Patrick Radden Keefe on page-turning journalism, his own celebrity, and the humanity behind his work

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Mixed Signals from Semafor Media

Episode: Patrick Radden Keefe on Page-Turning Journalism, His Own Celebrity, and the Humanity Behind His Work
Date: April 17, 2026
Hosts: Max Tani (A), Ben Smith (B)
Guest: Patrick Radden Keefe (D)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Mixed Signals dives into the art and intricacies of narrative journalism with acclaimed author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Hosts Max Tani and Ben Smith explore Keefe’s new book London Falling—a gripping examination of a mysterious death that intersects with the shifting socio-economic fabric of London—and use it as a springboard to discuss the craft, ethics, and evolving celebrity status of longform journalists today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Why This Story, and How Keefe Chooses His Subjects (03:47–08:52)

• Shift from “Capital T” Topics:
  Keefe’s prior books (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) tackled big subjects—The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the opioid crisis. London Falling focuses on a more intimate, personal tragedy.

  • "I always need to find some kind of human drama that's my way in." (D, 04:33)
  • Despite the scale, he’s drawn to stories through their characters, not their policy issues.

• How Stories “Find” Him:
  Keefe is “extremely findable” online—by design. He receives tips and cold emails, some of which have become major sources for his work.

  • "[The] best ideas aren't on the Internet... You're probably not going to find them by just sitting there on ChatGPT or Google." (D, 07:27)
  • He recounts learning about the central story of London Falling in a chance conversation: "He told me essentially... there's a 19-year-old boy, he dies... after his death his parents find out that he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. That night I Googled [him]... there was nothing online." (D, 07:31)

• Sifting Through Tips:
  Keefe does not employ an assistant or AI to handle his influx of pitches. The decision to pursue a story remains gut-driven and highly personal.

  • "I'm so inefficient, I don't have an assistant who does it because I don't think I would trust anyone... It's such a gut feeling thing." (D, 09:21)
  • He emphasizes the importance of narrative convolution—twisting, unpicking, and reassembling complex stories for readers.

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Source Relationships, Ethics, and Accountability (11:00–16:25)

• Why Do Sources Open Up?
  The unique trust dynamic is highlighted with London Falling: the victim’s parents initially kept everything quiet, trusting the police to deliver justice, but later turned to Keefe. He’s careful to manage expectations:

  • "We cannot enter into this with that implicit transaction in your minds because it would sort of be unfair to both of us." (D, 12:27)

• Expectations in Narrative Journalism:
  Keefe discusses the difference between mystery stories in print and podcasting, referencing his Wind of Change podcast (about the CIA possibly writing a Scorpions song) ending inconclusively:

  • "If the story’s a mystery, you need to solve the mystery... the value proposition is just not one where you can get to the end and say—and throw your hands up in the air." (D, 14:20)
  • Podcasts allow for more ambiguity, as listeners expect less conclusive endings compared to readers.

• Moral Complexity:
  He notes that most real-life stories resist simple conclusions and that listeners/readers must be prepared for continued ambiguity.

  • "In life, most stories are going to be more like Wind of Change than Say Nothing." (D, 15:49)

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The Business & Celebrity of Narrative Nonfiction (20:10–25:32)

• Sales and the “Bestseller” Label:
  Keefe estimates sales for his books are in the hundreds of thousands to millions—not mass-market “romantasy” levels, but significant.

  • “It’s like fewer than a million copies in the US, more than a million copies all in [for Say Nothing].” (D, 20:29)

• The “Celebrity Journalist”:
  Keefe discusses how the New York Times profile labeled him and the paradox of literary fame.

  • “Sort of celebrity journalist, you know, bit of a contradiction in terms… All of the comments are like, ‘I’ve never heard of this guy.’ So I think we have our answer." (D, 21:52)
  • He acknowledges that increased visibility lets him “cultivate sources” more easily but keeps his pop culture cameos (J.Crew ad, HBO’s Industry) separate from his serious reporting.

• Success Breeds Access:
  High-profile work means that tips and source relationships are easier: “They sort of have the cut of my jib because they can see my work.” (D, 22:48)

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Adaptations and True Crime (25:32–29:55)

• Film & TV Involvement:
  Keefe now negotiates executive producer roles for adaptations (“at this point I have some leverage”) and varies his involvement depending on the project.

  • “With Say Nothing… it was a sort of half to full time job for years. They took as long to make the show as it did to write the book.” (D, 25:47)

• Is Keefe a True Crime Writer?
  He resists the label, focusing instead on the larger themes and human dramas behind crimes.

  • “I don’t really think of myself as a true crime writer... The necessary kind of interesting, larger thematic issues that give it just a little bit more heft.” (D, 27:13)
  • Example: In writing about Amy Bishop, he was interested not in the shooter but in “an act of parental denial”—the mother enabling her daughter's evasion of justice.

• The Charisma of Criminals:
  Another tightrope: capturing the “roguish charm” and intelligence of dangerous subjects without glorifying them, always mindful of victims’ suffering.

  • “It's a tightrope walk while juggling... capture the charisma... while also not glorifying them, while also keeping in mind that there are real victims..." (D, 29:55)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Narrative Journalism:

  • “It's a page turner and yet a quagmire.” — Patrick Radden Keefe (D, 04:35)

• On Audience Expectations:

  • “I always need to find some kind of human drama that's my way in.” — Patrick Radden Keefe (D, 04:33)
  • “In life, most stories are going to be more like Wind of Change than Say Nothing.” — Patrick Radden Keefe (D, 15:49)

• On His Unintentional Public Profile:

  • “She said all of the [NYT] comments are like, ‘I’ve never heard of this guy.’ So I think we have our answer." — Patrick Radden Keefe (D, 21:52)

• On Charismatic Wrongdoers:

  • “Part of what makes… Chapo Guzman good at his job is that he’s a really smart guy… but has a certain charisma. That’s a thing I’ve always been interested in.” — Patrick Radden Keefe (D, 30:54)

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Podcast Structure and the Craft of Longform

• Nonlinear and Cinematic Writing:
  The hosts praise Keefe for structuring his narratives in a way that doles out revelations as characters themselves learn them, creating cinematic shock and engagement. (35:04–35:19)

• The Feedback Loop of Success:
  Keefe’s visibility and reputation help generate further story leads, illustrating a virtuous cycle for top investigative journalists. (36:20)

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• Why Keefe chose London Falling / the human drama at the heart of his work — 04:27–08:52
• Keefe's discovery process & email tips — 06:47–10:49
• Working with sources, family trust, and setting boundaries — 11:00–13:10
• Inconclusive endings in narrative journalism & podcasting — 14:08–16:25
• How podcast format changed storytelling — 16:34–17:22
• Book sales and “celebrity” status — 20:10–24:48
• Involvement in TV/film adaptations — 25:32–26:40
• True crime label and thematic ambitions — 27:13–29:36
• Portraying the humanity (and magnetism) of criminals — 29:55–31:55

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Tone, Style, and Closing Thoughts

Mixed Signals delivers an in-depth but lively conversation that balances journalistic shop talk with larger reflections on narrative craft and the modern media landscape. Keefe’s self-deprecating humor, the hosts’ gentle ribbing, and insights into the unsung processes of reporting will appeal to journalism devotees and curious outsiders alike.

Notable Final Exchange:

• “You can really imagine the sensation of feeling like, oh my god, I’m in a Patrick Radden Keefe book. I’ve got to tell Patrick Radden Keefe if like a specific set of horrible, complicated things happen to you.” — Max Tani (A, 36:30)
• “Patrick Radden Keefe is that for scumbags. Charismatic scumbags, yeah.” — Ben Smith (B, 37:21)

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to some of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawny. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore, and of course, I have with me our editor in chief, Ben Smith. Ben, you're a pretty busy guy. You've got a lot of editing to do of Semaphore. You are hosting events. Do you have time to read books ever?

[B]

You know, honestly, mostly not. I order books, I get review copies. I think about books. I carry books around. I do not read books as much as I would like.

[A]

Well, this week on the show, we are extremely happy to be engaging with the oldest form of media that there is, that is books, the written word. And that's because we have one of the best people who makes them on our show today. That's Patrick Raden Keefe. He's the author of the new book London Falling, which is a just absolutely riveting story about a young man who fell to his death in London in 2019. And the fantastic and interesting, fascinating and tragic story behind his death. It gets into the changing dynamics in the city of London, the rise of this Russian oligarch class be. We both received the press copy of this Tuesday night and neither of us could put it down. You finished the book? I almost got there in a matter of a few days. What did you think of the book and why did you want to have Patrick on the show today?

[B]

Patrick, you know, he's just on an unbelievable series of hits from the book about the troubles. Say nothing to this incredible book, empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. How many hot magazine writers do you get in the year 2026? He's really doing something special.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. The New York Times just published a profile of him where they asked if he was the last celebrity journalist, which is either depressing or not, depending on your perspective on our profession.

[B]

We all know it's you, Max.

[A]

Yes, I appreciate it. Well, he certainly is one of the last ones who's not standing in front of a camera or their laptop in a microphone producing content. We have a lot that we want to get to with Patrick, Brad and Keef. So we'll be right back after this.

[C]

Hi, I'm Joshua Spaniar, VP of marketing at Google, and you might assume I have all the answers when it comes to marketing. The truth, I'm just as curious to learn, discover the answers to everything. As everyone else, we are living through a total reset of our marketing industry. The old maps don't work, which means we get to chart a new path forward. It's dynamic, it's fast paced, and honestly, there's never been a more exciting time to be in marketing. That is why we've started a new podcast, Frontier cmo. It's from Think with Google, and I promise it's not just a bunch of corporate waffle. I'm sitting down with people who really know what's going on, CMOs, creators, technologists, the lot. And we're having a proper, unfiltered chat about what's working and quite frankly, what isn't. These are your notes from the Frontier. So do me a favor, search for Frontier CMO wherever you get your podcasts or watch us and subscribe on YouTube.

[B]

Patrick, thank you so much for joining us.

[D]

It's great to be with you guys.

[B]

I wanted to start with sort of why you chose this book, which kept me and Max up in subsequent nights this week, thought I would dip into it and wound up staying up till two in the morning. It's an amazing book.

[A]

You can't kind of dip into Patrick's books. That's not really how it works. They're page turners by necessity.

[B]

They're quagmires. But your last two books took on what I think of as almost like capital T topics, like the troubles in Ireland and then really like the American opioid crisis, like one of the big public policy issues of the E. And this one feels in a way like a smaller story, a maybe more personal story. I'm just sort of curious how you thought about approaching it, why you chose this one. Or maybe you don't buy that premise.

[D]

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm still reeling from hearing you describe my books as Quagmire's. But if I could just, if I

[B]

could just never escape, if I could

[D]

just recover from that. It's a page turner and yet a quagmire. You know, I didn't go into either of those earlier books thinking I'm going to write a book about a capital T topic. I think there are all kinds of policy issues or kind of broader themes of one sort or another that interest me. But in terms of the kind of writing that I like to do, I always need to find some kind of human drama that's my way in. So I actually, you know, it's strange because the Sackler book, I didn't think of it as a book about the Opioid crisis. I thought of it as a sort of biography of three generations of this American dynasty that happened to play a really critical role in initiating the opioid crisis. And similarly, say nothing. I thought of it as a story about a handful of people kind of against the backdrop of the trouble. So I guess I would resist it in that sense. But I get the idea that certainly for the person who reads the book, there's a sense that there's kind of some nutritional content they're taking away, which is that they learned about a big topic of interest, and this one is a little different. I was just very drawn to this sort of particular human story of the idea that there's this family who loses a son and then they learn that their teenage boy had been, prior to his death, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. But I will say, even there, that kind of tapped into a series of issues that was interesting to me because I had written an essay for the New Yorker, a books piece, kind of back of the book essay for the New Yorker after Russia's invasion of Ukraine about the awkward place where London found itself having rolled out the red carpet for all these dodgy Kremlin connected billionaires errors for decades when the invasion happened. And so I'd sort of been thinking about those things and I'd written about it in a more discursive way. And so the opportunity to explore some of those themes in the context of a really intimate family story was appealing.

[A]

Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to this story? And in particular, I was listening to another interview that you did promoting the book where you talked about how you don't find your stories, they find you. But, you know, you've been pretty good at picking them over the last few years. Can you explain exactly why you felt this is a story kind of worth pursuing, both as a magazine article and then eventually as a book?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I'm extremely findable on the Internet by design, because some of my best sources on any of my project, truly, I mean, some of the very best sources in my books are people who read an article I wrote in the New Yorker and then cold emailed me, people I would never have known to look for. And so it's important to have people be able to reach me if they need to. But as a consequence, I get a ton of email from strangers and I get pitched a lot. And most of what comes my way isn't for me for one reason or another. In part because the stories that I write for the New Yorker tend to take at a minimum six months. Right. So it's a big commitment to decide that you're going to launch into something like that. In this case, it was just. I was on the set of say Nothing, the FX series that we made based on my book. I got to chatting with this guy. I do tend to talk to strangers. You know, I'm. I will kind of fall into conversation with a stranger. I think that's a. It's good to kind of stay curious and stay in conversation with people. I tend to think the best ideas aren't on the Internet. You're probably not going to find them by just sitting there on ChatGPT or Google. And we got to chatting and this guy said, I might have a story for you. There's this family I know. And he started telling me about the family. And actually when I got back to the apartment that night, he told me essentially what I just said. There's a 19 year old boy, he dies, he goes off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames in London. And after his death his parents find out that he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. That night I googled Zach Brettler, which is the name of the boy, and there was nothing online to indicate even that he was dead. And I don't know, it's not that I have some sort of laundry list of ingredients that it fit. It was literally that he told me. And I was so intrigued, I could feel myself leaning in and wanting to know more. And that's usually a good. I think I've gotten over the years at not being so analytical and thinking what are the ingredients of a good story and actually sort of listening to my own attention span, kind of heeding the things that I, I'm, you know, just naturally drawn to or not.

[A]

But to just go back a second, Patrick, you're unsurprisingly inundated with tips. And I'm sure after the book comes out and a bunch of people read it, you'll just get more people reaching out to you and whatnot. But I mean, how do you just practically sift through all of that? Do you have an assistant? Have you programmed some bot to do it for you? AI agent? How are you actually sifting through to try to find what your next stories might be in that among all the

[D]

tips, I'm so inefficient, I don't have an assistant who does it because I don't think I would trust anyone to it's. Such a gut feeling thing that I don't think I would necessarily trust someone to do that, even that first pass. And I'm too technically inept to. It's kind up with some AI solution. I try and read everything that comes in, but a lot of the time I'm just reading a few lines. And you sort of generally get the, you know, you generally get the idea. I think the thing that's hard, the thing that I wrestle with is some stories are inherently complicated. So I mean, for any of us, right? Like, you guys get pitches too. You get a pitch and you open it up and it's 5,000 words long and immediately you feel this kind of sinking feeling. And your inclination is. And it's funny because when I talk to young journalists, they'll sometimes send me pitches they want to send to the New Yorker. And I'm always kind of amazed because I'm like, do you get email? Like when you open an email like this, does it just like your heart quicken with excitement? You know? And I think the tricky thing for me is that some of these stories, in a weird way, a story that's going to be a good story in my hands needs a degree of kind of narrative convolution. And then ideally what happens is that I'm sort of unpicking it and then like rearranging it in a way that will be more digestible for a reader. And so that does mean that occasionally I'll get these big, dense emails and it actually takes me, you know, it takes me half an hour to get to the point where I'm confident that I can say no, actually, this isn't for me. Thank you. I've, I've sort of figured out, I think, what you're talking about, and it's not for me.

[B]

Do you reply to them all?

[D]

No, I, I, I have a little note on my website that says something like, I get a lot of email and I'm bad at email. So I mean, I, I, no, I, I rarely do.

[B]

I work with sources a lot and many of them are kind of professional, transactional sources in some sense, people in public life who know the game. But of course, like, the pure of heart sources are the best ones. Yeah, like the ones who just have a story they want to tell and have, and you're the first journalist they ever called. I mean, it's just inevitably those are the best stories. Why do you think people do that? Like what, what prompts, in this case, these grieving parents to decide to open their lives up to you?

[D]

Yeah. I mean, in this case, there was a lot going on because they had. So Zack, their son dies in late 2019. And they, in a way that I think they today would tell you was really naive. You know, these are well off, upper middle class, sophisticated, well connected Londoners.

[B]

The mom's a journalist.

[D]

The mom's a journalist, a freelance journalist. The dad is in finance. They're white. You know, they live in Maida Vale, which is a really nice neighborhood in West London, Highly educated, all the rest. And there's. I mean, you guys will appreciate. I guess the listeners to this podcast might appreciate this story in a way that others wouldn't. But there was one point where I was talking to them early on and they were talking about how they decided to keep Zach's death quiet, to keep it out of the press. And they said, yeah, we checked in with a friend of ours who does pr. We have this friend, Matthew, Matthew Freud. But I mean, that sort of gives you an indication of the world in which they live. And they thought that when you call the cops, the cops are going to come and take care. Like, if your teenage son dies in mysterious circumstances, the cops will get to the bottom of it. That turned out in a kind of spectacular way not to be the case. The cops really screwed it up. And so fortuitously, they met me just a few months after the official process had kind of fully run its course. But I guess I would quickly caveat and say I then had to say to them, there's part of me that thinks that you're inclined to go public and talk with me because you think that I will sleuth out the answer in a way that the cops couldn't. And I will bring you the accountability that the system didn't afford. And we cannot enter into this with that kind of implicit transaction in your minds because it would sort of be unfair to both of us.

[A]

Has that been something that you've said to people in the past? Or is that something also that you've learned? Because, you know, I think back to, and I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast, being the media literate people that they are, probably know about your podcast that you did on Wind of Change where you kind of explored whether the CIA basically wrote that song by. What's the band called again? The Scorpions. Yes, exactly. Sorry. Slightly before my time. Slightly before my time. I didn't actually know Millennials, but now I hear.

[D]

I think we need to reboot this whole. This whole podcast.

[A]

I know. Sorry, sorry, sorry about It. I'm glad I get to still, you know, pull that card.

[D]

That's great.

[A]

You know, it's an amazing exploration of, you know, the song and the CIA and, And kind of the fall of the Soviet Union. And at the end, I think, you know, you don't get to the bottom of whether or not the CIA had written that song, which I think some people thought, you know, was maybe sl. I'm curious if you draw on that experience or if this is something you've always done, jumping into these types of stories.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, how long you got? I think about this stuff all the time. Daniel Zaleski, who's the editor at the New Yorker I've worked with for 20 years, he has occasionally over the years said when I would bring him ideas, particularly early in my career, he would say, if the story's a mystery, you need to solve the mystery. If it's an 8,000 word New Yorker piece that's gonna take 45 minutes of a person's time, the value proposition is just not one where you can get to the end and say. And throw your hands up in the air and say, and we'll never know because people get pissed. And I think that that's probably right. And actually, it's funny you mentioned Window of Change. Part of the reason I did Wind of Change as a podcast is that I always knew we would land in an inconclusive place, but I thought that for a variety of reasons, a podcast would lend itself. I think that the expectation of a podcast is different on the part of the listener for a couple of reasons. I mean, one I think is actually because I think we all learned what narrative podcast was from serial, and serial ended in an inconclusive way after I don't know how many hours. But the other is just that you can be walking the dog or doing the dishes, you're giving less of your mind to it. So that's part of the reason I did Window Change as a podcast. I think the challenge for me is not if you look at sort of two kind of very different projects. My book say Nothing was kind of a whodunit about this. This murder in 1972. And at the end of the book, I figured out who the murderer was, and it has this kind of very satisfying ending. And I think the challenge for me is that in life, most stories are going to be more like Wind of Change than say Nothing. You often don't get to the bottom of it, or if you do, there are still big unanswered questions.

[A]

So did you ever.

[B]

After it came out, did you ever get to the bottom of it? Did anybody ever come back to you?

[D]

So I want to choose my words carefully here. What I will say is a lot of people in the CIA listened to the podcast, and I know that it was widely listened to and discussed by people in the Agency. I had various conversations with various people subsequently, and I'm not necessarily in a position to divulge everything that I might have learned. I realize this is very unsatisfying, but it's all I can say.

[B]

You know, we're gonna have to make an 11 pirate podcast about this.

[D]

Exactly. I think I might do season, if only so that you can then come after me, you know, when we. When we end on an inconclusive note.

[A]

Yeah, I do think part of it, and, you know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, was it came out during COVID and people didn't have anything to do. And so I think that there was a little bit of a. We're only living for this podcast to figure out if the CIA did this song.

[D]

Yeah. You know, it's funny. So the numbers on this podcast were crazy, and the. Or at least to me, crazy, certainly in comparison to anything I've ever written. And it's. Even the feed. I mean, this is all a little inside baseball, but we just. I have this new book that just came out, and I do the audiobook, and we've done this now for a couple of our books, but we took the prologue of the audiobook and just put it as a free sample on the Wind of Change feed. And 100,000 people listened to it in, like, six days on this old feed from six years ago. But I think that the reason someone's

[A]

going to try to buy that feed, by the way.

[D]

Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, the. I don't. I don't know that I actually even control it. I think we sort of. Anyway, but I think it was the fact that we released in May 2020. I mean, I think it's a good podcast, but I also think we released in May 2020. Literally, it was the point in the pandemic where people were just realizing that this was not gonna be over by Easter. And I think everybody had already binged the Tiger King. Like, truly the Tiger King had come out a few weeks earlier, and it was that moment where everybody was kind of sick of their spouse and ready for, you know, a distraction.

[A]

Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Patrick, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.

[B]

On this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke to Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about how marketers can reach customers in the age of AI. So at this point in the year, we're probably already past reflecting on 2025 and very focused on looking ahead to the rest of 2026. What's on your mind right now?

[C]

I'm a marketer, and any good marketer starts and ends with their customer, with consumers. So front and center, I'm focused on my customers. So I'm thinking about how they're searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping across Google's platforms and beyond.

[B]

So what should marketers know and do differently?

[C]

What I'm seeing, Ben, is people who use AI overviews and AI mode in Google are making decisions faster and with more confidence because of those products. That's a remarkable speeding up of the buying process and something that marketers can really take advantage of to do so. We actually have a whole slew of new ad products which are really compelling, powered by AI, such as AI maps for search. It allows you to get the right message to the right person at the right time with a stronger intent signal to actually close that gap. That is making people more confident in decisions and your ad more relevant. It's actually closing the gap between discovery and decision that's really powerful.

[B]

Where can people find out more about this?

[C]

There's a new guide for marketers on thinkwithgoogle.com all about reaching consumers at the speed of AI. You can check it out at thinkwithgoogle.com thanks, Josh. Thanks, Ben.

[A]

I'm trying to understand and I think a lot of our audience is also kind of curious about, you know, you see New York Times bestseller. Nobody really knows exactly what that means. I'm curious, like, how many copies of the books do you sell? And also how big is the printed copy sales versus how many people are listening to your books as audiobooks?

[D]

I'm not completely on top of the numbers. And the other thing is that the books, some of them have really big foreign markets that some of them have, I should say.

[B]

Nobody is going to like throw you in a black van if you accidentally disclose sales figures.

[A]

Yeah, the publishing industry people are not nearly as scary as some of the other people you've encountered.

[D]

Exactly, exactly. No, I mean, it varies from book to book and with say nothing truly, it's like fewer than a million copies in the US more than a million copies all in.

[A]

Wow.

[D]

And with Empire Pain less than that, but not by a huge margin. It's interesting, right, because it's not romantasy numbers, but people are reading these books and engaging with them. And a lot of this is still fairly new to me, to be honest with you. Because my first two books didn't really. My first two books basically sold 10,000 copies each and kind of went away. But the second book, the Snakehead, is now finding a new life because people go back to it but say nothing. Kind of markedly changed the situation for me in terms of the kind of. In terms of what books mean and what they can be.

[A]

You've reached a point now where you're the rare celebrity journalist. The New York Times had a piece where they interviewed like 70 people. I think around you. They described. You're being interviewed by Sarah Jessica Parker. You are being interviewed by her. You've reached kind of this, you know, rare tier of journalists who actually regular people know. You posed for J. Crew. You were in an episode of Industry as yourself. I'm curious, how has that actually changed your work? I'm sure it means that you get more tips and more emails and people are more kind of familiar with you. But how has it changed the actual journalism or has it.

[D]

Well, there's. Okay, so a few things. I mean, first of all, on the celebrity journalist thing, it's funny, I thought that Times piece was very generous. I really liked Jonah Bromwich, who did it as a real reporter's reporter. And he kind of. He sort of wrote a profile of me the way I would write a profile of someone else, which I found it a little bit scary, but I appreciated the headline. You know, what is it like, can a journalist be a celebrity or something? It's just funny. It's one of those kind of trollish headlines where it's like, well, no, obviously. And it didn't go in the comments, but my wife went in the comments of the Times article. She said all of the comments are like, I've never heard of this guy. I literally never heard of this man. So I think we have our answer Right. So sort of celebrity journalist, you know, bit of a contradiction in terms. And then to kind of further tease this out, it has helped my work enormously that there are now people who've read my stuff and that I sometimes call, depending on the story or the universe I'm in, I will call people trying to cultivate a source and the person I'm reaching has, like, knows who I am and has read my stuff. That's immensely helpful because they. I don't have to persuade them that I'm rigorous and gonna work really hard and so forth. They sort of have the cut of my jib because they can see my work, the J. Crew thing, and industry and all that kind of stuff that I think of as entirely separate. So that's just these kind of fun, weird opportunities fall in my lap. I'm curious. I like to try new things. If it was totally garbage or. Or just some whack thing that I didn't want to be associated with, I wouldn't do it. And in those cases, I was sort of happy to say yes. And then also, frankly, I've been doing this 20 years. It's all I ever wanted to do. My career has unfolded against the backdrop of all these kind of doom and gloom narratives about the demise of the printed word and the kind of contraction of the magazine industry. And so if some opportunity comes along where people are saying, actually, we think that, you know, being a magazine journalist, you know, might conceivably be a kind of vaguely aspirational thing, I'm all for that. You know, I'll sort of do that without any. Without any shame or apology. Having said that, there's nobody. I don't think there's any scenario in which there'll be some, like, hard to reach source who says, well, I saw the J. Crew spread and I reconsidered. You know, this is in a kind of entirely different lane. You know, if anything, it would be the opposite, where there might be people who. And this is a thing I sort of thought about before saying yes to. This is like, at a certain point, you. You become Wolf Blitzer, right? Like, you're sort of. You become a person who's kind of playing a version of yourself on TV or in a movie. And there's probably some magic number of these types of things I can say yes to, beyond which that's my fate. And I will definitely say no before I reach that number.

[A]

Well, I will say, at least you got to play yourself in industry. Some guy just played Ben when he was on the Uber show.

[D]

Was it someone else?

[A]

I think he totally did it justice. Yeah, he didn't totally do it someone justice. Yeah, they glammed him up a little bit for Too funny for Hollywood. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, you mentioned some of the adaptations, the work that you've done for television. They adapted, say Nothing into a pretty successful FX miniseries. I'm curious, how involved are you in the film and TV adaptations of your work? This one got picked up as well by a 24. Are you increasingly involved. Are they just like, great, we have the rights, see you later?

[D]

No, I mean, at this point I have some leverage in a way that I didn't always. And so now if you want the rights to one of my pieces or my books, I kind of come along as an executive producer. What that means is pretty elastic. So in some cases, cases there are projects where I don't necessarily want to have a, a huge day to day role and there are others where I feel a kind of custodial responsibility for one reason or another. And I, I mean, it's hard because in Hollywood you can never. There's nothing you can do to make sure that something is good. There's always a kind of X factor and it could turn out to really suck or not get made at all. But I want to do everything I can to mitigate those kinds of risks. And so with say nothing it was, you know, it was, it was a sort of half to full time job for years. They took as long to make the show as it did to write the book. And I was really, really involved. And then there are other projects where it's like, I'll go to set for a couple of days and maybe look at a script here or there, but I'm not, but nobody's kind of banging down my door to get my notes.

[A]

I'm curious, do you think of your work as true crime or true crime Adjacen? Interesting that at the center of some of your work is kind of these stories of crime and of intrigue. And you've talked about the line between, you know, the kind of criminal world and the illicit and non illicit kind of worlds. And I do think that people read some of your work as kind of, you know, whodunits and whatnot. So do you think of your work that way? Do you think of your work as a shell to kind of tell this larger story, in this last case, the story of a changing London?

[D]

Yeah, I don't necessarily, I don't really think of myself as a true crime writer. I am not naive about these things. You know, you have to have a shelf in the book in bookstore or the library where you put it. There are kind of categories and it's fine. And there are lots of true crime fans who read my work and I, you know, I welcome them to it. But I. There have been a bunch of times over the years where Daniel, my editor and I would talk about a story and it's like there's this serial killer or, you know, there's a kind of a Crazy caper. There's a gang of bank thieves where you can kind of see how there would be a. Like a fun piece that you could do, but without any. Without kind of what, for me would be the necessary kind of interesting, larger thematic issues that give it just a little bit more heft. I mean, I'll give you an example, a piece that I wrote in 2014, I think it was 2014, 2013, 2014, called the Loaded Gun, which is about this woman, Amy Bishop, who was a mass shooter who shot a bunch of her colleagues at the University of Alabama. And then afterwards, it emerged that back in the 80s, she had shot and killed her brother with a shotgun. And years ago, Zaleski brought that idea to me. And my initial reaction was, I have no desire to write a piece about a mass shooter. I'm not curious about their psychology. I just don't want to. It's not a thing I want to do. And he said, oh, the story is actually not about Amy Bishop. The story's about her mother, who witnessed her daughter shooting and killing her son. And when the cops came to the door, she said, I saw the whole thing. It was an accident. And so then Amy Bishop doesn't get arrested, doesn't get questioned, doesn't get investigated, and kind of moves on. And it's this act of parental denial that then has this kind of explosive result years and years later in Alabama. And that, to me, the idea of this mother was much more interesting than a story just about Amy Bishop would have been. So I often write about crime, but I think it's more a function of the fact that I'm kind of interested in human transgression as a subject. And I guess I could sort of accept the notion of. I could accept the true crime premise, if you would agree with me, that Empire of Pain, my book about the Sackler family, is a true crime book. I mean, if it's capacious enough to include them, then sure, you do spend

[B]

a lot of time with people who do really bad things, and not only sort of white collar bad things like the Sacklers, but with violent people and dangerous people. And I'm curious, what are the sort of, like, probably mostly white collar listeners of this show not understand about criminals?

[D]

Oh, I don't know. I mean, I don't know that I have any great secrets. I will say that one thing that I think about a lot and that I sort of wrestle with as a writer is that many of the people that I write about are, in one way or another, really charismatic. And I Think that there's sometimes, I think it becomes a little bit of a kind of. You're like. It's a tightrope walk while juggling to write a piece in which you kind of capture the charisma and even the allure that some of these people have, while also not glorifying them, while also keeping in mind that there are real victims and that you want to sort of honor the suffering of the victims. And I think that people fall on one side or another of that line all the time, where they either are kind of glorifying, they're having sort of too much fun, and they're forgetting that there are real lives lost, or their sympathy with the victims is such that they kind of don't want to concede that some of these bad people actually have a roguish charm and a charisma. And that actually part of what makes, you know, Chapo Guzman good at his job is that he's a really smart guy. He's a brilliant businessman, you know, ruthless, a murderer, all the rest of it, but has a certain charisma. And. And that's a thing I've always been interested in. And a line I've always tried to, I mean, say nothing, right? It's. You have all these young people who join the IRA and they partially do it out of a sense of, you know, that they feel as though they're in an occupied colonial situation and they need to fight back. And they have a real sense of kind of righteous moral zeal, but also they're 21, 22 years old. They're obsessed with Che Guevara. They think that, like, this is the most romantic, glamorous thing you could possibly be doing. And so the challenge becomes, how do you capture that for a reader? That it's the kind of excitement of it, in addition to the sense of moral zeal, without becoming a little drunk on that excitement yourself.

[A]

One last question for you. The industry cameo where you're interviewing Harper for a profile that you're gonna do, would you actually write that piece, do you think? Would you do the Access profile on Harper?

[D]

I mean, you know, I've done profiles where I got a lot of. I wrote a big profile of Larry Gagosian where I had a lot of access. I don't know if Harper would like the piece that I would write, but the. No, I mean, listen, I keep pitching the industry guys that season five should really take place in the high stakes world of magazine journalism. Somehow they seem to think that that wouldn't be sexy enough for industry. But yeah, I could see writing that story. The thing I took issue with, and I didn't know this when I filmed that scene, is that if you actually watch the whole season, what's happened is that there's this other schmuck who tried to crack the story and then the implication is that he gets murdered and then I pluck the story from his dead, his still warm corpse and run with it shamelessly, which I think I would never do.

[A]

I wonder if Remnik would have been okay with that moral.

[D]

Exactly. If he'd sign off. He is an industry fan, I can tell you.

[A]

There you go. All right. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining us.

[D]

Thanks for having me, guys.

[A]

This is really great.

[D]

This was fun.

[B]

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[A]

So, Ben, before we get to the full debrief of the episode, I have to start with with something that I wanted to follow up with Patrick about. But we just, you know, the conversation was rolling so well that I thought to go back to it wouldn't make much sense. But he said essentially that he knew that he wasn't going to be able to get to the bottom of the CIA wind of change thing. So that's why he made it into a narrative podcast. Which I think is. I actually kind of really like that because I think to a lot of people the narrative podcast, especially at that moment was kind of like the peak, you know, the most prestigious long form narrative, you know, thing you could produce. And for Patrick, he was kind of like, well, this is. I'm not gonna get into the bottom of it, but so that. So I'll make a podcast about it instead. Which I thought was kind of interesting. Instead of thinking about it as why would I make a podcast about this if I can't get to the bottom of it? I thought that that was a pretty interesting way of thinking about things.

[B]

I kind of admire how he thinks about plot, you know, that he has these cards and he's thinking so hard about when he shows you each card when he's writing or winds of Change. Right. Like he kind of obviously playing with only like 48 cards.

[A]

Right. But it also is true, and you see that in the writing, particularly of this book. He is laying things out very carefully. And it's nonlinear, you know, for that kind of reason. And it jumps around in the timeline with the various different characters. It's very cinematic. But yeah.

[B]

And you're shocked as the other characters are shocked to find things out about each other.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Did you buy his kind of humility about being a celebrity journalist, his aw shocks thing about. About the New York Times comments, or is he some special thing?

[A]

I think that he is probably at the right level of fabus where if he's walking down the street, most people don't know who he is. But within the world of people who pay attention to this kind of stuff, he is as famous as you can get, essentially. I think that that's like. That seems like the perfect amount of fame. Right. Where you know, the heads are aware of who he is and everybody else has. Has no idea. And that mostly the way he benefits from that is monetary. A little bit of ego stuff, but also primari getting tips and good leads for better and better stories, which, you know this. As a journalist doing good reporting begets sources who want to bring you more stories so you can do even better reporting. And that's the kind of beauty and also frustrating thing about this job, particularly if you haven't had a hit.

[B]

You can really imagine the sensation of feeling like, oh my God, I'm in a Patrick Raden Keefe book. I've got to tell Patrick Raden Keefe if like a specific set of horrible, complicated things happen to you.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, there are just those types of people too, for whom, you know, when they learn that someone is on the case. And this is a very kind of old school thing. And it's. There's a diminishing number of people who can do this. But when you learn that a certain type of person is pursuing a story, you realize, oh my God, it's gonna get out there, so I better get my side into it. I think you're one of those people, Ben, when, particularly when you were doing the New York Times media column, people, I think if they saw that they were in your sights, they realized that they better tell you. Otherwise the other people around the story are gonna be talking.

[B]

Instead Woodward sort a classic of that where he's just like, I'm writing this chapter of history. Do you want to be in it? And like every White House official, then just talks to him for seven hours. And Patrick Radenkeef, is that for scumbags? Charismatic scumbags, yeah.

[A]

Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal with special thanks to Josh Billenson, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Daniel Haft, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bone. Our public editor is Dan Zaleski. We need an editor as good as Dan to keep us on our toes and give us good stories.

[B]

Wow. I feel a little sorry, Ben, a little threatened here. But if you enjoyed the podcast, please please do subscribe on YouTube and follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.