This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an award winning writer, author, and investigative journalist. His New York Times best selling books include Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing. Patrick raden Keith is also a staff writer of The New Yorker, and his work has been recognized with the National Magazine Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His nonfiction books Say Nothing, was named by The New York Times as one of the twenty best books of the twenty first century, and it has since been adapted as a limited series for Hulu. This was not the first time raden Keith's work inspired a series.
I was also an executive producer on a series last year on Netflix called Painkiller, which was.
With Matthew Yes, you were involved in that. That's loosely based on your my Socer reporting. Its SACER reporting for The New York So of course, the idea that you write a book at you and at some point an editor you work on that kind of stuff and it's a thousand people. Yeah, it was somewhat involved in some way. Of making your project helping to realize it. How did the difference feel to you?
Well, on Painkiller, I was involved in a much more arms length kind of way. There was one thing produce eily I did on that project that made a big difference, which is, at a certain point we were in kind of a culd sack. It wasn't going to get made where it had originally started, and I brought it to a producer friend of mine, Eric Newman, who had a deal with Netflix, and that was my one big contribution to that show. But creatively I wasn't all that involved.
Say nothing was much different. The book when it was finished, felt like exactly the book I had wanted to write, but also a book about material. It's pretty fraught, and so we never sent it out to the town. We never showed it to a bunch of different producers. What happened was there was a friend of mine who read the book, a guy named Brad Simpson who had known
for about ten years, who is a producer. Brad's wonderful, and he works with a woman named Jacobson, and they had made the People versus O. J. Simpson, which I thought was kind of an exemplary limited series about another vexed issue, race in America, and their pitch to me was, if you give us the rights of the book, we won't go away and make a show and come back with the show. We'll bring you along and you'll be there every day through the process. And that was appealing
to me in a number of respects. I mean partially because it ended up being like going to producing school. I learned so much working with them, and also because I got to be in the middle of the thing and have in theory a kind of custodial role where
I'm there protecting the book and protecting the work. In practice, as you say, there was a learning curve for me because you get into the middle of it and you realize that you know, you're one voice in the room, and it's a privilege to be a voice in the room, but you're not the only voice, and you're not the last voice.
I have found over the years when I would make films of whatever scope and budget. Eventually, over the years what I learned is that let's talk money first. Don't give any notes. I never give notes to directors and writers and producers that expand the schedule and add money, change locations change cities.
Why don't we shoot this in Paris?
Yeah, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower instead of the Gowanis Canal, you know whatever, because the money has become now so precious. How A guy walk to me on the street the other day, he said, do you have any advice for me? I said, you can't love everything. You divide all your scenes in the movie into two categories, the ones we like and the ones we love. And it says Bob gets out of the car, walks into the bank, do it in one shot and move on.
I mean, just that idea that everything I learned beyond screenwriting and character and so forth and acting, and I learned how to speak money.
And budget with those people.
But it's also kind of triage, right, So yeah, I mean the experience of writing a book.
How long did it take you to write that book?
Four years, depending on how you account because initially it was a piece in the New Yorker, and I didn't take any book leaves, so I was working full time at the magazine on other things as I was writing the book. So it took a while. But I wasn't just working on the book. But you have total control or near total control of each word. So there was the sort of humbling experience of getting into the big machine where there are budgets and schedules and other producers
and you're dealing with actors and they have ideas. But there's also just the experience. And I think this is maybe what you're getting at, which is that when the cost of a day is what it is, there's a kind of creative triage that you have to do that As a nonfiction writer, where the stakes are so much lower, in a way, you just don't I mean, I'm working on a book now, and I might finish next month, I might finish in June, I might finish it next year.
And it's not that people won't be unhappy if the timeline extends, but nobody's going to lose their job over it.
When the timeline extends. Is there a typical reason? Does it always change?
My hope would be that if I turn in a book that feels like it's half baked, I'm gonna hear about it and somebody will say, doesn't feel right, Yeah, nice, try go back and do it again.
You have a constant editor, the same editor, so.
I've been working with the same editor both at the magazine and my book publisher. I started with these two guys in two thousand and six, so we're going on twenty years.
Gots when you began at the New Yorker.
Yes, in terms of writing in general, when you submit to The New Yorker and you write Columbia, does Columbia have some formal pipeline to the New Yorker in terms of its journalistic mantle?
The Columbia School of Journalism?
So if we do the but how does or do you come from a family that owns like steel mills or something where where the New Yorker picks up the phone and takes your submissions.
Now do you get in there when you're a young college student?
Well?
I didn't.
That was the whole thing, is that. I what I'm going to describe now will seem like a vanished time. In nineteen ninety seven nineteen ninety eight, what I was doing was writing things, going to Kinko's, printing them out, putting them in a yellow envelope, or nailing them to the New Yorker, and then I would get back a paper rejection slip. And I started doing that probably my
junior year of college, which was crazy. I mean it was there was unbelievable hubris in thinking that I had any place pitching The New Yorker at all, and I pitched them for seven years before they accepted something.
I could see the un vote now Keith in the corner one hundred and fifty first, and I mean, this is the thing dropped by the bridge.
Truly.
It's like the East Campus dormitory. You know, sweet ten Ceah.
But when you leave, you go to law school.
You don't finish law school, and you come back and finish law school correct and take the bar. Okay, why no law career.
I sort of went to law school with a bit of bad faith. I had this idea, actually even before college, that it would be cool to be a New Yorker writer, not a journalist, not a magazine journalist, but a writer for the New Yorker. And I wasn't able to make it happen in terms of just connections or good ideas or the wherewithal or the good writing or whatever it was that it would have taken to get an assignment. I couldn't get it. Who was in charge then Tina
Brown initially, and then Remnick. Yeah, I mean Remnick was sort of I was pitching at it right around the time that Remnick took over, and I went off to grad school in the UK for a couple of years, which was kind of an easy choice because I got a fellowship. It was effectively free. It was like, do you want to go on live in England for a few years and go to grad school?
Yes? I do.
And at that point I liked being in school. I liked being a student. I thought it was a great lifestyle. I thought I haven't made it work as a journalist yet, so I'm going to buy some time and if I go to law school. The upside is if I really whiff and I never get an assignment from the New Yorker, I'll have a good fallback. I would say to any young aspiring journalists listening, this is not the best way to approach the ambition. It is a time consuming, indirect expensive I'll be.
Over here waiting for you to call me at law school exactly.
But that's what I did, and I ended up getting not a magazine assignment. Initially, I got a book deal my first year in law school and took some time off to write that book. And the book was it was a book called Chatter, about eavesdropping by government agencies. I thought I would pick a really easy subject for a non fiction book, and so I wrote about the most secretive agency of the US government, the National Security Agency.
When I did the movie Hunt For at October and I sat there with Tom Clancy, the Tom Clancy, and I said, you know, you're this master storyteller. I said, where did it all come from? He said, well, A lot of it was research. And he said, I would sit with people. I would contact people, they have lunch with me, they have a drink with me, and they'd give me information on a non attribution basis. And he goes in the third part with my imagination, Yeah, do
you go there? You're how old when you start the book Chatter?
Ah? God, I was young. I was inind of mid twenties.
So when you're calling people to get some information about this, what's their attitude toward you?
I mean, if I was calling from the Washington Post, they wouldn't have taken the call. And I'm saying, I am a first year law student in New Haven who's never written a book before, you know, published a few articles in his high school newspaper. I had no business writing that book. I had sort of a funny experience. This was at a time when there was a lot of consolidation happening in the big publishers, and I ended up with four different editors on that book because they
kept getting fired. But one of them was a wonderful woman I'm still in touch with, named Eileen Smith. When I was halfway through the book, Allen Smith suggested that I read this book by Jeff Dyer called Out of Sheer Rage. It's a book about DH Lawrence, but it's really a book about how Jeff Dyer is having trouble writing a book about DH Lawrence and chatter perhaps unduly influenced by Dyer that came about Patrick Hughes failure to write a book about the NSA and what does that
mean for us as citizens? And YadA, YadA, YadA. It is not a book that I look back on now with a great surge of pride.
Why did you choose that as your first book? Meaning in your childhood, in your development of your sensibilities about politics and the economy and society, what have you? What was it you like for you, politically, culturally, educationally as a child, I grew.
Up in a neighborhood called Dorchester in Boston, which is part of the city of Boston. It's the biggest neighborhood in Boston. It is economically, racially, ethnically very diverse. And my mother taught at UMass Boston, which is the big public university, which is actually in Dorchester. My father worked in state government. He worked for Mikeducaucus. I'm similarly kind of progressive, democratic politics obsessed background. You know, my mother
was a professor of philosophy. The house was full of books.
You're a good student, I was. I.
So it's funny. I grew up in Dorchester and I went to a fancy private school. I went to a school called Milton Academy, which is just outside of Boston, very good prep school. It was a great school at which I felt pretty mediocre because it was such a concentration of brilliant, hard working kids. And I had a kind of an impulse that I was a smart kid, but I didn't necessarily on a curve. I didn't have the grades to show it, because there's always some other the NFL, some other genius there.
We got outge right right.
So for me, there was this kind of funny experience where I didn't, you know, out of high school and I applied to Columbia, I didn't get in. I took a year off, I applied again. I got to Columbia where there was a little bit more of a Bell curve in terms of people's motivation and ability. And it was the first time in my life where I felt like there was a kind of input output ratio where I was, you know, getting good grades and feelings though if you if you do the work, you get the rewards.
So this first book, I'm just always curious about this kind of origins and the thing you choose this book why to seem.
Like a kids from a very specific place. So I finished college, I go off to the UK. I was at Cambridge University for a year where I studied international relations, and then I went into the London School of Economics. When I was at Cambridge, this is ninety nine, two thousand, there was an investigation happening in the European Parliament into
this thing that they called Echelon. And I had never heard of this, but Echelon had kind of been revealed in a little bit of investigative reporting, and the idea was that the US and four of its allies sometimes known as the Five Eyes, but basically the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK were secretly cooperating on global leaves dropping, where they kind of carved up the world and everybody can they can kind of listen in and share information that they're able to do anyone, hover up
to anyone they want. And the EU at the time, because the UK then as part of the EU, was concerned that this was maybe violating data protection laws within the EU, and so they started investigating this. And this was a big front page story in the UK and in Europe, and it wasn't covered at all in the
New York Times. Like this is the early days of the Internet, and so I would sort of read the New York Times and I couldn't see any coverage of it, and that dissonance seemed interesting to me, and so I ended up writing a master's thesis at the Lund School of Economics about eavesdropping and the NSA and echelon and this investigation and all that kind of stuff, which at the time was a really obscure subject to know anything about. I come back to go to law school in the
fall of two thousand and one. I'm in a civil procedure class, the beginning of my second week of law school, and the student rushes into the room and says a plan just to the World Trade Center. And it was this confluence of a few things. I had been failing to make any inroads as a magazine writer, and I
had this not much knowledge. I wrote a master's thesis, right, I wrote like a fifty page paper, but it was like a fork full of knowledge about something that it seemed really obscure at the time, and then suddenly, post nine to eleven, it's highly relevant. There's all these questions about, you know, where these conversations intercepted between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. When did we intercept them, When did we translate them? What do we know? Can we hear Bin Lauden? Does
he use a phone? All these kinds of.
Things determined to strike within you.
I go, yeah, exactly. It's crazy to think about this in retrospect, but I thought, well, maybe if I can't sell a magazine article, I could sell a book.
Interesting.
This is one of these the kind of other version of your life flashes before your eyes in which I'm not sitting across from you today because I'm an unhappy lawyer somewhere. But I thought, well, you need an agent. How do you find an agent? And I just looked through the stack of books that I had recently read, and I started checking the acknowledgments to see who these
people thinked. And in this stack of maybe ten books, one of them was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlasser, and one of them this is a very two thousand and one story, and the other was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Clodwell, which at the time had just come out recently, and they both thank the same woman, and her name was Tina Bennett. And I looked Tina up and I sent an email to her, just a few paragraphs saying I'm a student at law school, I think there might be a book and this stuff that I did.
And three hours later she called me. And what's funny about the story is there was no second agent on the list. Like if I didn't, I wasn't being actually all that systematic about it. It was incredibly lucky that she called back, because I don't know that I would have had the kind of fortitude to do what a lot of people do, which is muscle through and put in the kind of months of research and deal with the rejection. And then the eighth agent on the list is the one who turns out to.
Be your agent. That's your first book. I'm wondering.
Do you finish the book and it's still the New Yorker is calling your name?
Oh? Yeah, yeah, And then what happens?
I think the existence of the book. I mean, it's funny again, I look back at that book, and I would it's a book that I would I would probably write much differently if I wrote it today, if I wrote it at all. But a book has a kind of value as an artifact. Sometimes it's a it's a calling card. And it may be that the existence of that book just made them look at me a little bit more closely. But I had this kind of funny experience where I ended up going back to finish law
school after taking a year off. I was commuting from Mele, I was living in the village and commuting to New Haven. I mean, my heart was really not in it, and spent a lot of time on Metro North and I finished. I figured, Okay, well, you might as well take the bar now. At the time when you study for the bar exam, you would go to these in person courses.
So I was going to NYU and I would walk from my apartment on Leroy Street to this NYU classroom and to the review of the bar stuff, which is just the most mind numbingly tedious material you can imagine. And I would sit in the back row and read the daily news and drink coffee. And there was a trial happening that summer, not far away from where I was, of a woman from Chinatown who was a human smuggler
and her name was Sister Ping. And so rather than pay attention to all this legal stuff that I should have been following Yale Legal, I was very absorbed in this story of this human smuggler in Chinatown and ended up pitching that as a story to the New Yorker, and that was the one.
I mean.
There was really kind of a ticking clock because I was actually supposed to go and work at a law firm that fall, and I kept delaying my start date, waiting to hear from the New Yorker, and then finally, finally they came through and gave me the assignment.
When you're on the phone with the guy recruiting you for the firm, saying I'm sorry, I can't come.
Sorry, I'm hip deep in this sex trafficking.
It was actually so I blushed or recall, but it was a thing where I didn't have any money, and these law firms at the time, they're desperate to get these young associates in. I had heard a rumor that they would give you a no interest loan to kind of get you through the time before you got there, and so I ended up actually getting a ten thousand
dollars loan from them. And it was one of these awful things where when I finally called and said, you know what, after the fifth delay, I'm not coming at all, I said, and that ten thousand dollars, you know, I'm gonna can we look at an installment plan? You know, I will get it to you. And I did. I paid it off, but not immediately.
They were polite about it.
Exactly now, Eve inside the sacred tomb there with Remnick and all the New Yorker people, correct that this is the beginning of your serious career with the New Yorker.
It is and it's not. I mean I think that at the point where I called the law firm and said, salong suckers. You know, I got an assignment from The New Yorker. I had a notion that the rest of my life was about to start. And the truth was I'd gotten one freelance assignment, and.
They were hopeful.
I was hopeful. But I also when I finished that piece, I thought it came together well, and I sort of presented myself to the people at the magazine and said I'm ready to become a staff writer, and they said, no, you're not. So it was then another six years of freelancing.
No.
Yeah, I didn't get made a staff righter until twenty twelve.
So you're freelancing and writing many freelance articles for them, or for a bunch of people.
Freelance articles for them. I wrote for Slate. I wrote a bunch of screenplays that I mean, I actually I really kind of paid the bills by being a working screenwriter.
Because we were talking about saying nothing, was that your first foray and you said.
No, it was the first time something was britual because I was the kind of prototypical, unproduced screenwriter who you.
Know, I'm not delinear, and you were writing stuff I was and being paid to write screen Yes, any of it you liked?
Yeah, I mean I had a great I learned so much in that process about how to tell a story, a lot about kind of brevity and how you condense things, And it ended up being very good for my nonfiction writing to have kind of been in the trenches and worked on all these scripts that didn't get made. The process of them not getting made was demoralizing. If I write an article or I wrote a book. I've had two articles killed in my whole career, and it was
under It was because my editor Don died. So there's a uncertainty that those things are going to become something in the world. If I write a script, and this is even true today, I mean, is it, you know, is anything that's in development going to see the light of day?
Well, I worked on obviously, writing with friends of mine. I mean, I probably have four or five, at least four or five scripts somewhere in a box, somewhere in the bin, somewhere on the shelf, which I.
Thought were really really great.
You know, the pain of the unproduced screenplay is really really tough because you walk in the room, they tell you thank you, and you never hear from them again. Then you go to the movies eighteen months later and you go, oh, you passed up my movie to make that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're seeing watching the movie that took your slots.
No, it's amazing, nice, it's funny. I wrote a big profile about a year and a half ago of Scott Frank, who's one of the most successful screen Scott and Ollywood and a wonderful guy. Scott is this kind of legendary script doctor who has done rewrites on sixty movies and gets paid a lot of money to come in and diagnose very quickly the problems of the script. But we had this amazing exchange where he was just talking about
this ability that he has. He struggles when he's doing his own writing to see the flaws and things, but it's like an X ray if you look at somebody else's script, he can see the infirmities and he knows how to kind of come in and fix them, which is why he gets paid the big bucks to do what he does. He said, you know, there's been a handful of times in my career when I've been handed a script people have asked me to rewrite it, and I've read the script and I've said, there's nothing that
I can add. This is perfect. There's nothing that I can do. And I said, amazing. What were the movies and he said, oh no, no of them got made.
Author and journalist Patrick rad and Keith. If you enjoy conversations about investigative journalism and nonfiction writing, check out my episode with David Remnick.
The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremittingly. It's like a band having a set list. If you do everything, it's all sixteenth notes. Ferment got ad veto? Or will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, in voice.
And that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility. To hear more of my conversation with David Remnick, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Patrick raden Keith shares an unexpected job offer from the world's most notorious drug kingpin. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Patrick raden Keith first began contributing to the New Yorker as a freelance writer
in two thousand and six. In twenty twelve, he joined the coveted ranks of the magazine's full time writing staff. For Radenkeith, landing a full time position at The New Yorker was a dream come true.
I mean, I think it's the greatest job ever I would imagine. I love it. You know, you're not going to get rich doing it. And there are all kinds of ways in which the industry and the status of this kind of writing and the written word itself and the notion of objective truth are all imperiled at the moment. But to me, it is the sport of kings. It is just the best job imaginable.
I mean, the people I've read there, and the spell that it's cast on me to read you, to read Rebecca Mead, to me, Larry Wright, all these people I've read forever in that magazine.
It's crazy, yeah, and it's not.
And I mean, I think for me it's also there is a kind of thrill that I get. I think this stuff works for a large audience. There is a conviction that I have, which is that if you tell a good story, people will come to it, and they'll spend an hour reading an article. It's your job to make it beautiful and absorbing, kind of pull them in. I'm very attentive to that.
I mean, the New Yorker serves so many purposes for me just to read and enjoy some of this great writing. Why do I like, so many people go right to the crime story first. Now, a lot of stuff you've written is crime related. O chopo, yeah, Sackler. Why do most many readers, and I'm talking about sophisticated readers. This is not Netflix's crime documentary section, but even the most even the more elite sophisticated crowd, picks up The New Yorker and they want to read about crime.
You know, I think that for me, part of what interests me about these stories is that they are at heart stories about people who transgress. I mean, there's a theory with true crime that there's a sense in which you know, when you're at home and you're watching that Netflix documentary, it actually makes you feel safer in a way that you're kind of cozy there in your home that you're watching these sort of other people that's all
that's happening over the horizon. To other people, and my attraction to that genre is the exact opposite that I'm not interested in stories about psychopaths, stories about people who are totally unrecognizable. The interesting stories to me are the stories about the humanity of these people who do terrible things and asking these questions of how do you get off that conventional path that the rest of us are on, how do you start to deviate and how do you
turn into a Chappo Gusman. It's funny. I think a lot about kind of narrative time and how long you have to tell a story. And I always thought that if The Sopranos had been a movie, it would never
have worked. Because you're four or five episodes into The Sopranos when you have that amazing episode where Tony goes up on the college tour and he strangles the guy, so the first time you've seen him really commit an awful act of violence, and you've had four or five hours to fall for the guy and to get to know him in the context of his family and his meetings with this therapist, and at the point where he he does this appalling thing, you kind of feel your
stomach drop. You don't want them to do it. But also you're in there with.
Like the writers saying, let's be clear about one thing. Now, yeah, you know, five episodes, let's remember what he does.
Who this guy is. But they've given you lots of time in which to see him and I think to kind of see yourself in him in some way. And that, to me is the thing that's most intriguing about these kinds of stories is it's funny because I occasionally there are people who will criticize my work and say, you're humanizing these monsters, but of course you know, to me they are human beings right like it is inescapably what they are.
Well to me, it's what I call the there but for the grace of God. Obviously that comment go, I thought, which is I'm watching these things that I'm going, what do I have in comment with that person?
What have they gone through? What said? I mean?
For someone to just explode into some domer esque parade of insanity.
That's different.
You know, the psychopaths I almost never write about because I sort of have no interest in them. The people who are just total ciphers.
What's Guzman a businessman, a cycle businessman, or what is it in your words.
Yeah, he's pretty much that. It's funny. I mean I first wrote about him in twenty twelve, so this is before I was on staff at The New Yorker. I wrote a freelance piece for the New York Times magazine and my pitch to the New York Times magazine. Part of what's funny about this is that when I pitched that story in twenty eleven to the New York Times, they said, Choppo who they had? He was not a household name. And I said, here's this guy who runs this.
You know, he's an awful, murderous criminal, but he also runs this multi billion dollar commodity's business glomerate. Yeah, And I said, I want to do a kind of a Harvard Business School case study of a Mexican drug cartel. I want to look at it as a business, which is not too gloss over the awful things that he does, but when you look at the role that violence plays in the organization, it's actually strangely often quite rational.
How do they see themselves? I mean, in my mind have always look at characters and go, what do you think is coming over coming?
Well?
They do, Yeah, I mean, they're it's funny there's that old screenwriting adage that when you're writing the villain in the movie, he shouldn't think that he's the villain in the movie. He thinks he's the hero of the movie, and he's watching a different movie than you're watching Booth exactly, And so I think that there is I mean, another things I'm very interested in is just self deception, delusion, the stories that people tell themselves about the choices that
they make. So for Chappa Guzman, absolutely is there a version of the story in which Chappo Guzman thinks that he's had to make some tough choices in his life, but ultimately he's more or less a good guy who had to look at for his family and grew up with little in a part of the world where you know, you happen to live next to this country that is like the most drug addicted country in the world. There's a version of that story that he can.
Tell so well.
Chapo's lawyer called you, oh yeah, to describe that. How does that call get affected?
Yeah?
So it's funny. I do a lot of these what we call write arounds, which is where I'm writing about somebody who I don't have access to they won't give me an interview, but I go ahead and write anyway. And this Chopokusman piece, it was actually the second piece that I did about him for The New Yorker, was after he was captured, before he escaped, before he was captured again, so he'd he wanted to get caught, let's
stay here, you go, he wanted the super Max. Well, it's funny because when you actually look at the details of his life, it's pretty funny. During the years prior to that capture in Mexico, he had been you know, he had all these different safe houses and he's shuttling around, never sleeping in the same room twice. And there was this kind of intricate tunnel network underneath the safe houses
so he could escape. But then when you talk to the Mexican and US people who had been investigating him and listening in on the wiretaps, he realized that the biggest challenge for him was that he had all these different women in his life. His wife, he had his ex wives with baby, he was still cordial babies. He had mistresses or prostitutes. They were constantly having to get him his viagra wherever he was hiding out which was like a big logistical thing when it's a guy who's
you know, being counted by the DEA. And yeah, I interviewed one of these DEA guys us to listen under the wiretaps, and he said it was like Peyton Place. It was a whole deal, you know. I mean, so yeah, maybe he said, you know, just take me to the supermax please. So I wrote this piece. I didn't talk to him. He was locked up. I couldn't talk to him, was locked up in Mexico. Peace came out. I had not anticipated that he would read it. You know, he doesn't seem like a big reader, doesn't seem like a
New York or some time. Yeah, he had forty time. And I got a call from a lawyer who said that he represented the Guzman family after the peace came out, and I didn't know what it was about. I had this kind of funny thing where I called one of my sources who was a federal prosecutor who'd worked on these cases for years, and I said, I'm going to run a name by you. This guy says he's a cartel lawyer. Is he the real deal? What's the story? Like, I said, I'll run the name. I'll come back to you.
He called me back an hour later and he said, okay, so yeah, he's a real cartel lawyer. And he said, and he's one of these cartel lawyers who's like sixty percent cartel forty percent lawyer. So I was getting nervous and I eventually called him back and he said, I didn't know what it was going to be about. And he ended up asking me if I would like to ghost write I'll Chopo's memoir.
This is like analyze this, but it's profile.
No I know, and it.
Comes through and they're like you you you exactly well, no good, he said, uh yeah.
He said it was funny because the way the way he set it up, I was so nervous and I didn't know what we were going to talk about. And he has a very this guy's a very like starchy, kind of self important way of talking. And he said, eh, Signor is ready to write his memoir. And I said that's a book i'd like to read. And he said, but sir, is it the book you would like to write?
And I said no. I said no on the call, and I said no when he called me again a week later and said, as you continued to consider our offer.
Wow. Yeah, but nothing came of that. Nothing came of it.
What was funny is that I didn't tell anybody about this at the time, and then after the noted investigative journalist John Penn went down with Rolling Stone and had that kind of to me pretty silly interview with Kuzman. At that point I felt like, okay to cats out of the bag, and so I published something in The New Yorker saying I'd had this experience, I had passed
on the opportunity to do that kind of exercise. And what was funny is after I follished this in the New Yorker, I got a note from a journalist in Spain with El Pais, and he said he asked me too. You know, he was like clearly shopping it around. I was a little hurt, because, you know, I sort of wondered where was I in the pecking order?
You know, your waiter in a Korean barbecue was like I got a call from him.
What I tried to express to the lawyer. I don't know if he necessarily appreciated the comedy of this, but I was saying to him as delicately as I could. You know, often when you have somebody who has a memoir and a ghostwriter, that relations between the ghostwriter and the subject can kind of break down over time. And this was not a situation that I wanted to get into with choppol Guzman, author and journalist Patrick rad and Keef.
If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or.
Wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Patrick rad and Keef tells us about the origins of his investigative podcast wind of Change and how the CIA was rumored to have written a song for the German metal band Scorpions. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing. You may have heard the nineteen ninety power ballad wind of Change by the heavy metal band Scorpions. What you may not have heard is the rumor that the song
was actually written by the United States CIA. When Patrick rad and Keif heard about this alleged clandestine operation, he knew he needed to tell the story, but decided against his typical format.
So I have a source. You know, ideas come to me from different places, and I have a guy who is one of my dearest friends, my friend Michael, who is just an amazing font of ideas. He's a kind of one of these like Suey generous New Yorkers who's just ideas spin off this guy at a greater rate than they do anybody else I know, And as often as not he will call me and tell me these ideas, and a number of my pieces have started as things
he told me. And years ago he got in touch with me and said, you know that song wind of Change by the metal band the Scorpions, that was like the anthem to the end of the Cold War, and you know, young Russian teenagers were singing it in the streets as the Soviet Union collapses. I heard that song was secretly written by the CIA, and initially I tried to do it as a piece. I spent years trying
to make it work as a piece. But the challenging thing about a secret operator is that you're never going to get to a definitive account that says this happened, and you're also never definitively going to be able to say this didn't happen. And I couldn't figure out what to do with it, and I just kind of put it on the shelf. And then one night I woke up and thought, this is a podcast, and.
You've never done a podcast, but I've never done one before.
I'd listened to a lot of podcasts, and it was one of those things where I sort of woke up the mod of the night, I could see the whole thing. I knew how it would sound, I knew what I wanted to do. I think in part because they started really with cereal where you don't get a definitive answer, but also true crime, where you don't end you don't actually solve the mystery necessarily, and in part because you can listen to a podcast while you wash the dishes. Yeah,
you're giving a little less of your brain to the whole. Yeah. I think that means that ambiguity is a little safer in a podcast that you can kind of people are the listener is a little bit more indulgent. And so we spent a year, almost a year and a half doing it. My pitch to when we this was a good time to be making a podcast, when people are spending real money doing it, and I said, this has to feel like a Bond movie we're traveling around the world.
I want to be in Russia one episode, in Germany, the next episode, I want to be all over the place. It was so fun. I loved it.
So in terms of Sackler when I kept peeking back at the Sackler thing, your Sackler thing, because that article was just like some hit with a baseball bat.
That's a great writing you did. It was great.
And the book I read about CVS got in a lot of trouble down in Florida, pill milling and all this other stuff. Have you kept a little bit of a tab on what the developments of that story have been over the last few years since.
The book or not a little bit. I mean I CVS got into a lot of trouble.
They did. The pharmacies got in trouble. The distributors got in trouble. Other pharmaceutical companies got in trouble. You know it. Nobody knows how many people have died in the opioid crisis and the kind of an addiction crisis since the mid nineties, but the numbers at this point are creeping up on three quarters of a million Americans. And you don't get there without a lot of bad actors, you know, like it takes a village to get to a team kind of number. Yeah, and I have followed it in
a kind of arms length way. To go back to earlier when you asked, was the job everything? I hoped it would be. Part of what I love about the
job is that I'm sure it must be similar. I would think for an actor that I'm somebody whose metabolism is such that I love parachuting into a new situation in which I know virtually nothing, immersing myself in it, getting to know all these new people, getting as smart as I can, doing the best possible version of what I do, which is to kind of take all that in and figure out how to tell it as a story. And then I'm gone. I move on. I move on
to the next thing. There are all kinds of people who, for one reason or another, have a beat, and they keep writing about the same thing. And the opioid crisis is a massively important subject. And I hope that people continue to do great articles and books, and I know they will, but I'm done. I did it. I wrote my book.
A lot of people say that.
A lot of people said say something along the lines of, like your book is my chapter, you know what I mean. I spent a chapter of my life immersing myself.
But that I'm done. I've done irrecular and everything that's common.
And my curiosity, the curiosity that led me to your story, leads me to another story.
Yeah.
But listen, different people function in different ways, right, So I think that there are all kinds of instances in which there are people who just stay on the beat or they have have they basically have one subject or a few subjects over the course of their life. And there's all kinds of rewards that you can get from people who go that deep. That's just not who I am.
When I watched your show, I thought I was going to cry a lot, which is not me. I mean, I'm remember you to cry. I'm ready to be moved. But I thought, oh, this is one of those things. It's so fucking dark and so and not even in terms of death and blood all that's certainly there, just in terms of the circumstances for these people and their choices, and they just don't seem willing to face that there are or other choices. They think they have no choice. Now,
was it exhausting for you emotionally? To write this or what does it affect you that way? The darkness?
Yeah, I mean, I've been living with this story for a long time. My first trip to Northern Ireland happened in twenty fourteen. And it is a kind of oddity, I guess, a sort of personal quirk that I often write about really dark stuff. But I'm a pretty upbeat
you know, as my father would relentlessly. There was a song that my grandfather loved, which I think is probably from the thirties, and that my grandfather would quote and my father would quote to us when we were kids, which and there was a line in the song which is life can be delish with a sunny disposition, and that's you. I have a sunny disposition in the face of data your laptop. Yeah, exactly. But it's a helpful thing because there are Listen, I'm not a war correspondent.
I don't mean to. I'm not looking to kind of valorize the work that I do. There are all kinds of people who have more bravery and exposed to more carnage than I am. I've had moments in my career and I covered the Boston Marathon bombing trial. There are moments where you where it does take a toll where you know you.
The work that you're defy.
These pieces paralyze me. Oh god when they find them in the boat, Oh my god.
Thank you. But you know that's stuck and give you nightmares. So it's not that I'm totally immune to that. But no, listen, I think say nothing. It is a dark story, but you go to Belfast and you are cracking up the whole time. You're talking to people often about the darkest, most awful things, and they are and they are hilarious because there is this kind of their laughter is a
kind of defiance. And one thing that I'm so pleased about with the series is that I said when we started, I want to the book is I've sometimes hear from people that the book is they're kind of surprised to chuckle at times in the book, and that's just me trying to distill that Belfast sense of humor. And I said, we have to get that into the show, and I think we do so. As much as I can completely agree with your assessment that it's very dark, it's really
it starts dark and gets darker. It's also got humor laced all the way through it, and that humor feels to me to be both kind of very intrinsic to who the people in Belfast are and how they got through the troubles, and also maybe a saving grace for the rest of us.
Now, two last things. No fiction for you?
Why, well, you've like found the little wound and stuck your finger in it. I'm feeling the pain. I wanted to write fiction in college, and I did. I did writing workshops. There were aspects of it I think I was good at, and then aspects that I was not. And what I find and I actually find this it's a reason that I don't do more screenwriting even now. I mean I still do some, but not as much
as I used to. Is that the kind of paralysis of infinite choice where you you know, you create a character, you put the character.
In the world.
Here he goes, here, he goes, there are aliens land in the backyard. I mean, you could do anything you want right, and that I find difficult. You know, you hear writers talk about the terror of the blank page. With the work that I do, the page is never blank because most of what I do starts with I just go out there and I'm making phone calls and I'm reading documents and I'm I'm kind of assembling the pieces. And then there's this thrilling process which is how do
you arrange these into a compelling story. But by the time I sit down to write, I have all those materials in front of it. It's like it's like a you know when chefs talk about their mes on plus right, It's like you sit down to make the meal and everything is actually within reach. It's all there, it's all assembled, and you know, these are my ingredients and all I have to do is figure out how to combine them. What I struggled with with fiction anything and happen.
Well, it's like I watched locker Bee with Colin Firth. I love worship Colin Firth.
And of course, when when I think about the work you do the nonfiction workers, like you walk into a room to a hangar and there's all the pieces of the plane that was blown up, and you're going to sift through every single dial and knob and purse and shoe and then and then fiction. As you walk into the hangar, there's nothing in there at all for you to look at or consider or regard it's all from here. Number one, I really wouldn't worry about the fiction thing
if I were you. I think it's going quite well as it is. I think you should be very happy with the way it's going in my estination. And number two, are you going to do any more of this kind of stuff? My god, you gotta do more television or movies?
I am yeah. I have my book, The Snakehead, actually the thing that started in that in that NYU class. The Snakehead is underway with a twenty four as a series, which I'm going to co create with a really wonderful writer, Anamunch, who's gonna write the scripts. And so that's in the works, and I've got a couple of other things in various stages.
My thanks to author and journalist Patrick rad mkeef. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're pretty used by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial, and our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.