B (2:33)

Yeah.

A (2:34)

Wow. And so law school is just a distant memory now.

B (2:37)

Distant memory. That was 20 years ago that they accepted that first pitch. And I've been at it ever since.

A (2:43)

What was the very first pitch? Do you remember?

B (2:44)

It was about. I do. It became my second book. It was about a woman in Chinatown in New York City who came from Fujian province in China, in Southeast China. And she had arrived in New York in the early 80s, and she started sending for people from her village who couldn't get papers to leave China. And so she would smuggle them into the US and in Chinatown, people who work as human smugglers like that are known as snakeheads. And her name was. People called her sister Ping. Her name was Cheng TWI Peng, and she was the biggest of the snakeheads. And she brought all these people and eventually went on the run from the authorities and was caught, and it was a big federal trial and fascinating figure.

A (3:25)

I mean, the details of these stories, even as you tell them now, all these years later, they clearly live so deeply within you. For seven years. A lot of people would have given up before seven years went by. Why did you keep going? What did you love about this?

B (3:39)

I think it's the best job in the world. I really do. I mean, it's funny. We often hear these stories about doom and gloom and the media and cutbacks and the kind of, you know, people aren't reading as much as they were anymore, and attention spans are shortening, and everything's so unpredictable and dire. And I feel as though it's still just the best job imaginable. I mean, it beats working, right? You go out, you meet fascinating people, literally. You sort of have adventures, right? My job a lot of the time is just to kind of go out and have adventures. And once I get hold of a story, it will pull me into all these different dimensions that I never could have predicted or imagined from the outside. And meet a lot of people, hear their stories, and then come back and try and figure out what would be the most pleasurable way to relate this to other people. How can I turn this into a page turner?

A (4:39)

How do you find your stories?

B (4:42)

So when I go looking for my stories, I never find anything good. The best way is to just be sort of moving through life and be curious and talk to people and. And I find things. My book say nothing started because I just happened to be reading the obituary page of the New York Times, really, and I stumbled on a fascinating obituary of somebody I'd never heard of. And I thought, I want to know more about this woman. And that kind of pulled me in. And that initially was a New Yorker article and then a book and then a TV series on Hulu. That right there was about 10 years of my life that started because I was just sort of flipping through the paper, you know, drinking my coffee in the morning.

A (5:21)

Is it really just that sense of curiosity? You saw the obituary and you were like, I want to know more?

B (5:25)

Yeah. And I think some of it is kind of. I think the thing that I've gotten better at over the years is, in a strange way, not overthinking it, but kind of listening to my own attention span, listening to what engages me. You know, you have that experience. You see a friend you haven't seen in a while, and you meet for a drink or a cup of coffee, and they're catching you up on their life, and they might suddenly start telling you a story, and you feel yourself leaning forward a little bit, you know, involuntarily.

A (5:53)

It's gonna happen during this conversation.

B (5:55)

But those are the moments for me. I've learned to pay attention to those moments. And so if it was in that situation, I'm reading an obituary in the paper, I can kind of feel my heart quickening. And, you know, the next thing you know, it's a decade of my life later.

A (6:12)

Oh, well. So tell me about London Falling. Tell me about this story. Tell me about Zach Brettler and what it was that said this is a story you want to lean into what first grabbed you.

B (6:23)

So, yeah, I mean, that's an easy one. And it's actually another good example of this, the way in which things start for me. So that book, say Nothing, we ended up turning into a TV series. And I was very involved in the series. I was a producer, and I was there on set every day. And I moved my family over, actually, for a summer to London, where we were shooting.

A (6:43)

Oh, wow.

B (6:43)

And I was on set one day between setups where they were kind of redoing the lighting, and there was a guy who was a guest of the director, someone I'd never met before, who was just kind of hanging out, having a coffee, and I started chatting with him. And it was interesting. He's Jewish, and he was talking about the difference between the Jewish community in London and New York. And so we were just kind of going back and forth about that. And then I mentioned that there's a family friend of mine who's a rabbi in London, and something clicked with him because he knows who that rabbi is. So we were just kind of going back and forth shooting the breeze. And then he said, you know, I might have a story for you. He said, you're a magazine writer. I might have a story for you. And he said, I know this family here in London who are very dear friends of mine. And they had this tragedy happen a few years ago. They lost their 19 year old son. He died in really mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames, the river that runs through London. And he died in the river. And after his death, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened and they made this shocking discovery. They learned that their son, his name was Zachary, had had a secret double life that they hadn't known about. So he was just a teenager. He was 19. But he had been moving through London with this secret alter ego, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And the reason this guy told me the story is because Zach Brettler, the boy, his rabbi, the woman who did his bar mitzvah, was my family friend. And it was this coincidence where I mentioned her name. It made him think of this boy. He told me this story and, and he told me basically as much as I just told you. And I knew if the family is willing to tell me their story, this is how I'm gonna spend the next year of my life.

A (8:44)

You knew in that moment, I knew it. You leaned in like, I wanna know more.

B (8:48)

Absolutely.

A (8:49)

So you hadn't heard anything about this story up until that chance conversation.

B (8:52)

And in fact, I went back to my apartment that night and I googled Zach Brettler and I couldn't find any record of. I could see a record of him having been alive, but there was no indication that he died or anything about the circumstances of his death. The family had kept it very quiet.

A (9:11)

So how do you get, this is key, getting the family to talk to you, right, that you know that right off the bat. Tell me a little bit about your process on that. How do you get someone to trust you? You call the Brettlers years after their son has passed. And what do you say?

B (9:28)

Well, so what I did is in this case, I talked to this friend of theirs, his name is Andrew. And I said I'd really love to meet with them. I understand this is an incredibly raw and traumatic thing. This was the summer of 2023. He had died in late 2019, so it wasn't that long afterwards. How about we meet? And we're meeting totally off the record. No commitment in either direction. You know, they're not committing to talk to me, and I'm not committing to write about this. I won't even bring a notebook. We'll just sit at a cafe and talk and I'll listen to their story. And so those are the terms. And it's interesting, you know, a lot of the time I'm meeting with people for one reason or another. I often am writing about these quite traumatic events. And I'm sometimes meeting with people and I'm asking them to describe the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And I think I'm a pretty good listener at this point. I mean, I think I've learned how to be a good listener. And I also think that people, when they feel safe and they trust you, it feels good to tell their story. And so I sat with them for two hours and they just talked. I hardly asked a question. It just all came kind of tumbling out. And they could do that with the security that I wasn't going to go off and write the story. They could just talk just to. I think they got a feeling for who I was through that conversation. I think they may have done a little homework on me and read some of my work. And then we agreed to meet again. And one thing that's very important to me is transparency is just to be very, very honest and straightforward with people. And so basically what I said to them was we met again and I said, I would love to tell this story. I don't want to twist your arm. You guys have to decide. The one thing I have to tell you is if you decide you want to trust me to tell this story, there's no take backs. You can't say yes today. And then I go off and work on this for eight weeks. And then you get cold feet. You know, if you're in, you're in. So think really hard about it because I don't want a yes today unless it's a yes for good. And so they thought about it and then they said, we, we want to do this.

A (11:52)

Why do you think they were in years after their son died under such mysterious circumstances, for all the pain and the grief and the questions left unanswered, why do you think, what was it about their son's story in his case that they wanted to get out?

B (12:09)

Well, so part of what is interesting about this story is that. It's partially a story about how easy it is to think that, you know, the people you love most, your own family, people you live with, your own child, and that in this case, what they learned quite suddenly when Zach died was that they didn't know the half of it, that there was all this stuff going that his parents had been unaware of. And I think some of this will be very familiar to anyone who's raised an adolescent or frankly, been an adolescent. I mean, we all remember growing up and keeping secrets from our parents. Right? That your parents saw. They knew you really well in some regards. But I think with most of us, there were probably sides of who we were at 14, 15, 16, 17 that our parents didn't see. May still not know. I can certainly say, as the father of two adolescent sons myself, there is a moment when your child stops seeming like a human being that you've kind of formed out of clay in your own image, and they start surprising you, and they start kind of becoming something else that actually doesn't necessarily look like you or your spouse. And you kind of wonder, well, where did that come from? And I think Zach's parents went through that, and then they went through it in a really profound way when he died, because they suddenly realized there was this whole other side of things. The question was, what happened to him? Did he commit suicide? Was he murdered? Was it something else? Something kind of more exotic? And they learned that he had gotten mixed up with some very dangerous people in this kind of con that he was carrying out where he was pretending to be the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. And so the Brettlers did what I think a lot of us would do, which is that they trusted the police to get to the bottom of this. And part of what this story is about is that the police didn't. The police in London, Scotland Yard, couldn't figure out what happened. And so the parents kind of had to become detectives and get to the bottom of it themselves. So when I met them, the timing was really fortuitous because they'd kind of gotten to the end of the line in terms of trusting the authorities to figure out the death of their son. And they'd reached this point where they felt as though, God, we're going to kind of go this alone.

A (14:46)

And they'd work with a private investigator.

B (14:50)

They'd worked with a private investigator, and they felt as though there were some people who were responsible for their son's death who had not been held responsible. And so, having been really private about the whole thing up to that point, suddenly they were kind of ready to go public. And it's one of the strange. There are many strange coincidences in this story, and one of them is that I just happened to show up on this film set with their friend right around the time when they were thinking, what more can we do?

A (15:18)

I want to ask you more about the law enforcement response, because what you learn and reveal in here. So it's so key to this story and interesting. But to back it up a little bit more, there is this sort of story of London that you uncover as well, that you reveal the secretive web of money and power and influence, and a lot of it from other nations. Like anyone who spent time in London, I got to live there for a few years. You see, this is really the place where the global 1% come and convene and they buy up property and Gulf money flows through there, a lot of Eastern European money flowing through there, a lot of Russian money flowing through there.

B (15:56)

And.

A (15:56)

And Zach gets wrapped up in this. Tell me a little bit about that whole world that not many people really spend a lot of time in or understand. In London.

B (16:06)

Yeah. You know, I lived in London when I was in my 20s, in grad school. I lived there in 2000, 2001.

A (16:15)

We just missed each other.

B (16:16)

Did we?

A (16:17)

I went to the LSE the year after you did.

B (16:19)

Really?

A (16:19)

Yes.

B (16:20)

Look at that.

A (16:20)

We'll talk about that later.

B (16:21)

Amazing. Okay, so you will relate to what I'm saying here. The changes were starting to happen already then, and then it really accelerated later. Part of what I became really fixated on as I delved into the research for this book was the idea that on the one hand, you have this very intimate story about grief and loss and a kind of a mystery, which is what happened to this boy. But just beneath that, there's a story, really, about the history of London over the last four or five decades and how it's changed. And as I delved into this, I found that you have these two big changes that happen, really, in the 1960s and 70s, which is that London, which historically for hundreds of years had been a manufacturing city, it was a city that made things. There were lots and lots of factories and people engaged in industrial work. And it had been a port city, I mean, really one of the most important ports in the world. And in the space of about two decades, both of those things completely disappear. The manufacturing base in London just goes from a really robust sector to next to nothing. And all of the docks close in about the course of about 20 years, for fascinating reasons, because of the advent of the kind of modern, stackable shipping container, which meant that you had these much bigger ships which couldn't really navigate the Thames. And so shipping in Britain moved to other ports outside London. So in the 1970s, 1980s, the UK is kind of left wondering, well, what's this city going to be? What's its identity going to be? And really, under Margaret Thatcher, they decide London will be a destination for money and people who have it. And you get the deregulation of the banking sector, which leads to a kind of big influx of actually American bankers, really before the Russians come. It's the. The Americans who come. And there was a history going back much further in London of wealthy people having second homes there or, you know, buying a mansion there or having their kids educated in British schools. There was a sort of a tradition of people who had money but were fleeing instability, whether they were leaving Greece or Iran or whatever. Name your country who would kind of find a foothold in London. And with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, you have this huge influx of Russians who come and they're drawn by the real estate, by the shopping, by the security, you know, the financial markets, and the idea that you could come and kind of park your money there, it'll be safer there than it would be in Moscow. And by the schools and this process in which foreign elites, the sort of, as you say, it's the kind of global 1%, everybody wants to have a second home in London and maybe send their kids to school there, really transfigures the city in dramatic ways. I'm sure you've experienced this too, but I've gone back ever since living there. I left in 2001, and I've seen this change happen kind of gradually over the last few decades. It sort of changed the texture of English life, and there's a lot more conspicuous consumption in certain neighborhoods. There are these kind of supercars everywhere. There's unbelievable real estate prices which have driven a lot of people who previously lived in London actually have had to leave. And then you get these kind of bizarre things that happen where in the really expensive real estate. It's often the case that people will buy these properties, but then not live in them for most of the year. So you get these neighborhoods where there are no people, you know, and you walk around at night and all the windows are dark, and it's these incredible sort of multimillion dollar dwellings.

A (20:19)

Yeah.

B (20:19)

But nobody actually living there. So it's quite an eerie effect. But this is the London that Zach Brettler grew up in.

A (20:26)

And the schools in particular. The portrait that you paint of a young man who goes to a relatively elite boarding school, Right. Comes into contact with a lot of kids who are sent there from other nations or, you know, with parents from other nations, develops this sort of fascination with Wells, sort of an obsession with being perceived in this way. I mean, tell us a little bit more about how he starts to change his views and how that informs the person he becomes.

B (20:56)

Yeah, I mean, there's a few things going on here. One of the things that's sort of interesting is that Doc comes from a pretty comfortable family. His father works in finance, his mother's a freelance journalist. He has an older brother, Joe. They live in a really nice apartment in central London. This is a kid who kind of has everything. He goes to a fancy private school, but in the new London he feels poor because he's surrounded by all this conspicuous consumption and Bentleys and mansions and people shopping at Harrods and all the rest of it. I think it's also significant that he's a child of, he's a digital native and he's a child of the social media generation. And so he grows up on wasn't so much TikTok, but for Zach it was Instagram. And Instagram is kind of feeding him up these images of people living a very kind of blingy, dazzling lifestyle. And he's very taken with that. And he's in school with all these kids who are the children of Russian oligarchs and oligarchs from other parts of the world as well. But he's sort of amazed by the swagger of these kids who, you know, they're there in class with you, but they're wearing these designer suits and on the weekends they go and kind of party in fancy hotels and they're sort of carrying on in a way that the average 16, 17 year old maybe doesn't. There's a story I tell in the book about how a lot of these kids lived in dormitories and it was about an 8 minute walk from the dorm to class. And on cold mornings these oligarch sons would summon Ubers. They'd have these Ubers pull up to take them to class, you know, so they didn't have to walk for eight minutes in the cold. And Zach gets really kind of caught up in that and I think sort of loses some of his perspective. And his parents point of view was we live a great comfortable life, we're lucky. And he felt as though it wasn't enough and he would say, why don't we live in a bigger house? Why don't you drive a nicer car? He was kind of ashamed of their situation and he wanted more.

A (23:10)

And that's A real tension point in the family, too. I mean, you unpack these conversations you have with them. That had to be very uncomfortable for parents talking about their own child intensely.

B (23:21)

Yeah. And I think. I mean, on top of that, there's a bit of background here, which is that Matthew and Rochelle Brettler, who are really the kind of big characters in the book, it's about them and Zach, but it's very much. I've spent a lot of time with them. And one thing that they both have in common is that Matthew and Rochelle both have fathers who survived the Holocaust and who were refugees as teenagers in England. And so they both grow up in a way that I think a lot of people can relate to if they've talked to older family members, you know, people who have lived through the Great Depression. If you have a history in your family of being in a situation where you really had nothing, there's a kind of suspicion sometimes of the idea that you would, you know, you'd take out a credit card and spend money that you don't have on things that you don't need. All of that felt very foreign to Zach's parents. And for Zach, this was kind of the coin of the realm. This is the life that he wanted. He was obsessed with movies, and his favorite movie is the Wolf of Wall Street. He loved stories about kind of young men on the make. He loved hustlers.

A (24:29)

The law enforcement piece of it is fascinating because there are so many moments as you're reading, you're like, how did they miss that? Why did they not do that? That doesn't make any sense, that they don't go back to the apartment from which he jumped until days later. There's blood spatters that are not noticed on the first pass. They don't interview key suspects or people who could be involved in all of this. As. As you uncover this and you see some of the sort of darker circles he was adjacent to and coming into contact with, did that strike you as incompetence on their part? Was it an unwillingness to dive into some of these things? What do you take away?

B (25:11)

I think it was a combination of both. I mean, I will say I. You know, over the last 20 years, I've often written about law enforcement and criminal justice in one way or another. And most of the time, I feel as though I think I'm a pretty good investigative reporter, but I'm not in law enforcement. I don't have subpoena power. I can't get a warrant to search a place. I can't Force people to talk to me. And so a lot of the time, I feel like I'm sort of drafting on law enforcement, that they're doing their thing, and they have these superpowers that I don't have. And this story is one of the ones where I'm kind of amazed that the cops didn't do more. A lot of the time I was calling people that they never called. I was doing these things that the police, when I came in afterwards, people

A (25:56)

that they had never called, come into contact with.

B (25:58)

Yeah, absolutely.

A (25:59)

How is that possible?

B (26:00)

I think. Well, to your question, I think some of it is incompetence. I think some of it is that the Metropolitan Police has been dealing with cutbacks for decades. But I think there's this other, more interesting thing happening, which is that. And it connects to this story about the oligarchs in London, because you've had the presence of these kind of powerful, moneyed interests in London. And because there was a real sense from the outset that we want these Russians to come here, we want them here spending money, investing in our economy, there was a tendency to sort of look the other way when they engaged in criminal activity, up to and including murder. And so there are a series of stories I tell in the book. It's really an astonishing number of these cases in which you have people who either worked with or crossed the Russians in London, sometimes Russians, sometimes English people who end up dead in London under mysterious circumstances. Under mysterious circumstances, but where they'll, you know, somebody will fall off the roof of a building or fall in front of a train, or they have a heart attack which may or may not be poison. There are some kind of almost outlandish cases. I mean, there's a story I tell in the book about a guy who dies of multiple stab wounds all over his body with two different knives. And the police say, looks like suicide. And there was a tendency on the part of the authorities anytime something seemed a little exotic and a little bit as if it might implicate nefarious, powerful Russian interests for the police just to say, must be an accident. Nothing to see here. And that pattern gets repeated again and again and again. And I do think there's a little bit of that in Zach's story in the sense that there was a sort of a whiff of some greater danger and something that might be hard to prove in court. So this kid goes off a balcony, but you don't have evidence of somebody pushing him off the balcony. The easiest thing, if you're the cops in that Situation is to say, oh, well, he must have committed suicide. Somebody jumps off a balcony. They must want to end their own life. Now, I think something more complicated happened. And if you read the book, I sort of get into all the explanation for that. But I think there's a tendency on the part of the. Please, I'm afraid, to kind of take the sort of easiest, most pat explanation if it means they can say, case closed, we're moving on.

A (28:34)

What does that mean for Zach's parents, both in terms of what it is they're seeking now in the way of accountability or closure or whatever it is someone who's been through something so horrific can look for, but also in pushing for their own answers. Right. Hiring a private investigator, working with you on this. Are they at all worried about their own safety if there are nefarious elements at play?

B (28:57)

Yeah, I mean, they've been. They are an extraordinary couple, I should say. I mean, I think that they are. I think, have spent the last several years looking back at their son's life and wondering, were there things we could have done differently that would have saved him, and how could we have not seen some things that were going on? And I think that they've channeled that feeling of guilt and those kinds of questions into a really extraordinary effort to do what the cops didn't do and sort of become detectives and figure out what really became of Zach. And it's a story that I relate in the book, the sort of resourcefulness and really the courage that they have. I mean, they. You know, they go out, they seek out these gangsters and meet with them, and they engage with people who are quite scary individuals. And I think that there are some senses in which they felt at times as though they were putting themselves in a vulnerable situation. But to me, this is, at heart, a story about their love for their son and the things that they were willing to do, really, in the name of his memory, even after his death.

A (30:16)

The family piece of it is so central to everything. And there's a lot in this book about legacy and the choices that our ancestors and our elders make and how they live on through us in various ways in the way that we make decisions and choices about our lives. Why was that important for you to unpack in this story? And did it make you reflect any differently on your own life and your own family?

B (30:42)

Yeah, well, I should say that I'm always interested in family histories. You know, I wrote a book about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, and I was interested in the earlier Generations and the way in which, you know, certain ideas get passed down from one generation to the next. In the case of this book, there were three people in that apartment that night when Zach died. And we haven't mentioned the other two, but one was sort of a slippery businessman, and one was a very dangerous gangster. And what I did in the book was I traced Zach's family and also the families of these two guys. And that was important to me, in part, because it is a story about London, and London emerges as this kind of wonderful stage for reinvention. So Zach reinvents himself as the son of an oligarch, but he had these grandfathers who fled the Holocaust and reinvented themselves as young men in England. And these two other guys. Similarly, there are these kind of tales of families sort of starting afresh in London, immigrant stories, but also, to me, stories in a kind of inspiring way about what a city can be, the magic of a city. So I wanted to trace all of that. And I should say, I mean, I. You know, I really marveled at Matthew and Michelle Brettler and how they dealt with loss. And part of what's fascinating about them, even today, I still talk to them all the time, is that they. They live a life that is actually full of joy. And, you know, they. They had a celebration when. For what would have been Zach's 25th birthday. And they invited me to come to London for this event, and I sort of thought it would be very maudlin. I felt very honored to be invited, but I thought it would be this kind of sad memorial. And it ended up being about 30 or 40 people at their apartment, people who were family and friends, who'd known and loved Zach, and it was a celebration of his life. And I thought, God, these people have really figured it out. There's something so enlightened about the way they're grieving. And I did, if I'm honest, I sort of had a moment of thinking, I don't know if I could do it as well as they are.

A (32:55)

You thought that?

B (32:56)

Yeah, if I had that kind of loss. But I think that has everything to do with family history, because I think they both grew up with these fathers who lost everything. They lost their whole families when they were really young. And then they learned in a kind of defiant way to keep going and build a new life and to have joy and live with a kind of grace and beauty, even in the aftermath of just the most catastrophic loss. And to me, that was. It kind of remains incredibly inspiring.

A (33:27)

As an example, do they believe or do you believe that this will ever be solved, that there will be a definitive answer to what happened to Zach?

B (33:37)

Yes and no. I mean, I think that they probably share my view that some things will always remain mysterious. There are some maddening characters in this story, people who do know more than they're saying, who won't tell the brothers and won't tell me some of the details, and aren't being compelled by authorities, and aren't being compelled by authorities because the cops dropped the ball. But I think the Brettlers have a kind of rough sense of what happened to Zach. The interesting question for me is the emotional one, which is. And I've seen this in other cases I've written about, where people have a terrible loss and the way they deal with the loss is to think of the sort of mystery of what happened almost as like a math problem that you have to solve. And there's a sense that the way I'm gonna deal with my grief is to solve this problem. And I think the hard thing for the Brettlers is that even if you solve the riddle, even if you crack the mystery, it's not going to make that sense of grief and loss go away. So it's sort of learning instead to live with some of the ambiguity, to take comfort in the things that you do know and you have been able to find out, and they've been able to find out a lot, but then also to sort of. I think, in Zach's case, to see him more completely than they ever did when he was alive and to love him even in that more complete and kind of flawed complexity.

A (35:14)

There are so many complicated people in this book, right? But by tracing back their family stories and unpacking them the way that you do, you're sort of forced to reckon with people as they are, right? Full, complicated human beings with all the weight of their ancestors, decisions on their shoulders and everything ahead of them as well. For Zach in particular, though, what is it you hope people take away or understand about him? Because there's a lot in there, right, questions about why he did what he did that we will never know the answers to. But what do you. As someone who's looked into this for so long, what do you take away from that?

B (35:52)

I mean, I. You know, the way that I write is not a. I trained as a lawyer, but I'm not writing legal briefs. It's, you know, the book's not an op ed. I don't have a.

A (36:06)

You're not arguing.

B (36:07)

I don't have an argument to make per Se however, part of what's interesting about Zak is he's this incredibly distinctive personality. You know, he was a real sort of sui generis, unusual person who turns out to have been this amazingly talented, fabulous who could kind of code switch and, you know, mix it up with people who, who work all the time with real Russian oligarchs and somehow trick them into thinking, I mean, there are Russians who he convinced that he was Russian. I don't know how he did it. So on the one hand, he's this very distinctive kid. On the other hand, I think that the siren song that pulled him into some of these dark places is one that many of us would recognize. It's a culture that venerates wealth above all and venerates hustle, even when the hustle is illegal, potentially, and immoral and could end in catastrophe. And I don't think that you. I don't really touch this stuff in the book because I think it's implicit and you can kind of make these connections yourself. But I think that if you look around in our culture, in our political leadership, there are all kinds of examples of people who have chosen that kind of zero sum approach to life in which everything is about, I'm gonna get mine and it doesn't matter who I hurt along the way or what I might be risking in the process. There's a kind of fire that's sort of motivating people. And there's an adulation, I think, in our culture of those Wolf of Wall street type characters. And I think the problem for Zach was he didn't see the Wolf of Wall street as a cautionary tale. He saw it as an instruction manual. And I do not think he's alone in that regard. I don't think it's a generational thing even either. I don't think it's just young people. I think across the culture, there's a lot of that out there. And so on the one hand, Zach's story is very, very distinctive. Couldn't have happened to anyone else. On the other hand, there are aspects of this that I think speak to some kind of deeper ills in terms of where we are these days.

A (38:33)

You've drawn parallels to some of your other work as well in terms of our modern context. Your book say Nothing that went on to be a television series as well, focused on the Troubles, the decades long violent conflict in Northern Ireland. And you drew a parallel between some of the divisions and elements of that of the Troubles and what we see here in the States in terms of Our own political divisions. This was right before the 2024 election that you mentioned that sort of parallel. Do you still see that today? And if so, how. Just tell me more about that.

B (39:11)

Yeah, I mean, it's a thing I've thought a lot about, because you had this period of three decades in Northern Ireland in which there was this entrenched conflict and people picked sides and there was a great deal of sort of tribal allegiance, and the different sides had their own facts, and there's a lot about this that would actually be probably quite familiar to people. The thing that worries me the most, which is something I wrote about in say Nothing and I noticed in the Northern Irish context, and I'm afraid it's something that you see happening even in very recent months here in the US Is a kind of dehumanization, where the idea of tribal identity or political identity in some quarters becomes so entrenched and so extreme that you can have a person killed. And I mean, just to put a very fine point on it, you can have an American citizen, civilian, murdered by federal agents on camera. And the first reaction among some people is not to say, gosh, this is horrifying. This is one of my fellow citizens who's been killed by the state. But to look at aspects of that person's identity and political outlook and essentially say, I'm not too troubled by this. You know, it doesn't bother me as much when one of theirs gets killed as when one of mine gets killed. And that was, I'm afraid, the kind of poison that kept the Troubles going for as long as it did was a sort of indifference even to human life, because everything was secondary to that notion of which camp are you in, which color are you red or blue? You know, in that case, are you orange or green? And I feel us inching towards that kind of reality, and it worries me.

A (41:20)

Related, but on a bit of a lighter note, only because you mentioned you were on set when this book was being turned into a television series every day. Is that a weird experience to see your work turned into television before your eyes? Are you like, how is this happening? Or, this doesn't make sense? Does it still resonate in the same way? Like, what was that like?

B (41:41)

Oh, it's very strange. I mean, it. Yeah, it's so weird.

A (41:45)

Really.

B (41:46)

Yeah. And I mean, in a bunch of ways, because. Because in this case, it's a book where I'm imagining a world that is kind of a vanished world. Sometimes I'm talking about people who I never knew because they were dead. Before I started writing, literally, there's a housing project which is the place where Jean McConville lived, called Divis Flats. And Divis Flats was torn, we should

A (42:12)

say, the widowed mother, who's the central

B (42:14)

character who ends up murdered, who was murdered at the beginning of my book, say Nothing. And real woman murdered in 1972. Her 10 kids were orphaned. And there's this kind of very chilling opening scene of the book and the series where she's living in this kind of hulking housing project in West Belfast. This place, Divis Flats. Now, Divis Flats was torn down. And so when I was writing the book, I had to do all this research to try and reconstruct it for the reader. And so I. You know, I found old documentaries and old still photos, and I talked to people who lived there, and I read accounts of people who'd been there. And I was trying to kind of, you know, recreate this place that didn't exist anymore. So then we make the series, and we find that there's another housing project in Sheffield, England, which was very similar structurally to Divis Flats. And there's this old wing of the housing project that is soon going to be renovated, but they haven't renovated yet, so it's kind of abandoned. And we go and we shot all the exteriors there. And it's very eerie. I mean, it would be as if you'd sort of, you know, I mean, it's like something. The place that was in your imagination is there, and then the apartment, the interiors we created on a set. But to watch an actress play Jean McConville, this incredible actress, Judith Brody, you know, I stood there at the. I mean, if I'm honest, I stood there at the monitor. I was outside the room because you can't be inside the room. They're shooting in there. But I was just outside and I'm at the monitor, and every take, I'd be in tears.

A (43:55)

Really?

B (43:55)

Yeah.

A (43:56)

Why? Because, I mean, suddenly so real.

B (43:58)

Yeah. And it's. And, I mean, she's an extraordinary actress. And the. But. But the kind of. I like to think that I'm a. I'm a pretty visceral writer that I can. If I. If I want to sort of make you feel certain things or experience certain things, I can. I'm gonna use every tool in the box to do that on the page.

A (44:17)

Yeah.

B (44:18)

But there's only so far you can go on the page to watch a really talented actress with the camera tight on her face and wardrobe and hair and makeup and just brilliant production design. Where you've got all of the furniture, they've matched the wallpaper, that was the actual wallpaper in the flat. You know, the light switches, the door handles, everything is kind of period precise. You sort of feel it in your solar plexus, I think, kind of inescapably. And so there was a kind of horror and a pathos that I was trying to achieve when I wrote the book. But when you're dealing in television, it's just all that is sort of turbo charged.

A (45:09)

Does that make you want to turn more of your work into TV series, movies, visual format?

B (45:14)

Doesn't. It doesn't. I mean, I. I really enjoyed that experience, and I was really pleased with how it came out. I think the show is great, and I'd encourage people to watch it if they.

A (45:22)

Book was great, show was great.

B (45:23)

But the. And it's funny, many people said to me after the series came out, you're never gonna be this lucky again. You know, the story is generally not. Author loves adaptation. You know, adaptation actually gets made, and author is happy with it. So I really lucked out in that regard. But the thing that I love the most is to do this kind of work. And so I'm already back at it. I'm working on a new thing for the New Yorker that'll be out soon, and I love being back in the trenches.

A (45:52)

I have to ask you about something you said no to, because I'm fascinated on the backstory here, but you were approached about writing the memoir for El Chapo, the infamous Mexican drug lord.

B (46:02)

Yes.

A (46:02)

And you said, no. Thank you.

B (46:04)

Yeah.

A (46:04)

Tell me why.

B (46:05)

I. I mean, it was tempting in the sense that he had. At the point where I was approached, he had never given an interview of any sort. He did subsequently talk to noted investigative journalist John Penn for Rolling Stone, but. But at the time, he'd never given an interview. And I think what I worried about was that, I mean, first of all, listen, I. You know, it would be very difficult to write a version of that book that he. That I would be happy with and he would be happy with. And Chapo Guzman is not somebody I particularly wanted to make unhappy. So there's that. But I also. There is a. There's a kind of a tightrope that I'm often walking when I write, which is that I'm very interested in people who are charismatic. And I want to try and capture some of that charisma on the page, because I think it's important, I think, if you want to understand how Chapo Guzman could be One of the biggest drug traffickers in the history of the world. Part of the answer is that he is personally a very charismatic guy. And it would be sort of irresponsible of me not to capture that similar thing when I was doing say Nothing. Part of the reason people signed up for the IRA in the 1970s. Is that it was romantic and it was glamorous. And they had a sense that it wasn't just that what they were doing was righteous. It was also cool. And as a writer, I want to capture that. I want to make you understand that this is part of it. The question is, how do you show the romance without romanticizing it? In Chapo Guzman's case, how do I show the charisma of the guy. And the sort of fun of being him. Without glossing over the fact that this is somebody who's responsible for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of murders? There's a lot of families out there who've lost loved ones because of this person. And so that's always a line that I need to kind of very carefully walk. I think any scenario in which I was the man's ghostwriter. Would make that just untenable. I think I would sort of fall on one side of that in a way that I couldn't live with.

A (48:15)

But you do deal with a lot of people, groups, organizations, in a very dark world. I mean, even in this book, there are elements in there that, if they are made unhappy, could try to take that out on you. Do you worry about that, about your own personal safety? And also, are there groups or organizations you just won't touch?

B (48:36)

I try to be pretty careful. I have two children. I have a wife who I consult with all the time, very actively. Who has many opinions about what I should and should not be writing about. And I. It is true that I often am writing about unsavory folks. But I try and manage those relationships in a fairly careful way. And. I wouldn't do anything that I felt as though really put people in a great deal of harm. I think there'd be a kind of selfishness there. But I've managed it all right. And I think some of it is. You know, I tell stories in this book about. There's a gangster named Andy Baker. Who I started engaging with because he knew one of my central characters. And the first thing he said to me when we first met was he shook my hand. And he looked me right in the eye, and he gave me a big smile. And he asked after my wife and children by name. And I hadn't told him their names. And I wouldn't put my family in a situation where I thought he was going to do anything to them. I do think it's important. I mean, the reason I put it in the book to understand that this is the way these guys operate. And it kind of all comes back to family, right? That all of us. The way these gangsters operate is they're very predatory. They're looking for your vulnerability. And the biggest vulnerability for all of us is our families.

A (50:23)

Before I let you go, I have to ask about a surprise cameo you made on one of my favorite shows, HBO's Industry, in the season four finale. Just tell me what that was like.

B (50:34)

I had so much fun doing that.

A (50:36)

It was fun.

B (50:36)

I had so much fun doing it.

A (50:38)

You're basically playing yourself.

B (50:39)

I was playing myself and in fact, I knew that they'd written me into the script and then what happened was that they. They'd written me into the script as a character. Just the idea that they had. There's a journalist in season four and that he feels competitive with this guy Patrick Radden Keefe and one of the co creators, Conrad, sent me a text and said, so listen, we're actually gonna have a scene and you know, would you rather somebody else play you or do you want to just play yourself? And I thought, why not? And I had a blast. It's way too much fun. Way too much fun.

A (51:10)

Is it gonna be a recurring role? We're gonna see you.

B (51:12)

So I am pitching them that season five really should take place in the lucrative high stakes world of Legacy magazine journalism.

A (51:19)

1000%. I would watch this.

B (51:21)

Yeah. They see, seem unconvinced of the innate glamour of the world of magazines.

A (51:27)

I don't get it, but anything you can tell us about the next thing you're working on?

B (51:33)

I have a big story that I have been working on on and off since 2020, which is a really wild crime story in New Orleans and should be out soon.

A (51:51)

Can I say I am among the many who are very, very glad you did not become a lawyer. Stay a lawyer. Thank you so, so much for being here, Patrick.

B (52:01)

I think the legal community is probably grateful as well.

A (52:05)

Such a pleasure. Appreciate your time.

B (52:07)

Thanks for.