested in the issues i was constantly trying to like do more in-depth writing than is feasible for a once-a-day breaking news show that is going to get blown up by whatever headline is happening during the White House press conference anyway. I was constantly trying to do a lot of tape stuff that required me to run around the country all the time, and that's how I ended up building a relationship with the NBC investigative unit, which is chock-a-block with wonderful journalists who are mostly behind the scenes, investigative producers. And it turns out in television, especially at that point in time when there was a little bit of a feeling that investigative was

dwindling or not in a moment where it was having a vogue. It was hard to get that stuff on air. So there were all of these deeper threads of reporting where there'd be a piece and they didn't have a correspondent, they could get to front it, and they didn't even have a show that would want to run it. And I started putting that stuff on my show and going out and being the investigator for those stories. And so when my show was canceled, I ended up transitioning to a job as an NBC News investigative correspondent full-time. And Noah Oppenheim, the guy who I mentioned, who was running the Today Show then

and then shortly after was the president of NBC News, was the person who gave me that shot. I mean, he said, like, we love this taped investigative stuff you're doing for the Today Show, which I was kind of dual-hatted. I was doing both the MSNBC thing and the Today Show.

Why don't you continue? Well, I mean, my question is in terms of, like, you know, TV investigative reporting is that it struck me because of a conversation I had with my producer that when your story got spiked,

the Weinstein thing got spiked by NBC, you know, you talk about Universal getting involved and that guy getting involved and Opp nbc you know you you talk about universal getting involved in that guy getting involved in oppenheim you know having both of them saying like this is gonna be crazy and and on the higher ups the universal guys like he's never gonna leave me alone but wasn't there also a tremendous fear in tv investigative journalism of lawsuits oh yeah for sure and i'm sure your producer would be very familiar with it. So in any journalistic format, including in print, there's a legal review process that happens

because, you know, we all look at examples like Gawker getting sued into the ground and outlets get scared. And actually, one of the tactics Harvey Weinstein used was he hired Charles Harder, who was the lawyer who led that Hulk Hogan-Gawker case that destroyed that website. But, like, print has a little more lead time and longer window, right? You know, lead time was not an issue in this case

because it was a story that I worked on at NBC for the better part of a year and passed all sorts of legal reviews. In this case, I was a story that i worked on at nbc for the better part of a year and passed all sorts of legal reviews in this case i think something else is happening which i think maybe also informs why the statement from your producer is true print outlets while they very often have parent companies of various kinds yeah do something that is less expensive and therefore tend to be less entwined with their parent companies. And because of the level of expense involved in television reporting,

they tend to be like the crown jewel in the Comcast empire. NBC has changed hands between different corporate overlords. But in every era, it's a situation where like the bosses are not completely firewalled off. And that's what leads to the situation in the insider. It's what leads to the Weinstein story at NBC, where Steve Burke is

telling everyone like, we can't do this thing. You know, what I told this is repeated from those executives. I'll never hear the end of it from Harvey because he's a movie studio boss too. I'll never hear the end of it from Harvey because he's a movie studio boss too. And I think it's all an illustration of the legal panic is not actually rooted in sincere legal arguments. It starts there and then it becomes inflected by the business and relationship panic of a parent company that has mostly non-journalistic interests. I mean, the news business is a tiny portion of what Comcast has to care about. So you can see how a guy like Steve Burke, who had a background running theme park gift shops, who is not a journalist, and who has to balance a lot of different equities, is someone who was legendary for saying in these situations, I recount a bunch of instances of it

in the book, you know, why wouldn't you kill the story for this guy who's calling like, he'll owe you afterwards, you should kill it. And that is something that makes TV journalism uniquely challenging, because it is much more overshadowed by those parent company relationships. And I think it stresses the absolute need for better firewalls between the news divisions and the wider corporate ecosystems they sit in. Yeah, because it's completely detached from what it's supposed to be servicing, from the idea of the fifth estate, right? Yes. And it's scary from a news and democracy standpoint right because these are some of the main platforms mbc

news is a great uh legacy news institution that a lot of people rely on when they watch that evening broadcast you know there's still an old-fashioned set of people who care about right and but there's also a set of people that are are who watch something they think looks like the news and now we're being completely propagandized. Yes. And mind fucked. And now the idea of truth is nebulous. Yes.

And that is the philosophical underpinning of the book, which I write from the standpoint of being someone who profoundly believes in the free press as something that is vital to protecting our basic rights, that's enshrined in the Constitution for a reason. It's the only constitutionally protected profession, explicitly, you know? And there's a reason for that.

And I write about the ills in the media world and the ways in which powerful and wealthy people can manipulate the media because I sincerely believe in the great work journalists are doing at NBC and elsewhere. So important right now. Yeah, and believe they should be unfettered by that kind of interference.

And, you know, NBC is a great example of how the journalists are great in these cases because they, one after another, stood up and called out their bosses and demanded an investigation and leadership change, none of which happened because you have, you know, a parent company that is not invested in the journalism. So you wound up with a crazy situation where Rachel Maddow was getting on her own company's air and saying, I've independently confirmed the stuff in this book. There needs to be an investigation. And then just nothing. They won't do it. So it's a fascinating example of a much wider problem. That was about the Matt Lauer situation?

Both. The killing of the Weinstein story and the Matt Lauer situation. That was about the Matt Lauer situation? Both, the killing of the Weinstein story and the Matt Lauer situation. And I think that thankfully in this case, I had enough of a platform and enough of an investigative team around this that I was able to break that story out in the open. But so often stories are killed

and we just never learn about it. And sometimes people continue to get hurt as a result. And to your point, not only do people get hurt when abusers are shielded by news companies like this, but also the concept of the truth and its vital role in our democracy and electoral process gets hurt. You know, I come at this from the perspective of a journalist who loves journalism, and the book is like a giant celebration of how journalists have broken through these obstacles. obstacles. But it's fascinating how that same narrative and set of facts has been embraced by the conservative press and especially the very, very far right, like the Breitbart set that like, this is just another example of fake news. It confirms the Trump narrative. And that's frustrating. And I think the only way we overcome it is by cleaning house in our

journalistic out. They appropriate the language and terms and structure and then turn it in on itself and then throw it back at us. That's right. And they're not, look, they're not wrong. It is a disheartening example of the failures of the news media, but it also, the fact that it ultimately broke, the fact that the New Yorker took on the story and blew it wide open, all of that reminds us that the press, it is possible the press is by and large still doing its vital job. And I think the lesson for me is let's not cut down and excoriate the free press. Let's build it up and support it and make sure that these great legacy news organizations are transparent and are breaking the stories they should be. I mean,

Great legacy news organizations are transparent and are breaking the stories they should be. Right. I mean, the people actually churning out lies, fake news, you know, we need to lean on all of our platforms, the social media companies to root that out and identify it clearly. I think keeping ourselves to a really high standard at mainstream news outlets, including NBC, including CBS, all the places I've reported on is really important for reminding people like, hey, by and large, though there are screw ups, this is an important organ of our democracy. Sure. And also like, but also the idea that, you know, quick bait and emotions and things that connect to your emotions, you know, it's never that simple, man. Yeah. You know that if you're not going to read past the headline, how would you expect to be informed?

Well, I see great examples of this all the time. So one of the little subplots in the book is my relationship with Hillary Clinton, which kind of frayed around the Weinstein reporting. She was very close with Weinstein. Weinstein was one of her big fundraisers. And I had to interview every secretary of state for War on Peace, the previous book. Sure. Which I was in the middle of during the Weinstein recording. And she had agreed to an interview.

I had talked to her about the book from very early on and developing the concept. But she knew what you were up to. Yeah. So I get a call at a certain point from her PR person who says, we know you're working on this big story. We're concerned about it. And they did indeed continue to work with Harvey Weinstein for months after both like just he was an advisor around her and also they were going back and forth about a potential documentary about her, like right up until the 11th hour before the stories broke. There was email traffic. Yeah. You know, they knew pretty early on. And then suddenly she became unavailable for that interview. And I finally had to say like, hey, that wasn't off the record. And I'm going to have to give an explanation for why you guys

canceled. And that felt weird to me. And they did, you know, I have to say they got up. It wasn't the sit down that had originally been discussed, but they got a quick, slightly nervous phone call on with her, and she didn't have to do that. She owes me nothing, and she did give an interview for that book. So that's the totality of the facts there. And look, there's a thoughtful conversation to be had about what powerful people in politics knew about Harvey Weinstein and their failure to distance themselves early.

In Hillary Clinton's case, there are other factual things that are interesting. Tina Brown says that she warned Hillary's campaign at one point. Lena Dunham says she warned them. I've talked to another journalist who earlier that summer in 2017 warned the same PR guy like, why are you letting her do photo ops with this guy? This story is about to break. All of that is interesting and valid. But I lay that out and then I start to see, you know, the Breitbarty fake headlines, which are like, you know, Hillary Clinton, you know, ordered Ronan Farrow to stop reporting. And it's like, well, there's valid criticism to be had of Hillary on that. I say this as someone who has, I think, a very full view of her and

admires many things in her legacy. But it is important to talk openly about how politicians deal with people who give them money. Yeah. And how that is used as a shield. Are you doing that with Epstein now too? I did break a story about Epstein's relationship with MIT that's very much in the same bucket of themes. That they were sending all kinds of emails saying basically like, hide this Epstein money long after he was convicted. So that's all a valid conversation. But my point is, it gets distorted so quickly. And by the fourth iteration of the headline, it's like, you know, basically Hillary Clinton hired assassins to

kill me. It's subtle, and it demands and deserves a real conversation about the facts. But it can't happen because the alt-right headline machine turns it into something that is so distant from the truth. But, you know, you did sort of, you know, everything, all the work you've done, you know, outside again in Pulitzer is sort of like shifted the cultural dialogue, which, you know, is a profound thing and it's a real accomplishment. And I think you had a lot to do with that. Well, that means a lot to hear. And I end up saying this till I'm like a horse in the throat, but it really was these women who rose up. Sure. And also now a lot of men who have talked about sexual abuse,

frankly, and in a brave way. I had Terry... Yeah, I heard that interview. It was a great interview and he's a fascinating guy. You know, thank God there were, in every case of a story I reported whistleblowers and sources willing to come forward and people willing to turn over tapes and documents and bear their souls in some of these cases. And we wouldn't be having the conversation without them. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing the work. Now, just quickly, let's not get too far into it. Do you have any sort of hope or faith in the survival of the republic? Oh, just a small, small kicker question there. Yeah, I do.

I do. Because, you know, so the podcast is winding down now and the last couple of episodes are about Trump. They have some new reporting about Trump in there and particularly the kinds of deals cuts and yeah the ways he was part of this system of suppressing stories the hush payment reporting that with American media. Yeah the last episode is about one of those hush payments has a really fascinating interview with Karen McDougal who talks about this in a way she hasn't been before and a lot of like tapes from within the process of him trying to shut down that story and you come out of that's the playmate story yeah exactly and you come out of reporting on this sprawling empire of like filth and blackmail and killing stories that is the national inquirer and you really do feel disillusioned and there are times in the reporting where it seems like those systems of oppression and silence are immovable. But to your question, there are also so many times that remind

me, like the whistleblowers aren't going to stop. The sources aren't going to stop the reporters. And I'm not talking about me. There's a whole wide community of reporters that have encircled each of these stories and made them come out into the sunlight. They're not going to stop. And so I actually come out of all of this with a sense of optimism. I really think that as long as we keep thinking and talking about this and making sure we all as a culture care about defending the hard truths, we've got a fighting chance. Great. I'll hang on to that. You seem unconvinced.

I'm cynical and I'm a whiny guy. I like it. It's a good look. Thank you. Thanks for talking to me, Ronan. Yeah, thanks for taking the time. All right, that's that. There you go.

Ronan's book, Catch and Kill, available wherever you get books. Catch and Kill the podcast, available wherever you ever get podcasts. Also, my tour dates, the four that are coming up, the last few before I start taping GLOW. You can go to WTFpod.com slash tour for venue and ticket information for the Portland, Maine, New Haven, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, Huntington, New York shows. for the Portland, Maine, New Haven, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, Huntington, New York shows. And don't forget, Mark Maron, End Times Fun, will launch globally on Netflix Tuesday, March 10th. Now, I've got to slowly move the guitars out here, but I haven't got a wire to get the mic over. Maybe I do, but I also bought a mic for my harmonica because I hadn't picked up the harmonica in a while and and I've never owned a harmonica mic so if I can get the mic over there maybe I'll play a harmonica through an amplifier huh again not unlike my guitar I'm very limited on harmonica but it sounds cool through the ¶¶ © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Boomer lives. We'll be right back. everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly.

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