A 19-year-old fooled London’s richest people. Then he fell to his death.
On with Kara Swisher
0:00 This is a story about a boy who lies.
0:02 This kid Zach Breler that this book is about starts to tell
0:05 some people that he actually is the son of a Russian oligarch.
0:08 So this boy Zach at 18 starts telling grown-ups in London that he's
0:13 poised to inherit hundreds of millions
0:15 of dollars and he's looking to make investments,
0:16 but he he dies at 19 in very mysterious circumstances
0:20 going off the balcony of this luxury building overlooking the temps.
0:24 You're doing a murder investigation or a suicide investigation.
0:26 And one by one you get these people
0:28 starting to die in mysterious circumstances in London.
0:32 Business people who've had connections with the R
0:34 Russ Russians or cross them in some way.
0:36 And the police rather than be very aggressive and try and get to the bottom
0:40 of it have a tendency to just sort of say nothing to see here.
0:44 Looks like a suicide looks like an accident.
0:46 There's been a kind of decision by the authorities just to look
0:50 the the other way and conclude listen it's good for us.
0:54 London is to the billionaire what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.
0:58 We're proud of that.
0:59 If you could talk to Zach, what would you have wanted to ask him?
1:04 Oh, wow.
1:05 Cara, nobody's asked me that yet.
1:12 Hi everyone.
1:12 Today I'm talking to award-winning journalist and author Patrick Renkeefe.
1:17 He's got a new book out called London Falling.
1:19 It's truly excellent as usual with Patrick Raden Keefe.
1:22 He tells great stories.
1:24 This one's set in London by someone who pretends to be
1:26 the son of a Russian oligarch and it ends badly for him.
1:30 I of course really enjoy everything Patrick writes
1:32 as well as this book and this conversation.
1:35 So stick around.
1:37 Patrick, thanks for coming on on.
1:39 Great to be with you.
1:40 You're killing me because I came back from San Francisco last night.
1:43 I was there doing some interviews of some public officials.
1:47 Um and I I was going to sleep on the plane, but then I read your book all night.
1:52 just it's fantastic.
1:54 I had already read pieces of it,
1:55 but I read all the way through because it's so good.
1:58 So, thank you.
1:59 You're exhausted me.
2:00 Just so you know,
2:01 this is what I I want a captive audience on a plane with no It was great.
2:04 Anyway, I want to start with a more basic question.
2:07 I was thinking as I was reading because I loved Empire of Pain especially,
2:11 and I think that's the last time you and I talked.
2:13 Um, and you said you're basically fascinated by crime and corruption,
2:16 secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating listenit and illicit worlds.
2:21 the bonds of family, the power of denial,
2:24 and and one of the interviews you said this is a story about a boy who lies,
2:28 which I loved the way you talked about it.
2:30 So, how come what draws you to dark stories and dangerous people?
2:35 I don't know what it is, honestly.
2:36 It's not I don't really even think of myself as a crime reporter,
2:39 but it is a situation where when I go out
2:41 and I kind of pursue what's interesting to me in the world,
2:45 it's often stories about people transgressing in one way or another.
2:50 It's often stories about people kind of using
2:52 their own charisma to change the world a little bit,
2:56 to find some little wormhole,
2:57 some loophole they can get through or actually to kind
3:00 of reorganize the world in a way that they would want.
3:03 And it's funny because we talk about those stories as if they're outliers,
3:07 but I feel as though that is the era we live in.
3:11 And this kid, Zach Breler, that this book is about,
3:13 you know, he was a 19-year-old fabulist,
3:16 but at the same time, to me, he's the most 21st century creature imaginable
3:21 in this era.
3:22 Although we've been we've had fabulous, right?
3:24 There's been fabulous throughout history.
3:27 We have, but it's different.
3:28 You know, Zach is born in 2000, right?
3:30 So, he kind of perfectly tracks this millennium.
3:34 And he grows up, he's very much on Instagram.
3:37 His favorite movie is The Wolf of Wall Street.
3:39 and he grows up kind of exposed to a kind of hustle culture,
3:44 a real sense that everything's all or nothing.
3:46 You bet big, push all your chips in, tell lies if
3:49 you have to, you kind of fake it till you make it.
3:52 And that's the culture he was immersed in and that's the person he became.
3:56 Or he immersed himself.
3:57 This is you're talking about Zack Bratler.
3:59 He went to a fancy private school in London, not the fanciest.
4:03 Um, his family was welloff but not fabulously wealthy.
4:07 And at school he met kids of actual oligarchs and which
4:10 is kind of a brand for London at a time.
4:12 Although I understand many of them are leaving.
4:15 And he becomes so enamored of extreme wealth that he pretended to be
4:18 the son of a Russian oligarch which seems to be an unusual choice.
4:22 It's super easy to draw parallels with Anna Delvi,
4:25 the fake Russian aerys who scammed people in New York or young
4:28 car con artists like Billy McFarland who co-founded the fire festival.
4:33 talk about why he was going for this con because it's a little different.
4:37 They were they were looking for money really.
4:40 They were your classic con artists like
4:42 any given venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
4:45 But go ahead.
4:46 Yeah, I mean Zach was, you know, he grew up in an upper middle class family.
4:50 Father does structured finance, mother's a freelance journalist.
4:52 He had a big brother, very loving family.
4:55 Um, and he at 13 he goes to this school
4:59 uh kind of fancy private school on the outskirts of London.
5:02 Not the most academically rigorous place, but an expensive
5:04 His brother went to the better one.
5:06 Correct.
5:06 Exactly.
5:07 So, his brother had gotten into a school called the University College School.
5:10 Um, you know, more rigorous, more elite, and Zach doesn't get in.
5:14 And so, he ends up at this place called Mil Hill at 13.
5:18 And a bunch of the kids who go there are the children of oligarchs,
5:21 really wealthy people who've come in and found a second home in London,
5:25 many of them from the former Soviet Union.
5:28 and he's exposed to, you know, not just great wealth, you know,
5:33 wealth that far exceeds the wealth of his own family,
5:36 but also a kind of attitude, right?
5:38 There's a very sort of English perspective that his parents had,
5:40 which is that it's actually pretty
5:42 unclassy to have extravagant displays of wealth,
5:46 you know, that that there's something a little go about that.
5:49 Um, and these kids at the school are very kind of blingy and braggadocious.
5:56 And as a teenager, he's really taken in by that.
5:58 And so he starts to tell lies about his family, about how much money they make,
6:04 about where they live, about what kind of car they drive.
6:07 and he kind of graduates to a point where when he's out
6:11 of school out in the kind of adult world of London at 18,
6:15 he starts to tell some people that he actually is the son of a Russian oligarch.
6:19 He invents this whole new persona and he's got a whole story.
6:24 Um, crazily, I mean, one of the things that's so bizarre about this story,
6:28 you know, it's it's I I've been on book tour for 3 weeks across the US, and
6:33 one of the things that's fun about it is you go out and you meet people who've
6:36 read the book and sometimes they see things
6:37 that are in it that I didn't even spot,
6:39 but there was a woman who came up to me in um, Nashville.
6:42 She'd finished reading.
6:44 And she said, "You know what's so weird about this book
6:45 is that you have this kid who's kind of a compulsive liar.
6:48 And the kids in this story all see through the lies.
6:51 the kids who've grown up on social media and have
6:53 an idea that there's kind of a that everybody's wearing a mask,
6:56 everybody's putting on a face online,
7:00 they can see through the BS, right?
7:02 But the adults buy it.
7:04 And so this boy, Zach,
7:05 at 18 starts telling grown-ups in London that he's poised to inherit
7:10 hundreds of millions of dollars and he's looking to make investments.
7:13 And a lot of these kind
7:14 of vulturish grown-ups immediately attach themselves to him.
7:19 So, what what was he trying to achieve with the con itself?
7:23 Listen, I mean, the first thing I would say is when you're 18,
7:26 you're you know, you're you're not thinking three
7:28 chess moves ahead a lot of the time.
7:30 I think he was only thinking a step or two ahead.
7:33 And I think in this case, he wanted entree.
7:35 There was a life and a lifestyle.
7:37 It wasn't really no a typical con artist, right?
7:40 It's something else.
7:42 No, it was No.
7:43 And in fact, his his whole con was he was pretending to be the guy
7:46 with the money because I think he wanted
7:47 to he wanted to be driving in nice cars.
7:50 He wanted to get into private clubs and casinos.
7:53 He wanted to sort of be invited to the ball basically.
7:57 And that was as far as he as he'd gotten, I think.
8:00 He, you know, he had a notion of becoming a businessman.
8:02 He was trying to get into deals with oil and gas and and, you know,
8:07 trading cars and so forth.
8:09 And the guys that he became friends with were themselves
8:12 a certain kind of probably familiar to your listeners charlatan just
8:18 like a guy who you know he he was in he's
8:20 in crypto and now he's in AI and he's got
8:23 all these ventures and he's you know a lot of big
8:26 talk a lot of meetings a lot of bluster not
8:29 a huge amount of results to show for any of it
8:32 but um the appearance of of a hustler on the make
8:36 it's a huge part of the manosphere by the way it's that ideas like if
8:39 you just sell this car or do this stock or buy this coin or whatever
8:43 it is and I think some of that is very um is
8:47 in a in a kind of poignant way illustrative of the moment that we're living in.
8:52 I mean some of it is that there's a lot of BS, right?
8:54 That you can you can kind of fake it till you make it
8:58 and rise to the highest levels in this country and in and in business.
9:02 um you know, if you can trick voters, if you can trick uh investors,
9:06 um there's there's no practical limit to how far you can go at this point.
9:12 And so, if you're a young ambitious kid looking around,
9:15 there's a sense in which you probably take note of that and you think,
9:17 okay, this is the way to do it.
9:19 But I think there's another thing too which is that there's a kind of all
9:22 or nothing quality where there's a sense that you you kind of need to always be
9:27 betting the house because the alternative is
9:29 a totally uncertain future in which you probably
9:31 won't own your own home um you know or have a stable job or any shortcut.
9:38 It's the shortcut version of things.
9:39 I'm curious did you ever have a fake personality or did you ever try that?
9:47 I don't think so.
9:47 I mean I had as an got that today on pivot and he hadn't What did he say?
9:52 No, neither have I.
9:55 Yeah, neither have I.
9:55 Or thought about I had I mean in adolescence I think
9:58 we all kind of cycle through different personalities.
10:01 There were times where I was sort of I mean
10:02 for me it was like what kind of music do I like?
10:05 What kind of clothes do I wear?
10:06 What kind of kids do I hang out with?
10:08 I would have these brief phases where I'd
10:09 be really into something and then move on.
10:12 I think the sad thing about Zach's story is he's a kid
10:15 who I mean we haven't mentioned it but he he dies
10:17 at 19 in very mysterious circumstances going off the balcony of this luxury
10:22 building overlooking the temps and so the thing that's so sad
10:25 in his case is that he gets kind of he gets sort
10:27 of trapped in that he's in that sort of confusing phase that a lot
10:30 of us go through in adolescence might even be natural for an adolescent
10:35 I mean he takes it obviously to a very unhealthy extreme
10:38 um and he doesn't make it out you're sort of taking apart the death you're doing
10:43 a murder investigation or a suicide investigation or a death investigation.
10:47 Yeah.
10:48 I mean, it's also I think it's the parents
10:49 also trying to I think the weirdness of it, right, is after he dies,
10:52 his parents have to figure out what happened to him,
10:54 but they also have to figure out who was he.
10:56 I mean, it's that sort of strange experience of um
10:59 there's somebody that you raised, that you gave birth to, that you lived with,
11:03 you don't recognize and suddenly he's gone and you have to Yeah.
11:06 You have to sort of figure out get to the bottom of who he was.
11:09 It's interesting.
11:10 I've done a lot of interviews with the parents of kids who have died when
11:12 these relationships they didn't know with chatbots
11:15 and it's the same thing because these kids changed.
11:19 Yeah.
11:19 It's really interesting these when you
11:21 do these interviews because they thought they
11:23 knew the kid and then the kid was changed by the chatbot or whatever.
11:26 They had no idea they had this other
11:28 life happening to them which is interesting.
11:30 But one of the things that informed Zach in this case as you said
11:33 Wolf of Wall Street which is very resonant with young men I can tell you.
11:37 I had to get my kids off of it.
11:39 Um, and but the movie War Dogs is another one.
11:42 It's about two young That was another of his favorites.
11:44 Yeah.
11:45 Who become unlike
11:46 one of Zach's he was obsessed with with Ephraim Daroli,
11:48 the the Jonah Hill character in that.
11:50 Right.
11:50 Exactly.
11:51 Which who are unlikely arms dealers on the make.
11:53 And you've pointed out in other interviews that he saw the films
11:56 like an instruction manual rather than cautionary tales, which they were.
12:00 And I would agree they sometimes don't see the point of it.
12:04 They sort of think, you know,
12:06 Jordan and Wolf of Wall Street as a hero in some ways.
12:09 Is do a hunger to get rich or appear rich about
12:13 is it reveal something about Britain or the the world in general?
12:16 Because I think it applies very much in the US, too.
12:18 Yeah.
12:18 I don't I mean, it's funny.
12:20 On the one hand, this this is a very specifically English story in the sense
12:23 that Russian oligarchs just play a very particular role in the culture there.
12:30 Zach was obsessed with Roman Abramovich who at the time owned Chelsea Football
12:34 Club and um the aspect of it you don't really see here as much.
12:42 But I'll tell you, I mean I've been
12:43 traveling around talking about the book, you know,
12:45 I was down in Miami talking about the idea
12:48 that Zach growing up in in certain parts of London,
12:52 you know, it's supercars on the street everywhere.
12:55 It's this kind of blingy, ostentatious, sort of over-the-top displays of wealth.
13:00 There's a sense of a kind of roguish wealth,
13:03 a kind of gangster capitalist thing going on.
13:05 And there were all these heads nodding in Miami.
13:08 Oh, yeah.
13:10 Um, that's the dead center of that.
13:10 Yeah.
13:11 You know, I went to Seattle and you go to Seattle
13:13 and you start talking about oligarchs and the way they transform
13:16 a city and you know the oligarchs there aren't Russian
13:19 but uh but boy Bezos and the way in which he has Paul Allen changed that place.
13:25 Paul Allen.
13:26 Yeah, absolutely.
13:26 And so I think there are aspects of it here um as well.
13:32 I think some of it is just the culture and
13:35 and they did in San Francisco until they
13:37 all left which we were thrilled when they did.
13:38 And the the reinvention of London was based
13:41 on a lot of sort of sketchy foreign money.
13:44 Correct.
13:44 Yeah.
13:44 Which they welcomed in.
13:46 I mean this is the thing that's so fascinating about
13:47 the Trump administration now um touting this golden visa program, right?
13:52 Is that London did that two decades ago.
13:54 They did and it did bring billions of dollars
13:56 into the economy which they felt like they really needed.
14:00 Uh, but the upshot is that London's a very eerie place.
14:03 I mean, it's it's gone to an extreme that really no place I mean no place maybe
14:09 bar Miami in the US has gone where if
14:13 you walk around upscale neighborhoods in London after dark.
14:17 The buildings are all dark because nobody's living in the apartments.
14:21 They have these, you know,
14:23 massively expensive apartments which are bought by people
14:27 essentially as a kind of real estate speculation.
14:29 You have another thing going on too,
14:30 which is that there's a kind of criminal class.
14:34 Um, there's a whole story outline in the book
14:36 about how you get all these Russians who come,
14:41 they start buying these big properties,
14:42 they send their kids to the private schools,
14:43 they do things like buy Chelsea Football Club, and then one by one,
14:47 you get these people starting to die in mysterious circumstances in London.
14:51 Business people who've had connections with the R
14:54 Russ Russians or crossed them in some way.
14:56 And you get all these people falling off
14:57 of buildings or falling in front of tube trains.
14:59 And the police rather than be very aggressive and try and get to the bottom
15:03 of it have a tendency to just sort of say nothing to see here.
15:07 Looks like a suicide, looks like an accident.
15:10 And that eerie feeling which Matthew and Michelle, Zach's parents,
15:16 who are really the main characters in the book,
15:18 experience where they're, you know,
15:20 they're these people who sort of grew up in this city.
15:22 They think they know it and then
15:23 suddenly they realize that actually just beneath
15:25 the surface there's all this pretty dodgy stuff going on and there's been a kind
15:30 of decision by the authorities just to look the the other way
15:34 and and and sort of conclude listen it's good for us that all this has happened.
15:38 There's a there's a quote in the book from Boris Johnson when he
15:41 was the mayor of London saying London
15:42 is the the natural habitat for billionaires.
15:45 He said you know London is to the billionaire
15:47 what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.
15:50 We're proud of that.
15:51 this is where they should feel most at home,
15:54 right?
15:55 And one of the things um in a way also
15:57 this is a story about parenting in the digital age, right?
16:00 Because of the ability to be fake.
16:03 You're the father of two teen boys.
16:05 I have older kids and younger kids,
16:08 but the older ones are in their 20s and their early 20s.
16:11 It must have been first of all tough seeing
16:14 parents dealing with the grief of losing a son.
16:15 I can't even imagine.
16:17 Um talk about you talked about going to therapy for the first time
16:22 um when you were finishing this book although it didn't take long term.
16:25 Talk about this idea of parenting in a digital
16:28 age and how it affected you when you were looking
16:30 at this story because it's sort of like there
16:32 but for the go grace of God kind of thing.
16:34 Yeah, listen it's hard.
16:35 I mean I don't think um I think anyone who's who's a parent these days,
16:40 particularly a parent of an adolescent will relate
16:42 to the sense in which you have these dilemmas, right?
16:44 We I think there's a kind of natural American tendency,
16:48 probably a natural human tendency,
16:50 but particularly pronounced in America because we love a silver bullet.
16:53 We love we love innovation.
16:54 We love a new technology and something comes along and we
16:57 have a tendency just to let it kind of wash over us.
17:00 You know, when there's a new g whiz kind of tech,
17:04 we tend to just kind of adopt it, you know, to sort of swallow without chewing.
17:11 And I think that happened with phones.
17:13 It happened with social media.
17:15 And I, you know, my kids, my older boy was born in 2010, right?
17:19 So I'm sort of I'm right there in the generation
17:22 of parents who at a certain point all the kids had phones.
17:26 And you would really be putting your kid at a a pretty
17:29 significant social disadvantage to um to not let them have phones.
17:34 My kids go to a big public school and um and then
17:38 they get the phones and it's it's really hard to regulate, right?
17:42 And we as adults experience it.
17:43 I mean, they are addictive.
17:45 These technologies are addictive.
17:46 I think what I found with Zach was I guess I'd say two things.
17:50 One is, yeah, for me as a parent of two adolescent boys,
17:54 it took a toll to spend a couple of years talking,
17:57 you know, a few times a week to a couple
18:00 who'd lost a child when he was an adolescent.
18:03 it doesn't, you know,
18:04 there's no way not to open your heart
18:05 to people like that and really try and understand
18:07 their story at a bone deep level and have it not affect you as a parent.
18:11 Um, and yet where where I came out was not with any sort of parenting lesson.
18:18 I think I came out of it more with a sense of humility, honestly,
18:21 a sense that I think it's a fantasy to think
18:25 that our kids are clay and we can completely control who they become.
18:31 I think it is kind of true in a weird way when they're really little,
18:33 which is why, you know,
18:34 you get people obsessing over organic food and all the rest of it.
18:37 There's it's like a little science exper
18:38 it's like a little chemistry experiment, right?
18:40 It's like, I'm going to control all the inputs
18:42 here and then I can maximize the output.
18:45 And I I think in a kind of strange way for a lot of parents,
18:47 there's a sense that people don't usually say it this way,
18:51 but I think it's a little like, you know,
18:52 they're going to be like me, but better.
18:54 I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of tweak the uh the next generation,
18:59 right?
18:59 and they start to change.
19:00 And I think that happened before phones,
19:02 but I think phones really um make it much more dramatic, right?
19:07 But it also in this case allows Zach to um transform himself, right?
19:13 And put on a new suit as you you know,
19:15 which kids tend to do, and so do adults, by the way.
19:17 Everybody has some sort of mask in some way.
19:20 I'm curious if you I know this is going to sound weird,
19:23 but if you could talk to Zach, what would you have wanted to ask him?
19:27 Oh, wow.
19:28 car.
19:29 Nobody's asked me that yet.
19:32 Um, I'm a professional.
19:36 Uh, I mean, there are a bunch of parts
19:40 of this story that I still don't understand even now.
19:43 And so, there are certain details that I'd want to know.
19:45 There are certain deals he was doing, and I still don't understand what was kind
19:49 of happening under the hood of those deals.
19:52 Um, there are certain episodes I'd want to better understand.
19:56 Um, I think the biggest thing,
19:58 and it actually goes to a question you asked earlier,
20:01 would be just what was the plan, you know, where what was the longer term plan?
20:05 Where was this going?
20:06 Cuz there are these moments in this story
20:08 where he seems almost like the talented Mr.
20:10 Ripley.
20:11 It seems like he's playing some kind of slow burn long game con.
20:16 But I don't think he actually had a plan like that.
20:19 I think he was like a lot of kids who are 18, 19 years old.
20:22 I think he was just thinking one or two moves ahead.
20:25 Um, so I think that's what I would want to ask him is,
20:29 you know, where did you see this going?
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21:05 Now it doesn't come to a necessarily conclusion but when you think about sort
21:11 of the repercussions because his parents didn't
21:13 I know for people who don't know London
21:16 is a notoriously tabloid place that everything
21:19 goes into these tabloids and this story didn't
21:22 um which is of course it seems like it's fantastic for the tabloids right yeah
21:27 what was the impetus for the parents why did they talk to you and what
21:31 were the tradeoffs you had in that regard
21:34 because I'm assuming it was in your mind.
21:36 Oh, every day.
21:37 Yeah.
21:38 I mean, I So, Zach died in 2019 and his parents kept it quiet.
21:45 You know, I think they're they're both
21:47 very private people and also pretty sophisticated people.
21:50 And I think that they very quickly were able
21:52 to see if the Daily Mail got hold of this story,
21:55 they'd have a field day and it would be really unpleasant for our family.
21:59 And so, when I actually first heard the story, I heard it totally by chance.
22:02 I was producing this Hulu series, Say Nothing, based on my book,
22:06 and I was on set one day and I fell
22:08 into conversation with a guy who knew the family and he said,
22:10 "I might have a story for you." And when I went back to my apartment that night,
22:13 I Googled Zack Breler death balcony and there was nothing.
22:18 So that was, you know, years after his death.
22:20 It had wasn't on the internet anywhere.
22:22 It just interested you.
22:23 The story just interested you like, huh?
22:25 In a in a second.
22:26 I mean, when he when he told me the bare outlines of the story
22:29 that there was this family owed a kid who died in mysterious circumstances,
22:32 and it turned out he'd been pretending he was the son of a Russian oligarch.
22:34 Oh, yeah.
22:35 Hello.
22:36 I was in
22:38 right.
22:37 You know, it was an open question whether the family would talk to me.
22:40 And so, we had a series of conversations totally off the record.
22:43 I didn't even bring a notebook.
22:45 Um, and it was just fortuitous that the police who
22:50 really bungled this investigation had kind of botched the whole thing
22:54 and the formal process had kind of just run its course
22:57 at the point where they happened to meet me and so so they were frustrated.
23:02 Yeah, they were frustrated.
23:03 I think they had an appetite to push a little harder in the investigation.
23:08 And I think they also frankly felt a little gaslit by the police because
23:11 the Metropolitan Police in London had basically
23:13 said you shouldn't expect anything more from us.
23:16 And their perspective was well there all
23:17 these really key people you never called.
23:19 You know there are these rocks you didn't look under.
23:22 And so when I came along they ended up welcoming the idea of me diving into it.
23:28 Now to your to your question,
23:31 um it was a tricky one because I I felt enormous compassion for this family
23:38 and I had a huge amount of access to them,
23:40 not just in conversations, but they gave me
23:43 text messages and emails and all the files that the police
23:46 gave them and they when Zach went missing, they would Matthew,
23:51 Michelle, the parents would record the conversations they had
23:53 in real time with people when they were looking for him.
23:56 They gave me all those recordings,
23:58 but what I said to them from the beginning was, you know,
24:03 I've written a bunch of books and I worked
24:06 for the New Yorker and my north star is always the truth.
24:09 And the truth will probably be somewhat uncomfortable for you.
24:12 It won't be the Daily Mail version of the story,
24:15 but you'll find out what happened.
24:17 Yeah.
24:17 If you let me loose on this story, there will be elements of what I publish
24:22 that in a perfect world you might wish weren't out there.
24:26 And there are, if you read the book,
24:29 there's a bunch of family secrets that come out.
24:32 There's really unpleasant stuff about Zach and his parents
24:36 and his relationship with them and things that happen.
24:39 Um, you know, there are his private Google searches.
24:42 There's there's a lot of stuff in there that um I think
24:46 if Matthew and Michelle had editorial control wouldn't be in the book.
24:50 And so what I had to do was sort
24:51 of manage both my impulse to be compassionate to them
24:55 as people who've lost a child in the terrible
24:57 tragedy very recently and then my impulse as a reporter,
25:01 my imperative as a reporter, which is to get to the bottom of the story
25:04 and tell it in a really wholesome way and write a book,
25:08 you know, that's frankly it's not written for them.
25:10 Um, I'm not in PR and I'm not a therapist.
25:14 I'm, you know, I'm kind of answering to a different master.
25:17 Absolutely.
25:17 And I feel good about where we came out.
25:19 And when we launched the book three weeks ago at the 92nd Street Y in New York,
25:23 they came over as did Joe's ex-bro.
25:25 They were all in New York for the launch.
25:27 So, I feel good about that.
25:28 So, every um episode we get an expert to send us a question.
25:32 Yours comes from Tina Brown, very famous magazine editor.
25:35 Let's listen to it.
25:37 Hi, Cara.
25:38 Hi, Patrick.
25:39 Now, Patrick, I've read your incredible, fascinating, dark book,
25:43 Falling, London Falling, and it really leaves me thinking again,
25:49 as I often do when I read you, just about your methods really in Say Nothing,
25:54 you were able to penetrate the really sort of scary world of the IRA
25:59 and you got deep into those uh relationships
26:02 which were all built on decades of secrets.
26:06 Then in Empire of Pain, your book about the sacloids, you were also again,
26:12 you know, getting extracting information from a world which is was so ligious.
26:17 I mean, there's nobody more difficult and scary
26:20 than the Sacklers because they had an army
26:22 of lawyers and a ton of money and they had suppressed the truth for decades,
26:27 but you they couldn't beat you back.
26:29 And now in this uh London falling,
26:32 you stumbled into this this very uh sinister world of the London
26:36 underground culture that really no none of us had really read about before.
26:41 And I wondered how you got those people.
26:43 Um I wondered how you earned their trust.
26:46 You know, I wondered why they talked to you, frankly,
26:48 because you know, again, they're people who had who held their secrets close.
26:53 uh and that also actually includes the family who
26:56 uh certainly weren't prone to to just chatting to strangers.
26:59 So you have extraordinary way of of getting into people's heads and worlds
27:05 and I was very interested particularly in this new book about how you did that.
27:10 What a good question.
27:11 She is well she's one of the best.
27:13 Right.
27:14 She is she would immediately publish this story.
27:16 She she had her own wrangles with Epstein by the way and others.
27:20 Oh I know.
27:20 I know.
27:21 I know.
27:21 Um and and uh yeah, she's one of the few
27:24 people who comes out of those files smelling good.
27:26 Oh, she kicked him in the nuts is what she did, which is her favorite thing.
27:29 So,
27:31 um yeah, you know, so we we already talked about the Brelers.
27:34 I will say with the underworld folks,
27:36 it's part of what I love about this job is I, you know,
27:40 I I get to sort of move through the world and talk to all kinds
27:45 of different people and I have to find
27:46 a different wavelength to appeal to everyone.
27:49 There is no one approach.
27:51 I will say that sometimes the fact of my earlier work helps.
27:56 The nice thing about doing this work over a period of time,
27:58 you this is my sixth book.
27:59 I've been doing this been writing for the New Yorker for 20 years.
28:02 And so I have a track record.
28:04 You can Google me and get a sense of how I work.
28:07 And that works in funny ways.
28:09 So there's a guy who's a minor character in the book.
28:11 There's a big character in the book who's a gangster named Indian Dave.
28:14 very scary guy who um for a variety of reasons I couldn't talk to Indian Dave
28:21 and um but I I was tracking down people who were associates
28:25 of his in the underworld and there's a guy
28:27 a fairly notorious English gangster named Andy Baker
28:31 and Andy Baker had recently got out of prison
28:34 he's never talked to a journalist before and I made
28:36 an overture to him through intermediaries and he ended up
28:41 agreeing to talk with me and he became a really critical
28:44 source and to this day I don't know why Andy
28:48 decided to talk to me but I think I have
28:50 a theory which is that Andy knew that I had
28:54 written um not once but twice big articles about Chapo
29:00 Guzman
28:59 and I I think there may these guys all have an ego
29:03 I'm sure you've encountered this too car like you know where
29:06 why haven't you called me why haven't you called
29:08 exactly and so I think there was a little bit of a sense maybe
29:10 for Andy of you know finally a journalist
29:12 worthy of my statue in the criminal underworld.
29:17 Sure.
29:16 Uh comes knocking and it's the guy who wrote about El Chapo and um so you know
29:23 story must be told by the finest by somebody who's
29:27 by somebody who was worthy of you know whoever else it is.
29:30 And so um I think it was probably something like that.
29:34 But you know that became a really
29:36 important relationship for the book.
29:37 Andy actually is back in prison now.
29:39 But um but you know he calls me from prison.
29:42 I think I'm going to go.
29:43 He's he's organizing a reading in the prison library.
29:45 I'm going to go and do a book signing in the fall.
29:48 Um but um uh stranger thing.
29:51 It'll be it'll be it'll be a story to tell.
29:54 But um see, no, I'm going to contrast this.
29:56 You're doing that and I was thinking of going I was
29:59 in San Francisco last yesterday and the day before and I
30:02 was thinking of going down to the trial uh and just
30:04 waving at Elon to[ __] with him like, "Hi, hi dude.
30:08 What's up, girl?" You should have done it.
30:10 I know.
30:10 Oh, it would have he would have erupted because we he and I don't speak anymore.
30:14 But imagine the drama.
30:16 Just for me.
30:17 That was just for me.
30:18 That's my inclination.
30:19 So, but go ahead.
30:20 But it would have been for the rest of us had you only gone.
30:23 Correct.
30:23 I thought about it.
30:23 I just thought I just that'll be there's too much swisher out there right now.
30:28 So, anyway, um so go ahead.
30:30 Finish what she was asking.
30:31 Like, so you think Yeah.
30:34 So, you don't I I think that helps sometimes.
30:36 I will often send people articles I've written just to say like here you
30:41 know this will give you a sense of the kind of work that I do.
30:44 But you know I published a piece in the New Yorker um just as the book
30:48 was coming out about this crazy fraud conspiracy
30:51 in New Orleans involving people crashing into tractor trailers.
30:55 Totally different world.
30:56 You know that was the world of um uh
30:59 kind of scuzzy personal injury lawyers in New Orleans.
31:02 Um, and then a lot of people in New Orleans East,
31:05 you know, living in generational poverty and risking their lives to
31:09 make money in these schemes.
31:11 And um, it's just a it's just a different approach.
31:14 That's part of what I like about it is that there is no I don't have a beat.
31:18 I sort of move from one world to the next and I always
31:20 have a little bit of a sense of vertigo trying to figure it out.
31:22 Sure.
31:23 But what what do you do you would you say you do to earn their trust?
31:26 She's asking specifically.
31:27 What do you think you do?
31:30 Uh, I ask good questions.
31:32 I try to um I try to listen well.
31:36 Mhm.
31:37 But honestly, the biggest thing and and this is
31:40 annoying sometimes I think for other journalists
31:42 to hear because I am speaking from a position of um you know what these days
31:49 counts as rare institutional privilege in the sense
31:52 that I can keep coming back because when I'm writing for the New Yorker like
31:55 the piece I just published on New Orleans,
31:57 I started working on that piece in 2021.
32:01 So it just you've got time and um with a book I've got time and I
32:07 keep showing up and that kind of persistence
32:11 and I think in a kind of strange way,
32:12 you know, that sort of novelty of you begins to disappear
32:15 a little bit when they see you keep hanging around.
32:16 Another thing that I've always done is if you won't talk to me,
32:20 I'm going to call the 10 people you talk with all the time and all I
32:25 need is a few of them and if I talk with them for a couple hours,
32:29 they'll come back and say, "Oh, actually he's pretty serious.
32:31 You know, it's not he he's really trying to understand
32:34 this and they'll report back to you." It doesn't always work or it scares them.
32:38 That worked with Steve Case.
32:39 I talked to 25 people around him and he
32:42 he wasn't talking to me and then he's like,
32:44 "I guess I have to talk to you now." And I go, I guess you do.
32:47 I guess you do.
32:48 I mean, I think that's the, you know,
32:50 the line I often use, which is slightly obnoxious,
32:53 but but guess the point across is I'll say the train's leaving the station.
32:57 You get on it or not.
32:58 You know, um I say I'm inevitable, so you might as well.
33:04 Yeah.
33:04 I don't I don't I haven't quite summoned the confidence.
33:07 I'm rudder than you are, Patrick.
33:08 I'm sure you're charming.
33:09 I'm not charming.
33:10 I like it.
33:10 I could learn from you.
33:11 I also I also neg interesting when she was talking about this.
33:15 I find negging a lot of these billionaires
33:18 yields a lot of things, you know, because they're also insecure.
33:22 Yes.
33:22 So they'll go, "Well, you don't ask me about it." I go, "Not really.
33:25 I'm not interested in what you have to say." And then they and then I leave.
33:29 Like I actually go and then they always come back.
33:31 I shouldn't say this because now they'll figure it out.
33:33 But they'll never figure it out.
33:35 The thing is so many of these people, I mean, I don't know.
33:37 I've you you've spent more time around these people than I have,
33:39 but I've written about billionaires over the course of my career.
33:42 And so often, I mean,
33:44 the inherited variety is like a different kind of pathology.
33:47 But the self-made ones, I think almost without exception,
33:52 these are people who have some hole they're
33:54 trying to fill that they're never going to fill.
33:55 I always say their mothers didn't hug them enough,
33:57 but I would say their parents didn't hug them.
33:59 Whatever it is, but there's just
34:01 there's a thing motivating them.
34:03 And um I I wrote a big piece a few years ago for the New Yorker about Larry Gigo
34:08 and the art dealer who who is who you
34:10 know is the dealer for all those types of people.
34:13 And I swear Larry's great genius is realizing that at a certain point you've
34:20 you've got all the boats and all the houses and you're trying to find
34:22 some other way to measure your self-worth visa v your peers and if
34:27 it's you know if it's the best Picasso and you're worried that your rival
34:33 y is going to get it.
34:34 What's happening right now the trial with Musk and opening and Sam Waltman.
34:39 Why are they there?
34:40 Why are they exposing themselves?
34:43 And you think it's that you think it's that it's just a kind of
34:45 It's a dominance of It's a dominance.
34:48 It's a They can't stop the It's not good for anybody.
34:51 They should have settled, you know?
34:53 I I don't know.
34:54 I I think it's a deep deep deep
34:56 insecurity and a sense of victimization then manifests itself.
35:00 But that's another story.
35:01 But you're right, Larry Gagoshian took advantage of that.
35:03 So, one of the things you said after you published,
35:06 the story keeps moving, unfolding, fluttering its wings.
35:09 So, I'm going to check back on some of your other stories.
35:12 Now, I interviewed you for your book in 2022.
35:16 Um, your Empire of Pain about the Sackler
35:18 family that and their role in the opioid crisis.
35:21 I am still incandescent after reading that book, I have to say.
35:25 Not incandescent.
35:26 Someone pointed out I wasn't using it.
35:28 I'm furious.
35:29 Their company Purdue Pharma finally received its sentencing
35:32 in the federal court for fraud and kickback charges.
35:34 They ordered to pay over $8 billion in criminal penalties,
35:37 but none of the Sacklers faced criminal charges, which kills me.
35:43 Yeah.
35:42 How did you react when you heard about the ruling?
35:46 Well, I mean, I knew it was coming.
35:47 It was not a it was it at this point it was sort
35:49 of a formality of something that we that had been uh in the works for years.
35:53 I listen I to me it's
35:55 it is a um really lamentable feature.
36:00 I mean, never mind the fact there was a story, I think,
36:02 in the Financial Times a few weeks ago about how all
36:04 the big white collar criminal defense firms are out of work.
36:07 They're all because because there's no white
36:09 collar criminal defense prosecutions under the Trump administration.
36:12 So, you know, it's open season now, I guess.
36:14 But even in earlier eras, I think there's this crazy thing about
36:18 the way in which we prosecute corporations where you
36:20 can have a situation like this where the corporation
36:22 pleads guilty and pays fines, but no individuals go to prison.
36:27 And it's like you treat the corporation like a driverless car.
36:30 And I just don't know
36:33 as a kind of broad systemic matter that we are going to solve these kinds
36:38 of problems of of like corporate malfeasants of the highest without in this case
36:44 spurs a public health crisis that ends
36:46 up killing hundreds of thousands of people.
36:48 Um I don't know that you're that it's going to end up
36:50 being anything but a speeding ticket if people don't go to jail.
36:53 And so to me it was
36:55 yeah just I mean it was kind of a sad outcome but a sadly predictable one.
37:00 Yeah.
37:00 Do you imagine that will change?
37:02 I mean one of the reason I was interviewing
37:04 all these parents so much as I was hoping
37:06 lawsuits would occur right when people hear
37:09 this or that that federal regulators would finally pay attention or politicians.
37:14 And one of the companies, I think I've done two of the parents,
37:17 but I talk about it a lot.
37:18 Like this was years ago,
37:19 I started doing this on these these chatbot suicide things.
37:23 And one of the companies said to me, "When are you going to stop?" And I said,
37:27 "When you go to jail,
37:28 I'm hoping that's my goal here really for one of you to go to jail."
37:33 But it didn't happen in this case when there's so clear a line,
37:36 a bright line that you drew and many
37:37 others did between the Sacklers and what happened.
37:42 Yeah.
37:42 But but but again I mean I think the thing
37:44 that's so frustrating right is that we have if
37:47 you look at the chat bots right we in theory
37:50 I don't know I want to live in a society in which we in which we sort of learn
37:54 and improve over time and when you have certain forms
37:57 of corporate transgressions in which people are making decisions
38:00 on the basis of you know their their valuation or ROI or
38:07 shareholder value or whatever you know whatever these kind of uh
38:10 these considerations are where they say okay I'm going do the wrong thing.
38:13 I'm We're actually going to sell out the country.
38:15 We're going to sell out families like that um in the interest of
38:20 for King Charles.
38:21 Well, that's the thing.
38:22 But this is it's funny.
38:23 This is a thing I come back to a lot recently.
38:27 There's a um a friend of mine, a guy named David D.
38:30 Young, who wrote a terrific book that came
38:32 out a few years ago called Nazi Billionaires.
38:35 And it kind of is what it says on the tin, right?
38:38 It's like a story about the generation
38:39 of German industrialists who weren't ideological
38:44 Nazis but kind of made peace with the Third Reich because they realized it's
38:50 good for business and they said you know we are running these corporate empires
38:52 and actually that's the first and foremost
38:54 that should be our consideration is we
38:56 need to protect the business and I remember thinking specifically about the tech
39:02 barons when they you know in this new phase when they all started you
39:05 know with the inauguration thinking boy I'd love send them this book just
39:09 to give them a sense of how their grandkids are going to think about them.
39:14 Um, but the irony, right, is that like, well, here's the thing.
39:17 If you read the whole book, those families,
39:20 like the grandkids are now the wealthiest people in Germany.
39:23 That's right.
39:23 They don't That's exactly right.
39:25 I'm going to move on to your other book, Breakout Book, Say Nothing,
39:27 is about a kidnapping that set against
39:29 the backdrop of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
39:31 The political violence we've seen recently,
39:33 United States doesn't come anywhere near
39:34 what happened in Northern Ireland, obviously,
39:36 but it's concerning and the recent the latest assassination attempt of the White
39:40 House correspondents was only a few days ago and feels already like old news.
39:44 Are there any do you find any parallels having
39:47 written about the troubles or in here or not?
39:51 Uh, I do and I don't.
39:53 Yeah, I I it's funny when I was working on the book,
39:56 I guess I started working on the book on the article that became
39:58 the book in 2014 and I finished the book and it came out in 2018
40:03 2019 and during that time I mostly felt like I was writing a period
40:08 piece about a very foreign situation
40:10 that as an American I couldn't particularly relate to.
40:14 Um, but then you know, you got the Black Lives Matter protests and you got
40:19 these militarized cops out on the streets and tear gas and suddenly
40:23 just the kind of visual iconography of American life started
40:27 to look a lot more like the early days of the Troubles.
40:32 Um, I think that the kind of the depths of the division and you know there
40:40 was I I thought about it when when
40:42 ICE killed those two civilians um several months ago.
40:47 the response by people who very quickly
40:52 were looking to dehumanize them in one way, you know, um, oh, he he had a gun,
40:59 you know, he had a concealed carry permit or she was gay or whatever,
41:03 you know, immediately looking for some reason
41:06 not to think of them as human beings, like fellow human beings.
41:09 That's a very Northern Ireland thing.
41:11 the idea that that all deaths are not created equal,
41:14 that they're coded differently, and how you feel about them should be
41:18 really a function of the identity of the person who dies.
41:22 Um, that really worries me.
41:23 You know, I um I was at a thing
41:27 last summer in Maine and I saw George Mitchell speak
41:32 and he was talking about the Good Friday Agreement which
41:37 ended the Troubles and somebody asked him in the Q&A
41:41 if because he was very involved in that decision and ending this, you know,
41:44 three decade conflict.
41:45 Somebody asked him if he thought that there there could have been
41:48 a Good Friday agreement in a world in which social media existed.
41:53 And he said he he thinks he said, "I've thought about it and I don't think so.
41:56 I think if social media had had existed in 1998, we never
42:00 and weaponizes everything even more so because bots are in there.
42:04 Um, you know, and of course it's created out of rage and desperation.
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43:18 Now, you you also hosted a podcast called Wind of Change,
43:21 where you dig into the allegation that the CIA ghost wrote
43:24 a song for West German heavy metal band during the Cold War.
43:27 Um, you said that making it was the most fun you've ever had.
43:30 Why did you get out of podcasting?
43:32 Why aren't you doing Are you doing more?
43:34 I've got one in the works actually with the same um Yeah.
43:37 Yeah.
43:37 I mean, in the nature of the messed up podcasting industry,
43:43 the company that made that, Pineapple Street, doesn't exist anymore.
43:46 They were terrific people.
43:48 I did my succession podcast with them.
43:51 So, great.
43:51 And but the two people who I worked
43:54 with most closely on that, Joel Levelvel and Henry Molovski.
43:56 I am um I'm collaborating with again.
43:59 It's very early stages of a new podcast.
44:01 It's not about spying.
44:02 It is about music.
44:04 It's really fun.
44:05 And um yeah, I loved it.
44:07 I loved it and I love working with those guys.
44:09 You know, writing is solitary stuff.
44:13 Make a podcast.
44:13 You're like, it's like running off to join the circus.
44:15 It's really fun.
44:16 I'm having a lot of fun.
44:18 This is the best part of my career, I have to say.
44:20 Um we talked briefly about El Chapo.
44:22 He wanted you to write his memoir and you turned him down, by the way.
44:25 Just Andy Baker.
44:26 Um and you said access is overrated.
44:29 I would completely agree with you and Walter
44:32 Eisen should have agreed with me on that issue.
44:34 Um, where do you draw the line over what stories you'll cover?
44:37 And when it comes to writing someone's memoir,
44:40 would you say yes to someone that might surprise me
44:43 or is there someone you would even with or without access?
44:47 I don't think I would write anybody's memoir.
44:50 Yeah, I wouldn't ghost write anybody's memoir.
44:51 I, you know, um, it's funny.
44:55 I go back to actually a conversation I had with Larry Gozian
44:57 when we were at his beach house in Amagancet and he has all
45:01 these amazing I mean he's got surprise surprise he has an incredible art
45:05 collection and um he's been painted by all kinds of people you know David
45:09 Hawkchney did a portrait of of Gigosian and we were talking about the big
45:14 12,000word piece I was in the process of writing about him and I
45:19 think he was my sense is that he was a little bit uncomfortable
45:22 because he's so used to the art press which is a little bit,
45:25 you know, as you'll relate,
45:26 it's a little bit like parts of the tech press, right?
45:29 Where the the people who are just on the beat are kind
45:31 of really what they're hoping is that they'll they'll get the next interview,
45:34 they'll get invited to the party.
45:35 And um that wasn't me.
45:37 And he was, I think, becoming aware of that.
45:42 Yeah.
45:41 And uh I was trying to sort of prepare him for um my piece.
45:46 And I said, you know, when you when you see the piece,
45:48 it's not going to be like looking at a photo of yourself.
45:50 It's going to be like looking at a at a painting that somebody's painted.
45:55 somebody else's
46:01 I just sat for you know David Hawkchney painting Larry Gigosian doesn't actually
46:06 look like the way Larry Gozian sees himself right it's all filtered through
46:11 Hchney's perception that's the way I I see my writing and and and so I think
46:16 it's one thing to write a story like London falling where I have
46:19 a ton of access to this family it's a very intimate account of the family.
46:22 Um, but I wouldn't make any claim for it being their story.
46:26 Like if their name was on the cover along with mine and it was a memoir,
46:31 it's just that's just not what I do, you know?
46:33 Would there be anyone you might say yes to like in that regard?
46:37 Nobody.
46:37 Nobody.
46:38 I agree.
46:39 Yeah.
46:39 Um, yeah, Access is overrated.
46:41 I did some of that with the journal.
46:42 I hated it.
46:43 I hated it.
46:43 It was so I just I'm so glad I don't I'm so glad they're not talking to me.
46:49 I love it.
46:49 It's the best life.
46:50 I mean I feel I think it's better and I
46:53 think that the the story I always tell is you know
46:55 I find out anyway it doesn't matter.
46:57 Well you get all the and but you get better stuff.
46:59 I mean you know with the Sacklers none of them talk to me
47:02 and so I got you know I got doormen I got administrative assistants.
47:06 I got college roommates.
47:07 I got a yoga instructor who travel because when you're the Sacklers you
47:11 you know you go on vacation and you bring your yoga instructor with you.
47:15 um all those kinds of people, you know, I don't know.
47:18 Would it have been better to have the family
47:20 talking to me with their lawyers and their PR people?
47:23 I don't think so.
47:25 Um I'm always very sincere when I say to people,
47:28 I want to talk, you know, like let's hear.
47:31 I want to hear what you have to say.
47:33 Um but when they say no, that's never the end of the story from
47:38 Especially if you're a good reporter, it doesn't matter.
47:40 That's the one lesson I learned far too late, I think, in some ways.
47:44 Um, let's wrap up with some reflections on larger trends.
47:47 Very quickly, I'm gonna ask you I'm not gonna ask you about your J Crew ad.
47:50 I'm in the Devil Wears Prodatitude, so I can't.
47:52 Um, but you managed to become a famous magazine writer
47:56 at a time when magazines can feel like anacronisms as as you noted,
48:00 with a few exceptions.
48:01 New Yorker, I would say Vogue, a New York magazine is going pretty well.
48:05 Atlantic is.
48:07 Um, Say Nothing was adapted into a TV series uh for FX.
48:11 A24 has already optioned the rights for to your works,
48:14 including the rights to London Falling.
48:16 Obviously, it's such a clear I I was like, "Hello,
48:19 Netflix um before it was even published." How do you
48:23 feel ever feel like an entrepreneur who produces and sells IP?
48:26 I I've sold a lot of rights of stuff, too,
48:28 so I'm super aware of this world, but it's a different world.
48:32 It's sort of an omnimedia world.
48:34 How do you look at it?
48:36 Oh, boy.
48:36 I mean, I have a bunch of feelings about this.
48:40 I uh when I first started writing for the New Yorker,
48:43 I was freelance for six years before they put me on staff.
48:47 And they basically would publish one big piece a year, but nothing more.
48:51 And that forced me to learn how to hustle a little bit.
48:55 And so I started doing some screenwriting.
48:57 I did all kinds of different things.
48:59 I was at a think tank, you know, various things.
49:01 And I never really lost that even after I went on staff at the magazine.
49:06 And I think generally speaking, you'd be crazy in this moment.
49:09 Even if what you love most is magazine journalism, um at least for me,
49:13 just in terms of the economics of it and and the trend lines and so forth,
49:18 um I think it's good for everybody to have some kind of side hustle.
49:20 I do a bunch of things.
49:22 I um you know, I write scripts, I produce TV, I do podcasting.
49:30 Um, and it and and they all actually kind of feed into each
49:34 other creatively in a way that feels pretty healthy and useful to me.
49:38 Strangely enough, my, you know,
49:39 for years I was a an unproduced screenwriter getting paid
49:42 good money to write scripts for studios that they didn't make.
49:45 And all of that all those years in the trenches as a screenwriter actually
49:49 helped my non-fiction writing in all kinds
49:51 of ways that I wouldn't necessarily have predicted.
49:54 Um the the area in which it gets tricky I
50:01 think or the area in which I'm maybe a little
50:03 bit different from other magazine journalists is I think there's
50:07 a kind of sad trend that you've seen with the decline
50:10 of the industry in general which is that a bunch
50:12 of people now when they sit down to write a magazine
50:13 article or they conceive of a magazine article what they're
50:16 really thinking about is can I get an option in Hollywood
50:20 and I've I've been lucky in that regard.
50:23 I've had a lot of stuff optioned and some stuff made,
50:26 but I never ever ever pick a story on that basis.
50:28 I think it's a mistake to do that.
50:31 As a general rule, kind of across life, I think
50:34 you should focus on making the thing you're doing
50:36 be the best version of that thing and not I couldn't imagine honestly
50:41 kind of focusing on a project in front of me,
50:43 but in the back of my mind thinking how
50:46 cool it would be if it was something else.
50:47 If like if that's what you want to do, just go do that other thing.
50:49 In my view, that's a good point.
50:52 I think it leads to a lot of bad magazine writing.
50:54 So yes, I've been fortunate in that regard,
50:57 but I never um I never give any thought to that.
51:02 We never show things to people.
51:04 I mean, there's crazy stuff that happens
51:06 in this business among magazine journalists,
51:08 but there are people who will they'll cut life rights deals
51:12 with the subjects of their stories before they've published, which to me feels
51:15 Oh, wow.
51:16 Like it's just not a thing that I would that I would do personally.
51:21 Um And and some of that, listen, it's a little like the slammers, right?
51:24 Some of that comes from the desperation of people trying to make a living
51:27 in a in an industry that's rapidly contracting.
51:30 And so maybe I'm maybe some of my virtue
51:32 here is just a reflection of the fact that I've
51:34 you know that I've been fortunate that I don't
51:36 um I don't have to make those kinds of concessions.
51:39 But I would it would feel very weird for me if I were um
51:44 it would feel like a a pretty distinct conflict of interest if I were
51:47 trying to sign people up sign up the life rights of people who I
51:50 was then going to write a magazine article about which I hadn't published yet.
51:54 Right.
51:54 But you do have to think about I everything I do I'm like is
51:56 this better as a podcast or should it be a book or should it be Yes.
52:00 I spent a lot of time or maybe I'll do this this way
52:03 and so it's I'm constantly thinking about other ways to tell a story that I
52:07 don't you feel as though
52:08 Yeah I am too but I feel as though that's the the great thing about that is that
52:12 that's right everything has a kind of natural medium in which
52:15 it wants to so so wind change my podcast
52:18 I think would have been it wouldn't have worked as a magazine article.
52:22 You certainly could have done it, but you're right.
52:24 You're right.
52:25 You could, but it comes I'm not I'm spoiling nothing
52:27 here to say it lands in a slightly inconclusive place,
52:31 which I knew would be the case from the get.
52:34 And I felt as though if people listen to if people read a story and it
52:41 takes them hours and hours to read the story and at the end you're inconclusive,
52:45 they will feel frustrated because they've given you
52:48 their whole attention span for a certain amount
52:50 of time and then you've gotten to the end
52:51 and you haven't totally delivered the goods.
52:54 If they're listening to a podcast and they can
52:56 be washing the dishes or walking their dog's music
52:59 or, you know, on the bike or whatever.
53:01 Yeah.
53:01 Exactly.
53:02 And there's music.
53:03 Um, I mean there's a bunch of reasons why it worked better.
53:05 Yeah, there's lots of ways to tell a story.
53:07 Okay, I have two last questions.
53:08 I saw a Tik Tok um from the late show
53:12 Book Club where you said if you're doing your job,
53:14 this is the inevitable AI question, by the way.
53:17 If you're doing your job in a way that AI can easily replicate,
53:20 you're probably not doing your job well.
53:21 I could not agree more.
53:23 Your and I don't think you were saying that in a cavalier way.
53:26 Your point was that journalism unears new information by gumpture reporting,
53:30 making calls, going out in the world to talk to people.
53:32 There's also an element of creativity that is not replicable.
53:36 They can do a very close faximile.
53:38 I just made a version of myself that is pretty close.
53:42 Um, an avatar, a 3D avatar.
53:45 Um, is there a place for AI and journalism?
53:47 Because at some point they could be making calls,
53:50 sending emails, potentially do reporting.
53:53 Um, or it could even involve a con because AI may not identify itself as AI,
53:58 although that would be a good Patrick Raden Keefe story.
54:01 Um, it how do you look at it?
54:04 Everyone sort of has a take right now.
54:06 Do you have one?
54:08 I mean, I don't have a, you know, I don't have a bumper sticker take.
54:11 I do use AI.
54:13 It's been really helpful for me in really narrow ways.
54:17 And so, um, don't use it for anything associated with writing.
54:21 And I should say I I now get, as I'm sure to you, um,
54:25 these kind of clever spam emails that sneak past my filter
54:30 that are you can immediately tell that they're written by AI.
54:34 And, um, I think that a lot of the I think it's it's I think it's
54:38 such a mug's game to think that AI is going to help you with your writing.
54:41 It's it's one of those funny things where I I honestly feel as though
54:44 six months ago there were people who there was a certain kind of person who
54:47 thought that this was a good idea and now we know like in fact
54:50 it sort of flattens everything out and and you you can tell when you're reading.
54:55 Um I don't use it for that stuff.
54:57 I I will tell you the area in which it's been amazingly helpful.
55:00 Um, and I want to kind of pick my words carefully
55:03 because I don't want to tip too much about what this um,
55:06 I was working on a project and uh,
55:10 basically what I said to Claude and Chachi PT was
55:15 there's a certain kind of lawsuit that I'm really interested in.
55:18 And this lawsuit is really only about 10 or 15 years old.
55:21 The law changed and suddenly there started being these new lawsuits.
55:25 And I'll bet that there's the equivalent of like a big-
55:29 time kind of ambulance chaser who does this sort of thing.
55:32 And probably among the many people who started doing this 10 or 15 years ago,
55:36 there are some who are more prominent, have more prominent cases,
55:40 talk to the press and are big characters and I want you to find me those names.
55:46 And it went and gave me the two names.
55:49 And that's the kind of thing that it would have taken me, you know,
55:52 it could have taken me a day or two in the past for that stuff.
55:56 Great.
55:56 I think there are all kinds of uses um for for that's an excellent example
56:02 AI, but the um not in writing,
56:04 but in the actual writing or worse in the um I mean,
56:08 I think the point I was trying to make in that video was
56:11 your job is not to take[ __] that's on the internet and rearrange it.
56:15 But you wouldn't want it to make calls or send emails or do reporting for you.
56:19 You never do that.
56:20 But I mean, why do people trust me?
56:21 Well, part of the reason is that you're never going to I'm
56:24 never going to lay you off on an assistant, much less an AI.
56:27 I am accessible.
56:29 I am reachable.
56:30 I'm pretty straightforward.
56:32 I try and be as transparent as possible.
56:34 So, I don't know.
56:35 I mean, I guess there are some people who are I feel like I'm pretty busy.
56:39 I guess there are some people who are so busy that they need to ridiculous
56:42 outsource in that way.
56:43 But to me, the thing is, what's the world you want to live in?
56:45 I mean, some of this is that I'm you're catching me after 3 weeks of going
56:49 out and talking in rooms with people about
56:52 my book and meeting with people who've read it.
56:56 I just don't think there's I think ultimately as human beings,
57:00 we want to see other humans and read a human face.
57:03 And even in a universe in which you say,
57:06 "Isn't it uncanny the way the the way the avatar
57:09 seems like a real human face?" At a certain point,
57:12 people are going to get pretty icked out by that.
57:15 and want the real thing.
57:16 They do, but the numbers are growing enormously.
57:18 This used to be an outlier.
57:20 All these chat bots used to be an out.
57:21 I just interviewed Cherry Turkl about this.
57:23 It used to be an outlier and strange and now
57:25 it's very common unfortunately and very bad for people's health.
57:29 Um, let me ask you the last question.
57:30 In the recent New York Times profile,
57:32 you said everywhere you looked there were people doing morally grotesque things.
57:37 Um, and that while you may not be part of the solution,
57:39 you're not part of the problem.
57:41 And that's something.
57:42 I know what you mean.
57:43 Um, you got a a law degree from Yale,
57:46 which explains how your interest in your law,
57:48 and had a job lined up at a corporate law firm,
57:51 and but managed to sell a book and a New Yorker
57:53 article in the nick of time and never went down that path.
57:57 What would your life be like if you became a corporate lawyer?
58:00 And can you imagine yourself leading a morally grotesque life?
58:05 Uh, it's hilarious.
58:06 Maybe a sackler lawyer perhaps.
58:08 Yeah, exactly.
58:08 Well, I mean, listen, there's I think about this stuff all the time,
58:10 and if you read Empire of Pain,
58:12 the first person you meet in that book is Mary Joe White.
58:15 Uh, longtime lawyer to the Sacklers.
58:17 Slap her.
58:18 Um, oh, man.
58:19 Um, did I liked her?
58:23 Well, that's the thing.
58:23 She was a hero to a lot of people,
58:25 but but behind the scenes doing some pretty And again, like perfectly,
58:28 you know, her legal right to do that work,
58:30 but the idea that we would celebrate this person seems just gross to me.
58:35 Um, yeah.
58:35 I mean, it's funny.
58:36 I don't I think I would really struggle with it.
58:38 I I didn't want to come off too self-righteous in that times piece.
58:42 The point that I was making was just
58:45 I have no trouble explaining to my kids and I'll have no trouble
58:48 explaining to my grandkids what I was doing at this moment in history.
58:52 And I don't I don't know that I'll be able to boast about having,
58:56 you know, help helped turn the ship around.
58:58 I wish I could.
59:00 Um but I certainly it hasn't, you know, it hasn't been Yeah.
59:03 You know, full full speed ahead.
59:04 let me uh contribute to the you know the the kind
59:08 of um pretty dire direction in which we're going.
59:12 I think what my wife I should say and this is maybe a good place
59:14 to end what my wife would say is I would have been a terrible lawyer.
59:17 I mean leaving aside all the kind of moral choices.
59:20 Right.
59:20 I would have been so bad at it and um leaking everything.
59:24 Oh, let me tell you about Enron reporter.
59:26 Right.
59:26 Right.
59:27 Right.
59:27 So, I mean, hey, I guess I guess in that respect, maybe, yeah,
59:30 maybe um maybe the way in which I would sort of sabotage the machine
59:33 would just to be just be to uh you know, to be incompetent.
59:36 Um yeah, I guess I don't know.
59:37 You might have ended up like the lawyer in the Pelican Brief,
59:40 so be careful about that.
59:42 Exactly.
59:42 You are part of the solution in case
59:43 you're interested just from someone who admires you.
59:47 You're more than just not part of the problem.
59:49 Um in any case, it's a wonderful book.
59:51 It's really a great read.
59:53 It kept me up all night.
59:54 I'm exhausted.
59:55 Um, but I really appreciate it and I'm excited to uh see what you do next.
1:00:00 Oh, what a pleasure.
1:00:01 Thanks, Karen.
1:00:02 Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Rel,
1:00:04 Michelle Aloy, Katherine Milsop, Megan Bernie, and Kayn Lynch.
1:00:08 Nishad Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast.
1:00:12 Special thanks to Sam Lee, Katherine Barner, and Julia Sharp Leavine.
1:00:16 Our theme music is by Trackademics.
1:00:19 If you're already following the show,
1:00:20 you get to model in a J Crew ad or be in the Devil Wears Prada, too.
1:00:25 If not, you're part of the problem.
1:00:27 Thanks for watching.
1:00:28 See you on Thursday.