Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an award
Speaker 1: winning writer, author, and investigative journalist. His New York Times
Speaker 1: best selling books include Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing.
Speaker 1: Patrick raden Keith is also a staff writer of The
Speaker 1: New Yorker, and his work has been recognized with the
Speaker 1: National Magazine Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
Speaker 1: the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His nonfiction books Say Nothing,
Speaker 1: was named by The New York Times as one of
Speaker 1: the twenty best books of the twenty first century, and
Speaker 1: it has since been adapted as a limited series for Hulu.
Speaker 1: This was not the first time raden Keith's work inspired
Speaker 1: a series.
Speaker 2: I was also an executive producer on a series last
Speaker 2: year on Netflix called Painkiller, which was.
Speaker 1: With Matthew Yes, you were involved in that. That's loosely
Speaker 1: based on your my Socer reporting. Its SACER reporting for
Speaker 1: The New York So of course, the idea that you
Speaker 1: write a book at you and at some point an
Speaker 1: editor you work on that kind of stuff and it's
Speaker 1: a thousand people. Yeah, it was somewhat involved in some way.
Speaker 1: Of making your project helping to realize it. How did
Speaker 1: the difference feel to you?
Speaker 2: Well, on Painkiller, I was involved in a much more
Speaker 2: arms length kind of way. There was one thing produce
Speaker 2: eily I did on that project that made a big difference,
Speaker 2: which is, at a certain point we were in kind
Speaker 2: of a culd sack. It wasn't going to get made
Speaker 2: where it had originally started, and I brought it to
Speaker 2: a producer friend of mine, Eric Newman, who had a
Speaker 2: deal with Netflix, and that was my one big contribution
Speaker 2: to that show. But creatively I wasn't all that involved.
Speaker 2: Say nothing was much different. The book when it was finished,
Speaker 2: felt like exactly the book I had wanted to write,
Speaker 2: but also a book about material. It's pretty fraught, and
Speaker 2: so we never sent it out to the town. We
Speaker 2: never showed it to a bunch of different producers. What
Speaker 2: happened was there was a friend of mine who read
Speaker 2: the book, a guy named Brad Simpson who had known
Speaker 2: for about ten years, who is a producer. Brad's wonderful,
Speaker 2: and he works with a woman named Jacobson, and they
Speaker 2: had made the People versus O. J. Simpson, which I
Speaker 2: thought was kind of an exemplary limited series about another
Speaker 2: vexed issue, race in America, and their pitch to me was,
Speaker 2: if you give us the rights of the book, we
Speaker 2: won't go away and make a show and come back
Speaker 2: with the show. We'll bring you along and you'll be
Speaker 2: there every day through the process. And that was appealing
Speaker 2: to me in a number of respects. I mean partially
Speaker 2: because it ended up being like going to producing school.
Speaker 2: I learned so much working with them, and also because
Speaker 2: I got to be in the middle of the thing
Speaker 2: and have in theory a kind of custodial role where
Speaker 2: I'm there protecting the book and protecting the work. In practice,
Speaker 2: as you say, there was a learning curve for me
Speaker 2: because you get into the middle of it and you
Speaker 2: realize that you know, you're one voice in the room,
Speaker 2: and it's a privilege to be a voice in the room,
Speaker 2: but you're not the only voice, and you're not the
Speaker 2: last voice.
Speaker 1: I have found over the years when I would make
Speaker 1: films of whatever scope and budget. Eventually, over the years
Speaker 1: what I learned is that let's talk money first. Don't
Speaker 1: give any notes. I never give notes to directors and
Speaker 1: writers and producers that expand the schedule and add money,
Speaker 1: change locations change cities.
Speaker 3: Why don't we shoot this in Paris?
Speaker 1: Yeah, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower instead of
Speaker 1: the Gowanis Canal, you know whatever, because the money has
Speaker 1: become now so precious. How A guy walk to me
Speaker 1: on the street the other day, he said, do you
Speaker 1: have any advice for me? I said, you can't love everything.
Speaker 1: You divide all your scenes in the movie into two categories,
Speaker 1: the ones we like and the ones we love. And
Speaker 1: it says Bob gets out of the car, walks into
Speaker 1: the bank, do it in one shot and move on.
Speaker 1: I mean, just that idea that everything I learned beyond
Speaker 1: screenwriting and character and so forth and acting, and I
Speaker 1: learned how to speak money.
Speaker 3: And budget with those people.
Speaker 2: But it's also kind of triage, right, So yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean the experience of writing a book.
Speaker 3: How long did it take you to write that book?
Speaker 2: Four years, depending on how you account because initially it
Speaker 2: was a piece in the New Yorker, and I didn't
Speaker 2: take any book leaves, so I was working full time
Speaker 2: at the magazine on other things as I was writing
Speaker 2: the book. So it took a while. But I wasn't
Speaker 2: just working on the book. But you have total control
Speaker 2: or near total control of each word. So there was
Speaker 2: the sort of humbling experience of getting into the big
Speaker 2: machine where there are budgets and schedules and other producers
Speaker 2: and you're dealing with actors and they have ideas. But
Speaker 2: there's also just the experience. And I think this is
Speaker 2: maybe what you're getting at, which is that when the
Speaker 2: cost of a day is what it is, there's a
Speaker 2: kind of creative triage that you have to do that
Speaker 2: As a nonfiction writer, where the stakes are so much lower,
Speaker 2: in a way, you just don't I mean, I'm working
Speaker 2: on a book now, and I might finish next month,
Speaker 2: I might finish in June, I might finish it next year.
Speaker 2: And it's not that people won't be unhappy if the
Speaker 2: timeline extends, but nobody's going to lose their job over it.
Speaker 1: When the timeline extends. Is there a typical reason? Does
Speaker 1: it always change?
Speaker 2: My hope would be that if I turn in a
Speaker 2: book that feels like it's half baked, I'm gonna hear
Speaker 2: about it and somebody will say, doesn't feel right, Yeah, nice,
Speaker 2: try go back and do it again.
Speaker 3: You have a constant editor, the same editor, so.
Speaker 2: I've been working with the same editor both at the
Speaker 2: magazine and my book publisher. I started with these two
Speaker 2: guys in two thousand and six, so we're going on
Speaker 2: twenty years.
Speaker 3: Gots when you began at the New Yorker.
Speaker 1: Yes, in terms of writing in general, when you submit
Speaker 1: to The New Yorker and you write Columbia, does Columbia
Speaker 1: have some formal pipeline to the New Yorker in terms
Speaker 1: of its journalistic mantle?
Speaker 3: The Columbia School of Journalism?
Speaker 1: So if we do the but how does or do
Speaker 1: you come from a family that owns like steel mills
Speaker 1: or something where where the New Yorker picks up the
Speaker 1: phone and takes your submissions.
Speaker 3: Now do you get in there when you're a young
Speaker 3: college student?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 2: That was the whole thing, is that. I what I'm
Speaker 2: going to describe now will seem like a vanished time.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety seven nineteen ninety eight, what I was
Speaker 2: doing was writing things, going to Kinko's, printing them out,
Speaker 2: putting them in a yellow envelope, or nailing them to
Speaker 2: the New Yorker, and then I would get back a
Speaker 2: paper rejection slip. And I started doing that probably my
Speaker 2: junior year of college, which was crazy. I mean it
Speaker 2: was there was unbelievable hubris in thinking that I had
Speaker 2: any place pitching The New Yorker at all, and I
Speaker 2: pitched them for seven years before they accepted something.
Speaker 1: I could see the un vote now Keith in the
Speaker 1: corner one hundred and fifty first, and I mean, this
Speaker 1: is the thing dropped by the bridge.
Speaker 3: Truly.
Speaker 2: It's like the East Campus dormitory. You know, sweet ten Ceah.
Speaker 3: But when you leave, you go to law school.
Speaker 1: You don't finish law school, and you come back and
Speaker 1: finish law school correct and take the bar. Okay, why
Speaker 1: no law career.
Speaker 2: I sort of went to law school with a bit
Speaker 2: of bad faith. I had this idea, actually even before college,
Speaker 2: that it would be cool to be a New Yorker writer,
Speaker 2: not a journalist, not a magazine journalist, but a writer
Speaker 2: for the New Yorker. And I wasn't able to make
Speaker 2: it happen in terms of just connections or good ideas
Speaker 2: or the wherewithal or the good writing or whatever it
Speaker 2: was that it would have taken to get an assignment.
Speaker 2: I couldn't get it. Who was in charge then Tina
Speaker 2: Brown initially, and then Remnick. Yeah, I mean Remnick was
Speaker 2: sort of I was pitching at it right around the
Speaker 2: time that Remnick took over, and I went off to
Speaker 2: grad school in the UK for a couple of years,
Speaker 2: which was kind of an easy choice because I got
Speaker 2: a fellowship. It was effectively free. It was like, do
Speaker 2: you want to go on live in England for a
Speaker 2: few years and go to grad school?
Speaker 3: Yes? I do.
Speaker 2: And at that point I liked being in school. I
Speaker 2: liked being a student. I thought it was a great lifestyle.
Speaker 2: I thought I haven't made it work as a journalist yet,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to buy some time and if I
Speaker 2: go to law school. The upside is if I really
Speaker 2: whiff and I never get an assignment from the New Yorker,
Speaker 2: I'll have a good fallback. I would say to any
Speaker 2: young aspiring journalists listening, this is not the best way
Speaker 2: to approach the ambition. It is a time consuming, indirect
Speaker 2: expensive I'll be.
Speaker 1: Over here waiting for you to call me at law
Speaker 1: school exactly.
Speaker 2: But that's what I did, and I ended up getting
Speaker 2: not a magazine assignment. Initially, I got a book deal
Speaker 2: my first year in law school and took some time
Speaker 2: off to write that book. And the book was it
Speaker 2: was a book called Chatter, about eavesdropping by government agencies.
Speaker 2: I thought I would pick a really easy subject for
Speaker 2: a non fiction book, and so I wrote about the
Speaker 2: most secretive agency of the US government, the National Security Agency.
Speaker 1: When I did the movie Hunt For at October and
Speaker 1: I sat there with Tom Clancy, the Tom Clancy, and
Speaker 1: I said, you know, you're this master storyteller. I said,
Speaker 1: where did it all come from? He said, well, A
Speaker 1: lot of it was research. And he said, I would
Speaker 1: sit with people. I would contact people, they have lunch
Speaker 1: with me, they have a drink with me, and they'd
Speaker 1: give me information on a non attribution basis. And he
Speaker 1: goes in the third part with my imagination, Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you go there? You're how old when you start the
Speaker 1: book Chatter?
Speaker 2: Ah? God, I was young. I was inind of mid twenties.
Speaker 1: So when you're calling people to get some information about this,
Speaker 1: what's their attitude toward you?
Speaker 2: I mean, if I was calling from the Washington Post,
Speaker 2: they wouldn't have taken the call. And I'm saying, I
Speaker 2: am a first year law student in New Haven who's
Speaker 2: never written a book before, you know, published a few
Speaker 2: articles in his high school newspaper. I had no business
Speaker 2: writing that book. I had sort of a funny experience.
Speaker 2: This was at a time when there was a lot
Speaker 2: of consolidation happening in the big publishers, and I ended
Speaker 2: up with four different editors on that book because they
Speaker 2: kept getting fired. But one of them was a wonderful
Speaker 2: woman I'm still in touch with, named Eileen Smith. When
Speaker 2: I was halfway through the book, Allen Smith suggested that
Speaker 2: I read this book by Jeff Dyer called Out of
Speaker 2: Sheer Rage. It's a book about DH Lawrence, but it's
Speaker 2: really a book about how Jeff Dyer is having trouble
Speaker 2: writing a book about DH Lawrence and chatter perhaps unduly
Speaker 2: influenced by Dyer that came about Patrick Hughes failure to
Speaker 2: write a book about the NSA and what does that
Speaker 2: mean for us as citizens? And YadA, YadA, YadA. It
Speaker 2: is not a book that I look back on now
Speaker 2: with a great surge of pride.
Speaker 1: Why did you choose that as your first book? Meaning
Speaker 1: in your childhood, in your development of your sensibilities about
Speaker 1: politics and the economy and society, what have you? What
Speaker 1: was it you like for you, politically, culturally, educationally as
Speaker 1: a child, I grew.
Speaker 2: Up in a neighborhood called Dorchester in Boston, which is
Speaker 2: part of the city of Boston. It's the biggest neighborhood
Speaker 2: in Boston. It is economically, racially, ethnically very diverse. And
Speaker 2: my mother taught at UMass Boston, which is the big
Speaker 2: public university, which is actually in Dorchester. My father worked
Speaker 2: in state government. He worked for Mikeducaucus. I'm similarly kind
Speaker 2: of progressive, democratic politics obsessed background. You know, my mother
Speaker 2: was a professor of philosophy. The house was full of books.
Speaker 3: You're a good student, I was. I.
Speaker 2: So it's funny. I grew up in Dorchester and I
Speaker 2: went to a fancy private school. I went to a
Speaker 2: school called Milton Academy, which is just outside of Boston,
Speaker 2: very good prep school. It was a great school at
Speaker 2: which I felt pretty mediocre because it was such a
Speaker 2: concentration of brilliant, hard working kids. And I had a
Speaker 2: kind of an impulse that I was a smart kid,
Speaker 2: but I didn't necessarily on a curve. I didn't have
Speaker 2: the grades to show it, because there's always some other
Speaker 2: the NFL, some other genius there.
Speaker 3: We got outge right right.
Speaker 2: So for me, there was this kind of funny experience
Speaker 2: where I didn't, you know, out of high school and
Speaker 2: I applied to Columbia, I didn't get in. I took
Speaker 2: a year off, I applied again. I got to Columbia
Speaker 2: where there was a little bit more of a Bell
Speaker 2: curve in terms of people's motivation and ability. And it
Speaker 2: was the first time in my life where I felt
Speaker 2: like there was a kind of input output ratio where
Speaker 2: I was, you know, getting good grades and feelings though
Speaker 2: if you if you do the work, you get the rewards.
Speaker 1: So this first book, I'm just always curious about this
Speaker 1: kind of origins and the thing you choose this book
Speaker 1: why to seem.
Speaker 2: Like a kids from a very specific place. So I
Speaker 2: finished college, I go off to the UK. I was
Speaker 2: at Cambridge University for a year where I studied international relations,
Speaker 2: and then I went into the London School of Economics.
Speaker 2: When I was at Cambridge, this is ninety nine, two thousand,
Speaker 2: there was an investigation happening in the European Parliament into
Speaker 2: this thing that they called Echelon. And I had never
Speaker 2: heard of this, but Echelon had kind of been revealed
Speaker 2: in a little bit of investigative reporting, and the idea
Speaker 2: was that the US and four of its allies sometimes
Speaker 2: known as the Five Eyes, but basically the US, Canada, Australia,
Speaker 2: New Zealand and the UK were secretly cooperating on global
Speaker 2: leaves dropping, where they kind of carved up the world
Speaker 2: and everybody can they can kind of listen in and
Speaker 2: share information that they're able to do anyone, hover up
Speaker 2: to anyone they want. And the EU at the time,
Speaker 2: because the UK then as part of the EU, was
Speaker 2: concerned that this was maybe violating data protection laws within
Speaker 2: the EU, and so they started investigating this. And this
Speaker 2: was a big front page story in the UK and
Speaker 2: in Europe, and it wasn't covered at all in the
Speaker 2: New York Times. Like this is the early days of
Speaker 2: the Internet, and so I would sort of read the
Speaker 2: New York Times and I couldn't see any coverage of it,
Speaker 2: and that dissonance seemed interesting to me, and so I
Speaker 2: ended up writing a master's thesis at the Lund School
Speaker 2: of Economics about eavesdropping and the NSA and echelon and
Speaker 2: this investigation and all that kind of stuff, which at
Speaker 2: the time was a really obscure subject to know anything about.
Speaker 2: I come back to go to law school in the
Speaker 2: fall of two thousand and one. I'm in a civil
Speaker 2: procedure class, the beginning of my second week of law school,
Speaker 2: and the student rushes into the room and says a
Speaker 2: plan just to the World Trade Center. And it was
Speaker 2: this confluence of a few things. I had been failing
Speaker 2: to make any inroads as a magazine writer, and I
Speaker 2: had this not much knowledge. I wrote a master's thesis, right,
Speaker 2: I wrote like a fifty page paper, but it was
Speaker 2: like a fork full of knowledge about something that it
Speaker 2: seemed really obscure at the time, and then suddenly, post
Speaker 2: nine to eleven, it's highly relevant. There's all these questions about,
Speaker 2: you know, where these conversations intercepted between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: When did we intercept them, When did we translate them?
Speaker 2: What do we know? Can we hear Bin Lauden? Does
Speaker 2: he use a phone? All these kinds of.
Speaker 3: Things determined to strike within you.
Speaker 2: I go, yeah, exactly. It's crazy to think about this
Speaker 2: in retrospect, but I thought, well, maybe if I can't
Speaker 2: sell a magazine article, I could sell a book.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: This is one of these the kind of other version
Speaker 2: of your life flashes before your eyes in which I'm
Speaker 2: not sitting across from you today because I'm an unhappy
Speaker 2: lawyer somewhere. But I thought, well, you need an agent.
Speaker 2: How do you find an agent? And I just looked
Speaker 2: through the stack of books that I had recently read,
Speaker 2: and I started checking the acknowledgments to see who these
Speaker 2: people thinked. And in this stack of maybe ten books,
Speaker 2: one of them was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlasser,
Speaker 2: and one of them this is a very two thousand
Speaker 2: and one story, and the other was The Tipping Point
Speaker 2: by Malcolm Clodwell, which at the time had just come
Speaker 2: out recently, and they both thank the same woman, and
Speaker 2: her name was Tina Bennett. And I looked Tina up
Speaker 2: and I sent an email to her, just a few
Speaker 2: paragraphs saying I'm a student at law school, I think
Speaker 2: there might be a book and this stuff that I did.
Speaker 2: And three hours later she called me. And what's funny
Speaker 2: about the story is there was no second agent on
Speaker 2: the list. Like if I didn't, I wasn't being actually
Speaker 2: all that systematic about it. It was incredibly lucky that
Speaker 2: she called back, because I don't know that I would
Speaker 2: have had the kind of fortitude to do what a
Speaker 2: lot of people do, which is muscle through and put
Speaker 2: in the kind of months of research and deal with
Speaker 2: the rejection. And then the eighth agent on the list
Speaker 2: is the one who turns out to.
Speaker 3: Be your agent. That's your first book. I'm wondering.
Speaker 1: Do you finish the book and it's still the New
Speaker 1: Yorker is calling your name?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, yeah, And then what happens?
Speaker 2: I think the existence of the book. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: funny again, I look back at that book, and I
Speaker 2: would it's a book that I would I would probably
Speaker 2: write much differently if I wrote it today, if I
Speaker 2: wrote it at all. But a book has a kind
Speaker 2: of value as an artifact. Sometimes it's a it's a
Speaker 2: calling card. And it may be that the existence of
Speaker 2: that book just made them look at me a little
Speaker 2: bit more closely. But I had this kind of funny
Speaker 2: experience where I ended up going back to finish law
Speaker 2: school after taking a year off. I was commuting from Mele,
Speaker 2: I was living in the village and commuting to New Haven.
Speaker 2: I mean, my heart was really not in it, and
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time on Metro North and I finished.
Speaker 2: I figured, Okay, well, you might as well take the
Speaker 2: bar now. At the time when you study for the
Speaker 2: bar exam, you would go to these in person courses.
Speaker 2: So I was going to NYU and I would walk
Speaker 2: from my apartment on Leroy Street to this NYU classroom
Speaker 2: and to the review of the bar stuff, which is
Speaker 2: just the most mind numbingly tedious material you can imagine.
Speaker 2: And I would sit in the back row and read
Speaker 2: the daily news and drink coffee. And there was a
Speaker 2: trial happening that summer, not far away from where I was,
Speaker 2: of a woman from Chinatown who was a human smuggler
Speaker 2: and her name was Sister Ping. And so rather than
Speaker 2: pay attention to all this legal stuff that I should
Speaker 2: have been following Yale Legal, I was very absorbed in
Speaker 2: this story of this human smuggler in Chinatown and ended
Speaker 2: up pitching that as a story to the New Yorker,
Speaker 2: and that was the one.
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 2: There was really kind of a ticking clock because I
Speaker 2: was actually supposed to go and work at a law
Speaker 2: firm that fall, and I kept delaying my start date,
Speaker 2: waiting to hear from the New Yorker, and then finally,
Speaker 2: finally they came through and gave me the assignment.
Speaker 1: When you're on the phone with the guy recruiting you
Speaker 1: for the firm, saying I'm sorry, I can't come.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I'm hip deep in this sex trafficking.
Speaker 2: It was actually so I blushed or recall, but it
Speaker 2: was a thing where I didn't have any money, and
Speaker 2: these law firms at the time, they're desperate to get
Speaker 2: these young associates in. I had heard a rumor that
Speaker 2: they would give you a no interest loan to kind
Speaker 2: of get you through the time before you got there,
Speaker 2: and so I ended up actually getting a ten thousand
Speaker 2: dollars loan from them. And it was one of these
Speaker 2: awful things where when I finally called and said, you
Speaker 2: know what, after the fifth delay, I'm not coming at all,
Speaker 2: I said, and that ten thousand dollars, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna can we look at an installment plan? You know,
Speaker 2: I will get it to you. And I did. I
Speaker 2: paid it off, but not immediately.
Speaker 3: They were polite about it.
Speaker 1: Exactly now, Eve inside the sacred tomb there with Remnick
Speaker 1: and all the New Yorker people, correct that this is
Speaker 1: the beginning of your serious career with the New Yorker.
Speaker 2: It is and it's not. I mean I think that
Speaker 2: at the point where I called the law firm and said,
Speaker 2: salong suckers. You know, I got an assignment from The
Speaker 2: New Yorker. I had a notion that the rest of
Speaker 2: my life was about to start. And the truth was
Speaker 2: I'd gotten one freelance assignment, and.
Speaker 3: They were hopeful.
Speaker 2: I was hopeful. But I also when I finished that piece,
Speaker 2: I thought it came together well, and I sort of
Speaker 2: presented myself to the people at the magazine and said
Speaker 2: I'm ready to become a staff writer, and they said, no,
Speaker 2: you're not. So it was then another six years of freelancing.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't get made a staff righter until twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: So you're freelancing and writing many freelance articles for them,
Speaker 1: or for a bunch of people.
Speaker 2: Freelance articles for them. I wrote for Slate. I wrote
Speaker 2: a bunch of screenplays that I mean, I actually I
Speaker 2: really kind of paid the bills by being a working screenwriter.
Speaker 1: Because we were talking about saying nothing, was that your
Speaker 1: first foray and you said.
Speaker 2: No, it was the first time something was britual because
Speaker 2: I was the kind of prototypical, unproduced screenwriter who you.
Speaker 1: Know, I'm not delinear, and you were writing stuff I
Speaker 1: was and being paid to write screen Yes, any of
Speaker 1: it you liked?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I had a great I learned so
Speaker 2: much in that process about how to tell a story,
Speaker 2: a lot about kind of brevity and how you condense things,
Speaker 2: And it ended up being very good for my nonfiction
Speaker 2: writing to have kind of been in the trenches and
Speaker 2: worked on all these scripts that didn't get made. The
Speaker 2: process of them not getting made was demoralizing. If I
Speaker 2: write an article or I wrote a book. I've had
Speaker 2: two articles killed in my whole career, and it was
Speaker 2: under It was because my editor Don died. So there's
Speaker 2: a uncertainty that those things are going to become something
Speaker 2: in the world. If I write a script, and this
Speaker 2: is even true today, I mean, is it, you know,
Speaker 2: is anything that's in development going to see the light
Speaker 2: of day?
Speaker 1: Well, I worked on obviously, writing with friends of mine.
Speaker 1: I mean, I probably have four or five, at least
Speaker 1: four or five scripts somewhere in a box, somewhere in
Speaker 1: the bin, somewhere on the shelf, which I.
Speaker 3: Thought were really really great.
Speaker 1: You know, the pain of the unproduced screenplay is really
Speaker 1: really tough because you walk in the room, they tell
Speaker 1: you thank you, and you never hear from them again.
Speaker 1: Then you go to the movies eighteen months later and
Speaker 1: you go, oh, you passed up my movie to make that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're seeing watching the movie that took your slots.
Speaker 2: No, it's amazing, nice, it's funny. I wrote a big
Speaker 2: profile about a year and a half ago of Scott Frank,
Speaker 2: who's one of the most successful screen Scott and Ollywood
Speaker 2: and a wonderful guy. Scott is this kind of legendary
Speaker 2: script doctor who has done rewrites on sixty movies and
Speaker 2: gets paid a lot of money to come in and
Speaker 2: diagnose very quickly the problems of the script. But we
Speaker 2: had this amazing exchange where he was just talking about
Speaker 2: this ability that he has. He struggles when he's doing
Speaker 2: his own writing to see the flaws and things, but
Speaker 2: it's like an X ray if you look at somebody
Speaker 2: else's script, he can see the infirmities and he knows
Speaker 2: how to kind of come in and fix them, which
Speaker 2: is why he gets paid the big bucks to do
Speaker 2: what he does. He said, you know, there's been a
Speaker 2: handful of times in my career when I've been handed
Speaker 2: a script people have asked me to rewrite it, and
Speaker 2: I've read the script and I've said, there's nothing that
Speaker 2: I can add. This is perfect. There's nothing that I
Speaker 2: can do. And I said, amazing. What were the movies
Speaker 2: and he said, oh no, no of them got made.
Speaker 1: Author and journalist Patrick rad and Keith. If you enjoy
Speaker 1: conversations about investigative journalism and nonfiction writing, check out my
Speaker 1: episode with David Remnick.
Speaker 4: The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have
Speaker 4: a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress
Speaker 4: the hell out of the reader. Unremittingly. It's like a
Speaker 4: band having a set list. If you do everything, it's
Speaker 4: all sixteenth notes. Ferment got ad veto? Or will you
Speaker 4: sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of worse things.
Speaker 4: So you want some variation in tone, in voice.
Speaker 1: And that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of
Speaker 1: it's my responsibility. To hear more of my conversation with
Speaker 1: David Remnick, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After
Speaker 1: the break, Patrick raden Keith shares an unexpected job offer
Speaker 1: from the world's most notorious drug kingpin. I'm Alec Baldwin
Speaker 1: and this is Here's the Thing. Patrick raden Keith first
Speaker 1: began contributing to the New Yorker as a freelance writer
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six. In twenty twelve, he joined
Speaker 1: the coveted ranks of the magazine's full time writing staff.
Speaker 1: For Radenkeith, landing a full time position at The New
Speaker 1: Yorker was a dream come true.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's the greatest job ever I
Speaker 2: would imagine. I love it. You know, you're not going
Speaker 2: to get rich doing it. And there are all kinds
Speaker 2: of ways in which the industry and the status of
Speaker 2: this kind of writing and the written word itself and
Speaker 2: the notion of objective truth are all imperiled at the moment.
Speaker 2: But to me, it is the sport of kings. It
Speaker 2: is just the best job imaginable.
Speaker 1: I mean, the people I've read there, and the spell
Speaker 1: that it's cast on me to read you, to read
Speaker 1: Rebecca Mead, to me, Larry Wright, all these people I've
Speaker 1: read forever in that magazine.
Speaker 3: It's crazy, yeah, and it's not.
Speaker 2: And I mean, I think for me it's also there
Speaker 2: is a kind of thrill that I get. I think
Speaker 2: this stuff works for a large audience. There is a
Speaker 2: conviction that I have, which is that if you tell
Speaker 2: a good story, people will come to it, and they'll
Speaker 2: spend an hour reading an article. It's your job to
Speaker 2: make it beautiful and absorbing, kind of pull them in.
Speaker 2: I'm very attentive to that.
Speaker 1: I mean, the New Yorker serves so many purposes for
Speaker 1: me just to read and enjoy some of this great writing.
Speaker 1: Why do I like, so many people go right to
Speaker 1: the crime story first. Now, a lot of stuff you've
Speaker 1: written is crime related. O chopo, yeah, Sackler. Why do
Speaker 1: most many readers, and I'm talking about sophisticated readers. This
Speaker 1: is not Netflix's crime documentary section, but even the most
Speaker 1: even the more elite sophisticated crowd, picks up The New
Speaker 1: Yorker and they want to read about crime.
Speaker 2: You know, I think that for me, part of what
Speaker 2: interests me about these stories is that they are at
Speaker 2: heart stories about people who transgress. I mean, there's a
Speaker 2: theory with true crime that there's a sense in which
Speaker 2: you know, when you're at home and you're watching that
Speaker 2: Netflix documentary, it actually makes you feel safer in a
Speaker 2: way that you're kind of cozy there in your home
Speaker 2: that you're watching these sort of other people that's all
Speaker 2: that's happening over the horizon. To other people, and my
Speaker 2: attraction to that genre is the exact opposite that I'm
Speaker 2: not interested in stories about psychopaths, stories about people who
Speaker 2: are totally unrecognizable. The interesting stories to me are the
Speaker 2: stories about the humanity of these people who do terrible
Speaker 2: things and asking these questions of how do you get
Speaker 2: off that conventional path that the rest of us are on,
Speaker 2: how do you start to deviate and how do you
Speaker 2: turn into a Chappo Gusman. It's funny. I think a
Speaker 2: lot about kind of narrative time and how long you
Speaker 2: have to tell a story. And I always thought that
Speaker 2: if The Sopranos had been a movie, it would never
Speaker 2: have worked. Because you're four or five episodes into The
Speaker 2: Sopranos when you have that amazing episode where Tony goes
Speaker 2: up on the college tour and he strangles the guy,
Speaker 2: so the first time you've seen him really commit an
Speaker 2: awful act of violence, and you've had four or five
Speaker 2: hours to fall for the guy and to get to
Speaker 2: know him in the context of his family and his
Speaker 2: meetings with this therapist, and at the point where he
Speaker 2: he does this appalling thing, you kind of feel your
Speaker 2: stomach drop. You don't want them to do it. But
Speaker 2: also you're in there with.
Speaker 1: Like the writers saying, let's be clear about one thing. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, five episodes, let's remember what he does.
Speaker 2: Who this guy is. But they've given you lots of
Speaker 2: time in which to see him and I think to
Speaker 2: kind of see yourself in him in some way. And that,
Speaker 2: to me is the thing that's most intriguing about these
Speaker 2: kinds of stories is it's funny because I occasionally there
Speaker 2: are people who will criticize my work and say, you're
Speaker 2: humanizing these monsters, but of course you know, to me
Speaker 2: they are human beings right like it is inescapably what
Speaker 2: they are.
Speaker 1: Well to me, it's what I call the there but
Speaker 1: for the grace of God. Obviously that comment go, I thought,
Speaker 1: which is I'm watching these things that I'm going, what
Speaker 1: do I have in comment with that person?
Speaker 3: What have they gone through? What said? I mean?
Speaker 1: For someone to just explode into some domer esque parade
Speaker 1: of insanity.
Speaker 3: That's different.
Speaker 2: You know, the psychopaths I almost never write about because
Speaker 2: I sort of have no interest in them. The people
Speaker 2: who are just total ciphers.
Speaker 1: What's Guzman a businessman, a cycle businessman, or what is
Speaker 1: it in your words.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's pretty much that. It's funny. I mean I
Speaker 2: first wrote about him in twenty twelve, so this is
Speaker 2: before I was on staff at The New Yorker. I
Speaker 2: wrote a freelance piece for the New York Times magazine
Speaker 2: and my pitch to the New York Times magazine. Part
Speaker 2: of what's funny about this is that when I pitched
Speaker 2: that story in twenty eleven to the New York Times,
Speaker 2: they said, Choppo who they had? He was not a
Speaker 2: household name. And I said, here's this guy who runs this.
Speaker 2: You know, he's an awful, murderous criminal, but he also
Speaker 2: runs this multi billion dollar commodity's business glomerate. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I said, I want to do a kind of a
Speaker 2: Harvard Business School case study of a Mexican drug cartel.
Speaker 2: I want to look at it as a business, which
Speaker 2: is not too gloss over the awful things that he does,
Speaker 2: but when you look at the role that violence plays
Speaker 2: in the organization, it's actually strangely often quite rational.
Speaker 1: How do they see themselves? I mean, in my mind
Speaker 1: have always look at characters and go, what do you
Speaker 1: think is coming over coming?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: They do, Yeah, I mean, they're it's funny there's that
Speaker 2: old screenwriting adage that when you're writing the villain in
Speaker 2: the movie, he shouldn't think that he's the villain in
Speaker 2: the movie. He thinks he's the hero of the movie,
Speaker 2: and he's watching a different movie than you're watching Booth exactly,
Speaker 2: And so I think that there is I mean, another
Speaker 2: things I'm very interested in is just self deception, delusion,
Speaker 2: the stories that people tell themselves about the choices that
Speaker 2: they make. So for Chappa Guzman, absolutely is there a
Speaker 2: version of the story in which Chappo Guzman thinks that
Speaker 2: he's had to make some tough choices in his life,
Speaker 2: but ultimately he's more or less a good guy who
Speaker 2: had to look at for his family and grew up
Speaker 2: with little in a part of the world where you know,
Speaker 2: you happen to live next to this country that is
Speaker 2: like the most drug addicted country in the world. There's
Speaker 2: a version of that story that he can.
Speaker 3: Tell so well.
Speaker 1: Chapo's lawyer called you, oh yeah, to describe that. How
Speaker 1: does that call get affected?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So it's funny. I do a lot of these what
Speaker 2: we call write arounds, which is where I'm writing about
Speaker 2: somebody who I don't have access to they won't give
Speaker 2: me an interview, but I go ahead and write anyway.
Speaker 2: And this Chopokusman piece, it was actually the second piece
Speaker 2: that I did about him for The New Yorker, was
Speaker 2: after he was captured, before he escaped, before he was
Speaker 2: captured again, so he'd he wanted to get caught, let's
Speaker 2: stay here, you go, he wanted the super Max. Well,
Speaker 2: it's funny because when you actually look at the details
Speaker 2: of his life, it's pretty funny. During the years prior
Speaker 2: to that capture in Mexico, he had been you know,
Speaker 2: he had all these different safe houses and he's shuttling around,
Speaker 2: never sleeping in the same room twice. And there was
Speaker 2: this kind of intricate tunnel network underneath the safe houses
Speaker 2: so he could escape. But then when you talk to
Speaker 2: the Mexican and US people who had been investigating him
Speaker 2: and listening in on the wiretaps, he realized that the
Speaker 2: biggest challenge for him was that he had all these
Speaker 2: different women in his life. His wife, he had his
Speaker 2: ex wives with baby, he was still cordial babies. He
Speaker 2: had mistresses or prostitutes. They were constantly having to get
Speaker 2: him his viagra wherever he was hiding out which was
Speaker 2: like a big logistical thing when it's a guy who's
Speaker 2: you know, being counted by the DEA. And yeah, I
Speaker 2: interviewed one of these DEA guys us to listen under
Speaker 2: the wiretaps, and he said it was like Peyton Place.
Speaker 2: It was a whole deal, you know. I mean, so yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe he said, you know, just take me to the
Speaker 2: supermax please. So I wrote this piece. I didn't talk
Speaker 2: to him. He was locked up. I couldn't talk to him,
Speaker 2: was locked up in Mexico. Peace came out. I had
Speaker 2: not anticipated that he would read it. You know, he
Speaker 2: doesn't seem like a big reader, doesn't seem like a
Speaker 2: New York or some time. Yeah, he had forty time.
Speaker 2: And I got a call from a lawyer who said
Speaker 2: that he represented the Guzman family after the peace came out,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know what it was about. I had
Speaker 2: this kind of funny thing where I called one of
Speaker 2: my sources who was a federal prosecutor who'd worked on
Speaker 2: these cases for years, and I said, I'm going to
Speaker 2: run a name by you. This guy says he's a
Speaker 2: cartel lawyer. Is he the real deal? What's the story? Like,
Speaker 2: I said, I'll run the name. I'll come back to you.
Speaker 2: He called me back an hour later and he said, okay,
Speaker 2: so yeah, he's a real cartel lawyer. And he said,
Speaker 2: and he's one of these cartel lawyers who's like sixty
Speaker 2: percent cartel forty percent lawyer. So I was getting nervous
Speaker 2: and I eventually called him back and he said, I
Speaker 2: didn't know what it was going to be about. And
Speaker 2: he ended up asking me if I would like to
Speaker 2: ghost write I'll Chopo's memoir.
Speaker 3: This is like analyze this, but it's profile.
Speaker 2: No I know, and it.
Speaker 1: Comes through and they're like you you you exactly well,
Speaker 1: no good, he said, uh yeah.
Speaker 2: He said it was funny because the way the way
Speaker 2: he set it up, I was so nervous and I
Speaker 2: didn't know what we were going to talk about. And
Speaker 2: he has a very this guy's a very like starchy,
Speaker 2: kind of self important way of talking. And he said, eh,
Speaker 2: Signor is ready to write his memoir. And I said
Speaker 2: that's a book i'd like to read. And he said,
Speaker 2: but sir, is it the book you would like to write?
Speaker 2: And I said no. I said no on the call,
Speaker 2: and I said no when he called me again a
Speaker 2: week later and said, as you continued to consider our offer.
Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah, but nothing came of that. Nothing came of it.
Speaker 2: What was funny is that I didn't tell anybody about
Speaker 2: this at the time, and then after the noted investigative
Speaker 2: journalist John Penn went down with Rolling Stone and had
Speaker 2: that kind of to me pretty silly interview with Kuzman.
Speaker 2: At that point I felt like, okay to cats out
Speaker 2: of the bag, and so I published something in The
Speaker 2: New Yorker saying I'd had this experience, I had passed
Speaker 2: on the opportunity to do that kind of exercise. And
Speaker 2: what was funny is after I follished this in the
Speaker 2: New Yorker, I got a note from a journalist in
Speaker 2: Spain with El Pais, and he said he asked me too.
Speaker 2: You know, he was like clearly shopping it around. I
Speaker 2: was a little hurt, because, you know, I sort of
Speaker 2: wondered where was I in the pecking order?
Speaker 1: You know, your waiter in a Korean barbecue was like
Speaker 1: I got a call from him.
Speaker 2: What I tried to express to the lawyer. I don't
Speaker 2: know if he necessarily appreciated the comedy of this, but
Speaker 2: I was saying to him as delicately as I could.
Speaker 2: You know, often when you have somebody who has a
Speaker 2: memoir and a ghostwriter, that relations between the ghostwriter and
Speaker 2: the subject can kind of break down over time. And
Speaker 2: this was not a situation that I wanted to get
Speaker 2: into with choppol Guzman, author and journalist Patrick rad and Keef.
Speaker 2: If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be
Speaker 2: sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Spotify or.
Speaker 1: Wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Patrick
Speaker 1: rad and Keef tells us about the origins of his
Speaker 1: investigative podcast wind of Change and how the CIA was
Speaker 1: rumored to have written a song for the German metal
Speaker 1: band Scorpions. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: You may have heard the nineteen ninety power ballad wind
Speaker 1: of Change by the heavy metal band Scorpions. What you
Speaker 1: may not have heard is the rumor that the song
Speaker 1: was actually written by the United States CIA. When Patrick
Speaker 1: rad and Keif heard about this alleged clandestine operation, he
Speaker 1: knew he needed to tell the story, but decided against
Speaker 1: his typical format.
Speaker 2: So I have a source. You know, ideas come to
Speaker 2: me from different places, and I have a guy who
Speaker 2: is one of my dearest friends, my friend Michael, who
Speaker 2: is just an amazing font of ideas. He's a kind
Speaker 2: of one of these like Suey generous New Yorkers who's
Speaker 2: just ideas spin off this guy at a greater rate
Speaker 2: than they do anybody else I know, And as often
Speaker 2: as not he will call me and tell me these ideas,
Speaker 2: and a number of my pieces have started as things
Speaker 2: he told me. And years ago he got in touch
Speaker 2: with me and said, you know that song wind of
Speaker 2: Change by the metal band the Scorpions, that was like
Speaker 2: the anthem to the end of the Cold War, and
Speaker 2: you know, young Russian teenagers were singing it in the
Speaker 2: streets as the Soviet Union collapses. I heard that song
Speaker 2: was secretly written by the CIA, and initially I tried
Speaker 2: to do it as a piece. I spent years trying
Speaker 2: to make it work as a piece. But the challenging
Speaker 2: thing about a secret operator is that you're never going
Speaker 2: to get to a definitive account that says this happened,
Speaker 2: and you're also never definitively going to be able to
Speaker 2: say this didn't happen. And I couldn't figure out what
Speaker 2: to do with it, and I just kind of put
Speaker 2: it on the shelf. And then one night I woke
Speaker 2: up and thought, this is a podcast, and.
Speaker 3: You've never done a podcast, but I've never done one before.
Speaker 2: I'd listened to a lot of podcasts, and it was
Speaker 2: one of those things where I sort of woke up
Speaker 2: the mod of the night, I could see the whole thing.
Speaker 2: I knew how it would sound, I knew what I
Speaker 2: wanted to do. I think in part because they started
Speaker 2: really with cereal where you don't get a definitive answer,
Speaker 2: but also true crime, where you don't end you don't
Speaker 2: actually solve the mystery necessarily, and in part because you
Speaker 2: can listen to a podcast while you wash the dishes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're giving a little less of your brain to the whole. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that means that ambiguity is a little safer
Speaker 2: in a podcast that you can kind of people are
Speaker 2: the listener is a little bit more indulgent. And so
Speaker 2: we spent a year, almost a year and a half
Speaker 2: doing it. My pitch to when we this was a
Speaker 2: good time to be making a podcast, when people are
Speaker 2: spending real money doing it, and I said, this has
Speaker 2: to feel like a Bond movie we're traveling around the world.
Speaker 2: I want to be in Russia one episode, in Germany,
Speaker 2: the next episode, I want to be all over the place.
Speaker 2: It was so fun. I loved it.
Speaker 1: So in terms of Sackler when I kept peeking back
Speaker 1: at the Sackler thing, your Sackler thing, because that article
Speaker 1: was just like some hit with a baseball bat.
Speaker 3: That's a great writing you did. It was great.
Speaker 1: And the book I read about CVS got in a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble down in Florida, pill milling and all
Speaker 1: this other stuff. Have you kept a little bit of
Speaker 1: a tab on what the developments of that story have
Speaker 1: been over the last few years since.
Speaker 3: The book or not a little bit. I mean I
Speaker 3: CVS got into a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2: They did. The pharmacies got in trouble. The distributors got
Speaker 2: in trouble. Other pharmaceutical companies got in trouble. You know it.
Speaker 2: Nobody knows how many people have died in the opioid
Speaker 2: crisis and the kind of an addiction crisis since the
Speaker 2: mid nineties, but the numbers at this point are creeping
Speaker 2: up on three quarters of a million Americans. And you
Speaker 2: don't get there without a lot of bad actors, you know,
Speaker 2: like it takes a village to get to a team
Speaker 2: kind of number. Yeah, and I have followed it in
Speaker 2: a kind of arms length way. To go back to
Speaker 2: earlier when you asked, was the job everything? I hoped
Speaker 2: it would be. Part of what I love about the
Speaker 2: job is that I'm sure it must be similar. I
Speaker 2: would think for an actor that I'm somebody whose metabolism
Speaker 2: is such that I love parachuting into a new situation
Speaker 2: in which I know virtually nothing, immersing myself in it,
Speaker 2: getting to know all these new people, getting as smart
Speaker 2: as I can, doing the best possible version of what
Speaker 2: I do, which is to kind of take all that
Speaker 2: in and figure out how to tell it as a story.
Speaker 2: And then I'm gone. I move on. I move on
Speaker 2: to the next thing. There are all kinds of people who,
Speaker 2: for one reason or another, have a beat, and they
Speaker 2: keep writing about the same thing. And the opioid crisis
Speaker 2: is a massively important subject. And I hope that people
Speaker 2: continue to do great articles and books, and I know
Speaker 2: they will, but I'm done. I did it. I wrote
Speaker 2: my book.
Speaker 3: A lot of people say that.
Speaker 1: A lot of people said say something along the lines of,
Speaker 1: like your book is my chapter, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I spent a chapter of my life immersing myself.
Speaker 3: But that I'm done. I've done irrecular and everything that's common.
Speaker 1: And my curiosity, the curiosity that led me to your story,
Speaker 1: leads me to another story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But listen, different people function in different ways, right, So
Speaker 2: I think that there are all kinds of instances in
Speaker 2: which there are people who just stay on the beat
Speaker 2: or they have have they basically have one subject or
Speaker 2: a few subjects over the course of their life. And
Speaker 2: there's all kinds of rewards that you can get from
Speaker 2: people who go that deep. That's just not who I am.
Speaker 1: When I watched your show, I thought I was going
Speaker 1: to cry a lot, which is not me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm remember you to cry. I'm ready to be moved.
Speaker 1: But I thought, oh, this is one of those things.
Speaker 1: It's so fucking dark and so and not even in
Speaker 1: terms of death and blood all that's certainly there, just
Speaker 1: in terms of the circumstances for these people and their choices,
Speaker 1: and they just don't seem willing to face that there
Speaker 1: are or other choices. They think they have no choice. Now,
Speaker 1: was it exhausting for you emotionally? To write this or
Speaker 1: what does it affect you that way? The darkness?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I've been living with this story for
Speaker 2: a long time. My first trip to Northern Ireland happened
Speaker 2: in twenty fourteen. And it is a kind of oddity,
Speaker 2: I guess, a sort of personal quirk that I often
Speaker 2: write about really dark stuff. But I'm a pretty upbeat
Speaker 2: you know, as my father would relentlessly. There was a
Speaker 2: song that my grandfather loved, which I think is probably
Speaker 2: from the thirties, and that my grandfather would quote and
Speaker 2: my father would quote to us when we were kids,
Speaker 2: which and there was a line in the song which
Speaker 2: is life can be delish with a sunny disposition, and
Speaker 2: that's you. I have a sunny disposition in the face
Speaker 2: of data your laptop. Yeah, exactly. But it's a helpful
Speaker 2: thing because there are Listen, I'm not a war correspondent.
Speaker 2: I don't mean to. I'm not looking to kind of
Speaker 2: valorize the work that I do. There are all kinds
Speaker 2: of people who have more bravery and exposed to more
Speaker 2: carnage than I am. I've had moments in my career
Speaker 2: and I covered the Boston Marathon bombing trial. There are
Speaker 2: moments where you where it does take a toll where
Speaker 2: you know you.
Speaker 3: The work that you're defy.
Speaker 1: These pieces paralyze me. Oh god when they find them
Speaker 1: in the boat, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Thank you. But you know that's stuck and give you nightmares.
Speaker 2: So it's not that I'm totally immune to that. But no, listen,
Speaker 2: I think say nothing. It is a dark story, but
Speaker 2: you go to Belfast and you are cracking up the
Speaker 2: whole time. You're talking to people often about the darkest,
Speaker 2: most awful things, and they are and they are hilarious
Speaker 2: because there is this kind of their laughter is a
Speaker 2: kind of defiance. And one thing that I'm so pleased
Speaker 2: about with the series is that I said when we started,
Speaker 2: I want to the book is I've sometimes hear from
Speaker 2: people that the book is they're kind of surprised to
Speaker 2: chuckle at times in the book, and that's just me
Speaker 2: trying to distill that Belfast sense of humor. And I said,
Speaker 2: we have to get that into the show, and I
Speaker 2: think we do so. As much as I can completely
Speaker 2: agree with your assessment that it's very dark, it's really
Speaker 2: it starts dark and gets darker. It's also got humor
Speaker 2: laced all the way through it, and that humor feels
Speaker 2: to me to be both kind of very intrinsic to
Speaker 2: who the people in Belfast are and how they got
Speaker 2: through the troubles, and also maybe a saving grace for
Speaker 2: the rest of us.
Speaker 3: Now, two last things. No fiction for you?
Speaker 2: Why, well, you've like found the little wound and stuck
Speaker 2: your finger in it. I'm feeling the pain. I wanted
Speaker 2: to write fiction in college, and I did. I did
Speaker 2: writing workshops. There were aspects of it I think I
Speaker 2: was good at, and then aspects that I was not.
Speaker 2: And what I find and I actually find this it's
Speaker 2: a reason that I don't do more screenwriting even now.
Speaker 2: I mean I still do some, but not as much
Speaker 2: as I used to. Is that the kind of paralysis
Speaker 2: of infinite choice where you you know, you create a character,
Speaker 2: you put the character.
Speaker 3: In the world.
Speaker 2: Here he goes, here, he goes, there are aliens land
Speaker 2: in the backyard. I mean, you could do anything you
Speaker 2: want right, and that I find difficult. You know, you
Speaker 2: hear writers talk about the terror of the blank page.
Speaker 2: With the work that I do, the page is never
Speaker 2: blank because most of what I do starts with I
Speaker 2: just go out there and I'm making phone calls and
Speaker 2: I'm reading documents and I'm I'm kind of assembling the pieces.
Speaker 2: And then there's this thrilling process which is how do
Speaker 2: you arrange these into a compelling story. But by the
Speaker 2: time I sit down to write, I have all those
Speaker 2: materials in front of it. It's like it's like a
Speaker 2: you know when chefs talk about their mes on plus right,
Speaker 2: It's like you sit down to make the meal and
Speaker 2: everything is actually within reach. It's all there, it's all assembled,
Speaker 2: and you know, these are my ingredients and all I
Speaker 2: have to do is figure out how to combine them.
Speaker 2: What I struggled with with fiction anything and happen.
Speaker 3: Well, it's like I watched locker Bee with Colin Firth.
Speaker 3: I love worship Colin Firth.
Speaker 1: And of course, when when I think about the work
Speaker 1: you do the nonfiction workers, like you walk into a
Speaker 1: room to a hangar and there's all the pieces of
Speaker 1: the plane that was blown up, and you're going to
Speaker 1: sift through every single dial and knob and purse and
Speaker 1: shoe and then and then fiction. As you walk into
Speaker 1: the hangar, there's nothing in there at all for you
Speaker 1: to look at or consider or regard it's all from here.
Speaker 1: Number one, I really wouldn't worry about the fiction thing
Speaker 1: if I were you. I think it's going quite well
Speaker 1: as it is. I think you should be very happy
Speaker 1: with the way it's going in my estination. And number two,
Speaker 1: are you going to do any more of this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff? My god, you gotta do more television or movies?
Speaker 2: I am yeah. I have my book, The Snakehead, actually
Speaker 2: the thing that started in that in that NYU class.
Speaker 2: The Snakehead is underway with a twenty four as a series,
Speaker 2: which I'm going to co create with a really wonderful writer, Anamunch,
Speaker 2: who's gonna write the scripts. And so that's in the works,
Speaker 2: and I've got a couple of other things in various stages.
Speaker 1: My thanks to author and journalist Patrick rad mkeef. This
Speaker 1: episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Speaker 1: We're pretty used by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria
Speaker 1: de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial, and our social
Speaker 1: media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the
Speaker 1: thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.