Patrick Radden Keefe: From the New Yorker to the bookstore to the screen

Patrick Radden Keefe is a writer and investigative journalist known for books such as Chatter, Say Nothing, and The Snakehead. His work has been recognized with the National Magazine Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. The New York Times named Say Nothing one of the 20 best books of the 21st Century. His reporting on the Sackler family was the inspiration for the 2023 Netflix limited series PAINKILLER and his book Say Nothing was adapted into a limited series for FX/Hulu of the same name. SAY NOTHING was named as one of the 10 Best Shows of 2024 by Variety, Vulture, and the New York Times. Keefe has also written extensively for many publications, including The New Yorker, Slate, and The New York Times magazine. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:38Alec Baldwin?

  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 bestselling books include Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing. Patrick Radden Keefe 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 book Say Nothing was named by the New York Times as one of the 20 best books of the 21st century, and it has since been adapted as a limited series for Hulu.

• 2:22Alec Baldwin?

  This was not the first time Radden Keefe's work inspired a series.

• 2:27Speaker 06

  I was also an executive producer on a series last year on Netflix called Painkiller, which was-

• 2:34Alec Baldwin?

  With Matthew?

• 2:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:35Alec Baldwin?

  You were involved in that?

• 2:36Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:37Alec Baldwin?

  That's loosely based on your-

• 2:38Speaker 06

  On my reporting, my psycho reporting.

• 2:40Alec Baldwin?

  Psycho reporting for The New Yorker. So, of course, the idea that you write a book, it's you, and at some point, an editor, you work on that kind of stuff, and it's a thousand people.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:50Alec Baldwin?

  Someone involved in some way in making your project, helping to realize it. How did the difference feel to you?

• 2:56Speaker 06

  Well, on Painkiller, I was involved in a much more arm's-length kind of way. There was one thing, prodigiously, I did on that project that made a big difference, which is that at a certain point, we were in kind of a cul-de-sac, 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. See, 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 that'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 I'd known for about 10 years, who is a producer.

• 3:40Speaker 06

  Brad's wonderful, and he works with a woman named Ina Jacobson, and they had made The People vs. 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 to 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-

• 4:26Speaker 06

  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.

• 4:38Alec Baldwin?

  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?

• 4:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:59Alec Baldwin?

  At the foot of the Eiffel Tower instead of the Gouanis Canal, you know, whatever. Because the money has become now so precious. Had a guy walk up 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, like, 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.

• 5:30Speaker 06

  But it's also a kind of triage, right? So, yeah, I mean, the experience of writing a book.

• 5:33Alec Baldwin?

  How long did it take you to write that book?

• 5:36Speaker 06

  Four years, depending on how you count, because initially it was a piece in The New Yorker, and I didn't take any book leave. 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 this 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.

• 6:20Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm working on a book now and I might finish next month, I might finish in June, I might finish-

• 6:26Alec Baldwin?

  A year from June.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  Next year. And it's not that people won't be unhappy if the timeline extends, but nobody's gonna lose their job over it.

• 6:34Alec Baldwin?

  When the timeline extends, is there a typical reason or does it always change?

• 6:39Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:48Alec Baldwin?

  Doesn't feel right.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, nice try. Go back and do it again.

• 6:51Alec Baldwin?

  You have a constant editor, the same editor all the time?

• 6:54Speaker 06

  So I've been working with the same editor, both at the magazine and my book publisher. I started with these two guys in 2006, so we're going on 20 years.

• 7:03Alec Baldwin?

  That's when you began at The New Yorker?

• 7:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 7:06Alec Baldwin?

  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 what do they do? How does? Or do you come from a family that owns like steel mills or something where the New Yorker picks up the phone and takes your submissions?

• 7:26Speaker 06

  No, I mean I-

• 7:27Alec Baldwin?

  How do you get in there when you're a young college student?

• 7:28Speaker 06

  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 1997, 1998, what I was doing was writing things, going to Kinko's, printing them out, putting them in a yellow envelope-

• 7:46Alec Baldwin?

  Gorgeous.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  And mailing 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.

• 8:11Alec Baldwin?

  I can see that envelope now, Keefe in the corner, 150 first and-

• 8:16Speaker 06

  No, I mean, this is the thing-

• 8:17Alec Baldwin?

  Right by the bridge.

• 8:18Speaker 06

  Truly. It's like the east campus dormitory, you know? Sweet 10C.

• 8:23Alec Baldwin?

  But when you leave, you go to law school. You don't finish law school and you come back and finish law school, correct?

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:29Alec Baldwin?

  Take the bar?

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:31Alec Baldwin?

  Okay. Why no law career?

• 8:34Speaker 06

  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.

• 8:58Alec Baldwin?

  Who was in charge then?

• 9:00Speaker 06

  Tina Brown initially and then Remnick, yeah. I mean, Remnick was sort of, I was pitching 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 and 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 journalist listening, this is not the best way to approach the ambition.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  It is a time-consuming, indirect, expensive-

• 9:47Alec Baldwin?

  I'll be over here waiting for you to call me at law school.

• 9:51Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:00Alec Baldwin?

  And the book was?

• 10:01Speaker 06

  It was a book called Chatter about eavesdropping by government agencies. I thought I would pick a really easy subject for a nonfiction book. And so I wrote about the most secretive agency of the US government, the National Security Agency.

• 10:14Alec Baldwin?

  When I did the movie Hunt for Red 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'd have lunch with me. They'd have a drink with me. And they'd give me information on a non-attribution basis. And he goes, and then the third part was my imagination.

• 10:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:36Alec Baldwin?

  So when you go there, you're how old when you start the book Chatter?

• 10:39Speaker 06

  Oh, God, I was young. I was in my kind of mid twenties.

• 10:42Alec Baldwin?

  So when you're, when you're calling people to get some information about this, what's their attitude toward you?

• 10:47Speaker 06

  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, 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, Eileen Smith suggested that I read this book by Jeff Dyer. Called Out of Sheer Rage. It's a book about D.H. Lawrence, but it's really a book about how Jeff Dyer is having trouble writing a book about D.H.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Lawrence. And chatter, perhaps unduly influenced by Dyer, became about Patrick Keefe's 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.

• 11:44Alec Baldwin?

  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 like for you politically, culturally, educationally as a child?

• 12:00Speaker 06

  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 Mike Dukakis, similarly kind of progressive, democratic, politics obsessed background. You know, my mother was a professor of philosophy. The house was full of books.

• 12:34Alec Baldwin?

  You were a good student?

• 12:36Speaker 06

  I mean, I was. I went to a, 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, a very good prep school. It was a great school at which I felt pretty mediocre because it was such a concentration of brilliant, hardworking 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 genius there.

• 13:04Alec Baldwin?

  The NFL.

• 13:04Speaker 06

  Some other genius there.

• 13:05Alec Baldwin?

  Who were doing great in college.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  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, I was getting good grades and feeling, so if you, if you do the work, you get the rewards.

• 13:30Alec Baldwin?

  So this first book, I'm just always curious about this kind of origins and this thing. You choose this book why? It seemed like a fascinating.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it came 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 99, 2000. 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, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, were secretly cooperating on global eavesdropping, where they kind of carved up the world and everybody can, they

• 14:19Speaker 06

  can kind of listen in and share information that they're able to

• 14:22Alec Baldwin?

  To anyone you want.

• 14:23Speaker 06

  Hoover up, to anyone they want. And the EU at the time, because the UK then is 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, I'd 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 London 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.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  I come back to go to law school in the fall of 2001. I'm in a civil procedure class, the beginning of my second week of law school, and a student rushes into the room and says, "A plane just hit 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 50-page paper, but it was like a forkful of knowledge about something that had seemed really obscure at the time. And then suddenly, post 9/11, it's highly relevant. There's all these questions about, you know, were 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 Laden? Does he use a phone?

• 15:51Speaker 06

  All these kinds of things.

• 15:52Alec Baldwin?

  Bin Laden determined to strike within US?

• 15:54Speaker 06

  There you go. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy to think about this in retrospect, but I, I thought, well, maybe if I can't sell a magazine article, I could sell a book.

• 16:03Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting.

• 16:04Speaker 06

  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 or 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 acknowledgements to see who these people thanked. And in this stack of maybe 10 books, one of them was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and one of them, this is a very 2001 story, and the other was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which at the time had just come out recently. And they both thanked 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 in this stuff that

• 16:49Speaker 06

  I did. And three hours later, she called me. And what's funny about this story is, there was no second agent on the list. Like, 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.

• 17:17Alec Baldwin?

  That's your first book. I'm wondering, do you finish the book, and it's still The New Yorker is calling your name?

• 17:24Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:25Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. And then what happens?

• 17:26Speaker 06

  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 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-

• 17:38Alec Baldwin?

  It's a calling card.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  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 end up going back to finish law school after taking a year off. I was commuting from my, 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 studied 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-

• 18:21Speaker 06

  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.

• 18:43Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, legal stuff.

• 18:45Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:08Alec Baldwin?

  And you're on the phone with a guy recruiting you for the firm saying, I'm sorry, I can't come. I'm hip deep in this sex trafficking thing.

• 19:13Speaker 06

  It was, it was actually so, I blush to recall, but it was a thing where I, 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, a no interest loan to kind of get you through the time before you got there. And so I ended up actually getting a $10,000 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 $10,000, 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.

• 19:51Alec Baldwin?

  They were polite about it.

• 19:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:54Alec Baldwin?

  Now, you've 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?

• 20:02Speaker 06

  It is and it's not. I mean, I think that at the point where I called the law firm and said, so long, 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.

• 20:19Alec Baldwin?

  You were hopeful.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  I was hopeful, but I also, when I finished that piece, I thought it came together well. And I, 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.

• 20:31Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. I didn't get made a staff writer until 2012.

• 20:35Alec Baldwin?

  So you're freelancing and writing many freelance articles for them or for a bunch of people?

• 20:40Speaker 06

  Freelance articles for them. I wrote for Slate. I wrote a bunch of screenplays that, I mean, I've actually, I really kind of paid the bills by being a working screenwriter.

• 20:49Alec Baldwin?

  See, that's interesting because we were talking about Say Nothing. Was that your first foray? And you said, no.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  It was the first time something was produced.

• 20:55Alec Baldwin?

  That's what I mean.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, because I was, I was the kind of prototypical unproduced screenwriter who, you know.

• 20:59Alec Baldwin?

  But I'm not delineating. You were writing stuff.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  I was.

• 21:01Alec Baldwin?

  And being paid to write screenplays.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 21:03Alec Baldwin?

  Any of it you liked?

• 21:04Speaker 06

  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 write a book, I've had two articles killed in my whole career and it was under, it was because my editor died. So there's a near certainty 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?

• 21:47Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I've, I've 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 18 months later and you go, oh, you passed on my movie to make that?

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:13Alec Baldwin?

  You're sitting watching the movie that took your slots.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  No, it's amazing. 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 screenwriters in Hollywood, a wonderful guy. Scott is this kind of legendary script doctor who has done rewrites on 60 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 in things, but he's, it's like an X. If he looks 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 have 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,

• 23:00Speaker 06

  there's nothing that I can add, this is perfect, there's nothing that I can do. And I said, oh, amazing, what were the movies? And he said, oh, none of them got made.

• 23:11Alec Baldwin?

  Author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. If you enjoy conversations about investigative journalism and nonfiction writing, check out my episode with David Remnick.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  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 16th notes.

• 23:37Alec Baldwin?

  It's all Anagata de Vida.

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Or you sound like the Ramones, although I've heard of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, in voice.

• 23:47Alec Baldwin?

  And that's your responsibility, you feel?

• 23:49Speaker 07

  I feel all of it's my responsibility.

• 23:53Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with David Remnick, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Patrick Radden Keefe shares an unexpected job offer from the world's most notorious drug kingpin.

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  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover, seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges...

• 25:14Speaker 00

  There are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 25:46Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Patrick Radden Keefe first began contributing to The New Yorker as a freelance writer in 2006. In 2012, he joined the coveted ranks of the magazine's full-time writing staff. For Radden Keefe, landing a full-time position at The New Yorker was a dream come true.

• 26:08Speaker 06

  I mean, I think it's the greatest job ever.

• 26:11Alec Baldwin?

  I would imagine, yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 06

  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.

• 26:35Alec Baldwin?

  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 read Larry Wright, all these people I've read forever in that magazine, it's crazy.

• 26:46Speaker 06

  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 and to kind of pull them in. I'm very attentive to that.

• 27:06Alec Baldwin?

  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, Ochopo, 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?

• 27:35Speaker 06

  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

• 28:18Speaker 06

  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 Chapo Guzman? 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. It's the first time you've seen him really commit an awful act of violence. And you've had, you know, 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 his therapist.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  And at the point where he does this appalling thing, you kind of feel your stomach drop. You don't want him to do it, but also, you're in there with him.

• 29:11Alec Baldwin?

  I think the writer's saying, let's be clear about one thing now.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:15Alec Baldwin?

  You know, five episodes, and let's remember what he does.

• 29:17Speaker 06

  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 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.

• 29:42Alec Baldwin?

  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 common with that person? What have they gone through? What's that? For someone to just explode into some Dahmer-esque parade of insanity, that's different.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 30:06Alec Baldwin?

  What's Guzman, a businessman, a psycho businessman? Or what is he, in your words?

• 30:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's pretty much that. It's funny, I mean, I first wrote about him in 2012. 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 2011 to The New York Times, they said Chapo who? 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 commodities conglomerate.

• 30:39Alec Baldwin?

  He's a successful businessman.

• 30:40Speaker 06

  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 to 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.

• 30:56Alec Baldwin?

  How do they see themselves? I mean, in my mind, I always look at characters and go, what do you think is coming over, coming across?

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Well, they do, yeah. I mean, there, 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.

• 31:14Alec Baldwin?

  John Milks Booth theory.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. And so I think that there is, I mean, another thing that I'm very interested in is just self-deception, delusion, the stories that people tell themselves about the choices that they make. So for Chapo Guzman, absolutely, is there a version of the story in which Chapo 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 out 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.

• 31:45Alec Baldwin?

  Is well, Chapo's lawyer called you?

• 31:48Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:50Alec Baldwin?

  Describe that.

• 31:52Alec Baldwin?

  How does that call get affected?

• 31:53Speaker 06

  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 the piece anyway. And this Chapo Guzman piece, it was actually the second piece that I did about him for The New Yorker. It was after he was captured, before he escaped, before he was captured again. So he'd-

• 32:15Alec Baldwin?

  He wanted to get caught, let's face it.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  There you go, he wanted the supermax. 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 was 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, you realize 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 whom 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 hunted by the DEA.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  And yeah, I interviewed one of these DEA guys who used to listen in on the wiretaps. And he said, "It was like Peyton Place, it was a whole deal." You know, they're kind of having to- 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, he was locked up in Mexico. Piece 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 Yorker subscriber.

• 33:26Alec Baldwin?

  He's got time.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's got 40 girlfriends. And I got a call from a lawyer who said that he represented the Guzman family after the piece 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 gonna run a name by you, this guy says he's a cartel lawyer, is he the real deal? What's the story?" The guy 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 60% cartel, 40% lawyer."

• 34:00Speaker 06

  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 El Chapo's memoir.

• 34:13Alec Baldwin?

  This is like analyze this, but it's profile this.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  No, I know.

• 34:16Alec Baldwin?

  It comes to you and they're like, you, you, you.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  Exactly. Well, no.

• 34:19Alec Baldwin?

  You're good.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  He said, 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 has a very like starchy, kind of self-important way of talking. And he said, El señor 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 a 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 continue to consider our offer.

• 34:52Alec Baldwin?

  Wow.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:53Alec Baldwin?

  But nothing came of that?

• 34:55Speaker 06

  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 Sean Penn went down with Rolling Stone and had that kind of, to me, pretty silly interview with Guzman. At that point, I felt like, okay, the cat's 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 published this in The New Yorker, I got a note from a journalist in Spain with El País. And he said, he asked me too. You know, he was like clearly shopping it around. I was a little hurt because I, you know, I sort of wondered where was I in the pecking order, you know?

• 35:34Alec Baldwin?

  Your waiter in a Korean barbecue was like, I got a call from them.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  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 that, 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 Chapo Guzman.

• 36:02Alec Baldwin?

  Author and journalist Patrick Rattenkeef. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Patrick Rattenkeef 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.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 37:36Alec Baldwin?

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

• 38:06Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. You may have heard the 1990 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 Rattenkeefe heard about this alleged clandestine operation, he knew he needed to tell the story, but decided against his typical format.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  So I have a source. 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 sui generis 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."

• 39:16Speaker 06

  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 operation 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."

• 39:46Alec Baldwin?

  You've never done a podcast before?

• 39:48Speaker 06

  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 in the middle of the night and 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 serial, 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.

• 40:12Alec Baldwin?

  Bingo. Back.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're giving a little less of your brain to the whole.

• 40:16Alec Baldwin?

  No screen.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  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 were 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.

• 40:48Alec Baldwin?

  So in terms of Sackler, when I kept peeking back at the Sackler thing, your Sackler thing, because that article was just like someone 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 been, 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 no?

• 41:10Speaker 06

  A little bit. I mean, I-

• 41:11Alec Baldwin?

  CVS got into a lot of trouble.

• 41:12Speaker 06

  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 addiction crisis since the mid 90s. 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-

• 41:37Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 06

  -to get to-

• 41:38Alec Baldwin?

  A team.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  -that 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 who, 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

• 42:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 42:36Alec Baldwin?

  A lot of people say that.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:37Alec Baldwin?

  A lot of people said, say something along the lines of like, your- Is my chapter, you know what I mean? I spent a chapter of my life immersing myself, but then I'm done. I've done everything I've done. And my curiosity, the curiosity that led me to your story leads me to another story.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, but, 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, they 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.

• 43:09Alec Baldwin?

  When I watched your show, I thought I was gonna cry a lot, which is not me. I mean, I'm ready 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 other choices. They think they have no choice. Now, was it exhausting for you emotionally to write this? Or it doesn't affect you that way, the darkness?

• 43:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I've been living with this story for a long time. My first trip to Northern Ireland happened in 2014. And it is a kind of oddity, I guess, a sort of personal quirk that I'm, I often write about really dark stuff, but I'm a pretty upbeat, you know, as my, as my father would relentlessly. There was a song that my grandfather loved, which I think is probably from the 30s, and that my grandfather would quote, my father would quote to us when we were kids. Which, and the, and the, there was a line in the song, which is, "Life can be delish with a sunny disposition." And

• 44:15Alec Baldwin?

  And that's you.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  I have a sunny disposition.

• 44:18Alec Baldwin?

  So you sit down at your laptop.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  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, the work that I do. There are all kinds of people who have more bravery and are exposed to more carnage than I am. I've had moments in my career, you know, 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 doing.

• 44:41Alec Baldwin?

  You covered The New Yorker, didn't you?

• 44:42Speaker 06

  I did, yeah.

• 44:43Alec Baldwin?

  Those pieces paralyzed me, oh, God, when they find him in the boat, oh, my God. Great writing there, boy.

• 44:48Speaker 06

  Thank you. But, you know, that stuff can 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 are talking to people often about the darkest, most awful things.

• 45:04Alec Baldwin?

  That must be crap.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  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 wanna, the book is, I will 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 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.

• 45:49Alec Baldwin?

  Now, two last things. No fiction for you, why?

• 45:53Speaker 06

  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 a world.

• 46:24Alec Baldwin?

  He goes here, he wears what?

• 46:25Speaker 06

  He goes there, 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 me. It's like, you know, when chefs talk about their mise en place, 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

• 47:10Speaker 06

  figure out how to combine them. What I struggled with with fiction was anything can happen.

• 47:17Alec Baldwin?

  Well, it's like, it's like when I watched Lockerbie with Colin Firth. I love, worship Colin Firth. And of course, when I think about the work you do, the nonfiction work, it's 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 is you walk into the hangar and 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 estimation. And number two, are you going to do any more of this kind of stuff? My God, you gotta do more television or movies.

• 47:56Speaker 06

  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 A24 as a series, which I'm going to co-create with a really wonderful writer, Anna Munch, who's going to write the scripts. And so that's in the works and I've got a couple of other things that are in various stages.

• 48:21Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to author and journalist, Patrick Rattenkeif. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. 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.

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  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can

• 51:19Speaker 07

  Get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.