 Welcome and thank you for joining the New America Fellows Program future tense and solid state books for this webinar discussion of Patrick Brandon keeps Empire of pain, the secret history of the Sackler dynasty. I'm a we still you director the fellows program for more than 20 years New America has supported hundreds of fellows who've gone on to publish books, produce documentary films and other dealer reported projects. I'm very grateful to be able to host this conversation with Patrick today, as he talks about a very necessary and very timely conversation about the opioid crisis. Before we start a few housekeeping notes to keep in mind. If you have questions during the event, please submit them through the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, and we'll pass them to the moderator. If you need close captioning zoom now provides that function. Please click the CC button at the bottom of your screen and the menu bar. You can sign up for our newsletter and events list so you can also receive invitations for future events like this, and you can find that on our website. And more importantly copies of Empire of pain are available for purchase through our bookselling partner solid state books. You can find a link to buy the book on the little event icon on the page next to both Patrick and Rachel. Before I turn the conversation over to Patrick and Rachel, let me introduce you to them today. Patrick in Keith is a class of 2017 fellow with New America. He's a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the most recently published book, say nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction was selected as one of the best 10 best books of 2019 by the New York Times book review, the Washington Post Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. He was also named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the decade by entertainment weekly. His previous books are the snake head and chatter. His work has been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for feature writing and the oral prize for political writing. He's also the creator and host of the eight part podcast, wind of change. Rachel Aviv is a class of 2019 fellow with New America. She joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2013. The National Magazine about a range of subjects including medical ethics, criminal justice, education and homelessness. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for public interest for a story about the elderly elderly people stripped of their legal rights. She received a Rona Jocelyn Fellow Foundation writers award, and the Scripps Howard Award for reporting about police violence. Rachel was also named a 2020 Whiting nonfiction grant fellow for her book in progress about mental illness. With that Rachel turn the conversation over to you. Hi Patrick. So I remember you saying something. A year and a half ago you had tweeted about you were reading a bunch of documents that had just been released in the Sackler cases and somehow the book emerged. As I understood it from that tweeting process and I wonder where in that like how that happened what was the seed. What was the moment where you knew you had a book as opposed to a story that you had just finished for the New Yorker a couple months earlier. Yeah, good question. So first of all I should say thank you to New America for hosting this and to solid state books, which is really one of my favorite I used to live in DC solid state is a bookstore I really adore, and very glad that they're sponsoring this as well. And thank you Rachel for doing this. It's such a treat to get to talk with you about the book. So, yeah, I had written a piece about the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma their company in 2017 for the New Yorker. I came out in late 2017. And I thought a little bit about maybe trying to do a book after that piece came out but I felt as though there just wasn't enough material for me to write the book in the way that I would want to write it so you know I tend to write stories that are very, I mean as do you Rachel, you know stories that are very kind of closely focused on on people and the connections and relationships in their lives and the choices that they make and I felt as though in writing about this family that wouldn't cooperate with me wouldn't talk with me, you know, to this day I haven't met the vast majority of the Sackler you know I did the people that I write about in the book you know people I haven't met in person. So there's always a kind of hubris associated with that right with writing what people that you don't have access to. I just felt as though I couldn't. I just couldn't feel like I was inside the room, like I knew who they were I knew how they talked. I didn't feel as though I'd be comfortable characterizing how they thought, or, or behaved behind closed doors. It was quite it was over a year later when the state of Massachusetts did something that no other state had done up until that point they pretty much every other state was suing Purdue Pharma the company over its role in the opioid crisis but more Moreheely the Attorney General Massachusetts became the first state Attorney General to sue individual members of the Sackler family, and in doing that she made public all of this internal documentation. And so yeah I had this thing where I was reading this complaint, the Moreheely's office put together, and was quoting all of these incredible emails, including you know emails from some members of the Sackler family, and they were so appalling to me, and so revealing that I think I knew by the time I had finished this pretty extensive thread in which I was kind of live tweeting these documents I just thought I have to write a book I mean it you know there's both the material for me to do it in a way that I think could be quite vivid and interesting as a story about people making choices, but also there's almost a moral imperative to do so because I was so shocked by by the things they said. I was also thinking about, like how you manage your feeling kind of rage when you're reading or you're appalled as you read, but like as you write. You're in a tone of rage that's like unsustainable or it's like aggressive on the reader. And I also was thinking about how, if you had met them in person you might have like had some shreds of sympathy or empathy for them but the fact that you had that contact, it allows you to sort of, it cultivates your anger even more and I guess I wondered like how consciously you had to work at like managing a tone that wasn't too indignant. I mean, so there's two separate, there's two separate things there right the the tone question was one I thought a lot about where there is a there is a kind of register of like high moral outrage that some people write in and it's really enjoyable sometimes to read those that type of writing. I don't mean this in a, in a pejorative way at all I just just as an example it's like if you read Matt tie be, you know, who famously, you know, talked about Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid. In any number of other writers there is a sense in which there's a kind of an indignation that's right on the surface of, of the writing and I really didn't want to do that for a variety of reasons I just thought that in some ways the recording and and I think that the the material kind of speaks for itself. And so in some ways, I wanted to just dial back my own editorializing it's certainly in there like you can see my point of view I think probably the reader can register when I'm being a little bit sarcastic. But I sort of felt as though it would stifle the material in some in some weird way if I if I tried to kind of put too much spin on the ball. There's a separate issue though which is this issue of like people who don't talk to you and how much. I mean I think about this stuff all the time because I often read about people who won't talk to me. And I agree with you that it's it's harder. It's harder to shiv someone if you've spent a lot of time talking with them. That doesn't mean I don't do it, and I've certainly had instances in which I spent a great deal of time speaking to somebody for a piece and then they never talked to me again. You know, not because I was I was anything but straightforward with them, and I'm always pretty straightforward with people and saying, I'm not your PR person here I'm not your ventriloquist like when you know I'm going to end up writing the piece the way I. I see it describing these facts the way I see them. But having said that I did you know I, I do feel some empathy for the Sacklers in a weird way to me if they were just purely purely evil people who set out to do this, or even just purely greedy I mean greed is a huge part of this but if this was the only psychological ingredient in play, I think it would be a much less interesting story what what's interesting for me and where I try to understand them is the amount of denial that they're in and that they're kind of stubborn refusal to acknowledge that what they thought was such a great idea actually was catastrophic. Yeah. I mean another amazing aspect of the book is like the way in which you talk to sort of the invisible workers for the family like someone who mows their lawn, the housekeeper, the yoga instructor, and then incredibly the doorman who sees Bobby Sackler jump to his death. I want to know how you found that man and then whether he had been sort of waiting for decades to like unload this incredibly fraught experience or what his relationship with this information that he had never shared was and sort of how you approached him. Yeah, I mean he he was so I have to be a little bit careful because this story I learned about the death of Bobby Sackler through a source who took me off off to it. And this source also helped me find. He had been a doorman in the building for a long time. I didn't get the feeling he was very candid about it and his, his memory was extremely precise so my the person who took me off to this story. He had a conversation with him at my request, initially about it, and came back and took notes and came back to me and relayed that conversation, kind of point by point and then I ended up calling him. And we had and he described the whole thing a new and it was just, you know, you've had this experience as well I'm sure but it's always just comforting. You know, I kind of evaluate not just somebody's credibility but how good their memory is describing an event that happened long ago, and a traumatic event. But the details were just kind of point for point very very precise. About what he had experienced. But it was. I mean he, you know, he, I think we're so far away that he didn't he didn't seem to be. He didn't express any trauma to me but, but, but look, I mean he, there are details, quite gruesome details associated with, as you can imagine, of, you know, body falling nine stories, and kind of cracking open on the pavement. He recounted to me that I, I chose to leave out of the telling of that episode just because it felt. I don't know exactly what the word is but kind of cruel or distasteful to to get sort of too far into the like anatomical implications of what happens to a body when it falls that that far, but he did describe that stuff to me in some length at some length and I think that was one of the invisible employees I mean this was something that I found very moving talking to suffer Reno that the there are actually a number of incidents like this because there was a woman who was a housekeeper for many many years that I spent a lot of time talking to who had similar stories but it's funny these kind of moments of tenderness between like alienated rich people and the, the like domestic staff who happened to be the only people on hand when tragic things happen. So there were, I didn't write about this in the book but I mean there are conversations about you know like when Mortimer Sackler the older Mortimer Sackler his marriage falls apart and he's kind of like sitting there in his underwear like incredibly bummed out like, you know, trying to figure out what he's going to do with his life, talking to his housekeeper and and she had very fond memories of him. And similarly with Saffirino Perez I mean he's the one who tells Muriel Sackler that her son has just died, and then he's the one who finds a blanket and covers the body. And the intimacy of that was very moving to me. Another thing I remember you saying, maybe a couple years ago I don't even know what the context was actually I think the context was some of your first book, maybe, and you were joking that it's just as bad to be late to a story, too late to a story as too early to a story. And, you know, there was, so obviously you've got this story at the right time but there probably was a question about when does it end, because like there's still legal. There's still stuff that might emerge from the legal process and I wondered like how you know where your resolution is or just where to stop. I want a great question. Yeah, the, my, my first book was about. It's not a very good book I wrote this book called chatter and I was very young when I wrote it and it. But it was about the NSA and wiretapping by government agencies and it was very hard thing to write a book about, you know, as at the time kind of a non journalist. But it was funny because it came out about a year before all of these big scandals associated with warrantless wiretapping and in the Bush administration and then obviously you know much later in the Obama administration Snowden and all this stuff. But I, at one point I was talking to this guy, I was writing a story about kind of walls like hedge funds and I was talking to this investor guy and I made some joke about how my, my first book I was like a little, I was sort of ahead of the curve basically came out you know too soon and he, he said that he sort of chuckled and said yeah you know it's funny in investing like there's there's no real meaningful distinction between like being ahead of the curve and just being wrong. And with this one I don't know I mean I, I think there was a there was a frustration for me which is that the story was playing out in very much in real time at the end of last year in the beginning of this year. And I was trying to figure out where does this end. And for a variety of reasons we wanted to finish the book and have it come out around now. The kind of machinery of publishing is such that you don't get to just pick when you, when you drop a piece of a piece of writing. So we don't really know the ending. And we probably we probably will know what the end game is by say August, where the bankruptcy will be resolved and we'll know whether or not all these lawsuits against the Sackers are going to move forward or, or be stopped effectively by a bankruptcy judge. What happened was like I just kind of got some clarity on where I thought things broadly speaking would end which is to say, Sackers won't face criminal charges, they'll get to keep the va, they'll put up you know several billion dollars to try and remediate the opioid crisis. But they won't acknowledge any wrongdoing, and they will walk away with the vast bulk of their fortune that they made from oxycontin during a time when their company we now know was committing felonies and has since played guilty to committing felonies. I think that's probably roughly where we're going to end up and so I felt okay about the ending the book I mean it's my last book had a kind of very distinctive ending because I made this discovery about a murderer at the end. And I'm aware that that the ending of this book may not be quite as it may not have quite the same like Agatha Christie. I don't know if you have any reactions. But I can live with that and I think that in some ways part of the one of the themes I was trying to highlight with this book is that if is it in any story about billionaires in this country. It could cause tremendous harm. If you're waiting for some resolution where you have a kind of feeling of catharsis and accountability and and justice reigning in the end, you'll be waiting a long time. I'm also really fascinated by the world of like giving money to art charities, like I guess that had not been a world that I really like thought about in terms of what are people's motivations what are their ulterior motivations like what does that do for someone. And I remember you saying that like that world had been like, hotly hard to crack like you totally cracked, like all you know what was going on in the pharmaceutical world and the corruption there. But I guess I wondered like, what were some of the challenges you ran into in this more like noble seeming culture. Yeah, it was a little hard to break in with some of the reporting there. I mean I did end up with quite a few people talking to me on on very deep background where they, you know they wouldn't allow me to quote them in any way. I think in large part because, well for a few reasons I mean one because people weren't necessarily authorized to talk. And to because I think a lot of these institutions are very scared. And I think in some of these institutions that it's not just with the Sacklers either but but a lot of art museums and universities that have taken money over the years. And I think in the specific case of the Sacklers what I was able to establish is that a lot of them privately, they all knew. To some greater or lesser extent that this was kind of blood money that this was this was dirty money that they were taking. And they just hope people wouldn't notice and that. And this would be especially true the Sacklers a lot of these institutes these relationships were very long standing relationships between the families and these particular you know the museums for instance in the universities. So if you have somebody who's only been working there for the last two or six or 12 years they came in, and there's this already this existing relationship and this legacy with this name. I don't know that people necessarily felt that it would be easy for them to unwind and it's just the kind of thing that would be so difficult to do and legally fraught, and it might set a worrisome precedent for your other donors. And so I think there was this general sense that like that's just way too big a lift, nobody was going to do that, electively, they would much prefer to just try and kind of keep their heads down and write it out and in fact after I published this piece in 2017 the New York Times, called around to I think 21 cultural institutions to ask them, like in light of these new revelations how do you feel about taking soccer money. And they didn't get a single comment on the record from anyone suggesting that they found it problematic. They got a lot of either people refusing to take their calls, or alternatively saying you know we love the Sacklers we stand by them. We'll keep taking their money. There's really only when the photographer Nan Golden came into the picture that I think the calculus started to change for these institutions. Another incredible like moment that I will never forget one reading is the moment where you're talking to Richard Sackler is college roommate. And he tells you that Richard Sackler spent a summer, trying to like find a way to pharmaceutically improve the human orgasm. I would love if you would tell it like talk a little bit about what that conversation was like and how you got to the place where that was what he was telling you and whether he realized that this is felt like a very emblematic memory and if so then how do you sort of enter into that memory and expand it so it becomes a scene. Yeah, so Richard Capet. One of the things that's very strange and wonderful about writing, you know, big, big pieces in a in a national magazine that lots of people read as, as I'm sure you've experienced as well you. When you're working on a story nobody knows the world doesn't know you're working on it and so you're kind of quietly I always think of it as you're like, you're, you know, it's like when you, when you stay in a strange house or a strange hotel room and you're trying to like, find your way to the bathroom in the dark you know you don't really know exactly where the furniture is and you're kind of feeling around. And you don't know what's there. And so you're just kind of feeling along and then the piece comes out. And at that point, almost invariably I start hearing from people who I wish I had known to look for when I was writing the piece. This happens every time. And with this with the Sackler piece had happened in a really profound way, lots and lots of people who had known the family over the years got in touch and it was one of those things where I was kicking myself because I wish that these were people I could have talked to when I was doing the piece. But the rabbit was one of the people who got in touch with me and initially, you know, I wasn't writing a book, but we, we kind of developed a relationship and started talking back and forth, and we talked through a whole lot of memories that he had of Richard Sackler memories beyond what are in the book. And many of them very, very revealing I thought of Richard Sackler's character. And that story in particular, I wanted to capture, because I mean I think now Richard Caput looks back at the person that Richard Sackler became and he's quite horrified. But at the time Richard Sackler was kind of a magical guy to hang out with, you know, he was, he was brilliant, and he had this sense that anything is possible and I think this was what I wanted to try and capture and the reason I like that story is that you have some But for somebody else would be some idle fancy for Richard Sackler who had grown up with great wealth and this kind of headlong enthusiasm for his own passions. There's this sensible like let's just do it let's not let anything stand in the way and so the two of them were very interested in the physiology of orgasm. And for Richard Caput who was like a working class kid from the center of Long Island. And I thought oh it's you know, physiology of workout interesting subject why not. But also I need to get a summer job and Richard Sackler said nonsense like we need to study the physiology of orgasm let's take this seriously. And so the two of them spent the summer, you know, pouring over obscure medical texts and traveling to Woods Hole to to interview some some renowned physiologist there. I wanted to try and capture some of the infectious sense of fun that Richard Sackler had because I do think that it's not totally dissimilar with oxycontin there's that sense of a kind of a eureka moment and then a willingness to just absolutely plunge after it in this very headlong manner. Which I think ultimately ends up becoming quite dangerous. So I'm seeing a note to remind everyone that they can ask questions in the, I guess in the Q&A box. And maybe I'll just ask the question that I'm seeing here to encourage others to ask to this question is in the upcoming HBO special crime of the century will you reveal anything new that is not in the book and this is from Ed Bish. Hi Ed. Ed has been a very important activist on this subject, going back decades, had lost a son to oxycontin. And I'm glad you're joining us Ed. The, I really couldn't have written this book without the activism of people like Ed. There's a lot in this. So there's, I should just to back up for people who don't know there is an HBO documentary it's a two part film made by Alex Gibney who's a great Oscar winning documentary maker. Coming in I don't know the exact premiere date but it's in early May. I was a consultant on it and I was involved in the first episode. It's called Crime of the Century and it's about not just Purdue and oxycontin but actually more broadly speaking about the role that the American pharmaceutical big pharma played in the opioid crisis. I don't know that I reveal anything all that new beyond what's in the book I can tell you there is a lot in this documentary. Alex did amazing reporting and there's some stuff that shocked me and I feel as though I'm, I'm beyond, you know, jocable at this point. But yeah I'd encourage you all to watch and thanks for for tuning in. Okay, since there's no more questions I'm just going to ask a selfish question, which is how you know you talked about your first book being bad which I haven't read it so I can't like I want to defend it but I won't. What is it that you like and then and then I feel like each book has not only got each book has gotten better and better and I wonder like what it is. Obviously as you get older maybe you just learn to write better but is there something in that you learned about what makes a book that you sort of didn't have access to earlier on that you've been like honing book by book. I think. I mean I think so that first book was just a weird book I wrote it when I was a law student it was about the National Security Agency which is just an incredibly hard subject to write about. And it ended up being so hard to report that I kind of defaulted to a. Really brilliant editor. Eileen Smith who's now at FSG but at the time was at random house who gave me when I was halfway through the book she gave me the book out of sheer rage by Jeff dire. Now to sheer rage wonderful book for those of you who don't know it but it's a book about Jeff, how Jeff dire tries to write a book about DH Lawrence and fails and the whole thing becomes kind of this very self conscious exercise. And he pulls it off beautifully. And I, you know, chatter in some ways was my kind of pale imitation of that which was like what what does it mean for a young curious citizen to try and write a book about the biggest intelligence agency in the United States, and there's so much trouble kind of getting to the truth what are the implications of that. And in retrospect all of that just feels a little meta to me. I feel as though I'm a better reporter now and so that that's the sense in which I, it feels like a weird outlier. I was kind of learning how to write a book when I wrote it. But I, you know, starting with my next book after that the snake head I think I, I sort of found my voice I found the way in which I like to tell these stories which is these kind of narrative investigations and told through people and with a lot of kind of seen work and I mean one of the big things for me would be I try and avoid huge chunks of exposition I try and sort of sneak in my exposition or fold it in wherever I can so that I'm not there's never a point where you kind of turn the page and then it's like and now a chapter on the history of whatever it is, whatever the very dry subject is. So it's always a question of how much can I distill that stuff so that you don't, so that you get what you need but you don't notice it when you're getting it. And I don't know I feel as though the in a strange way that it was the big transition for me was from chatter to the snake head and that was when I knew the type of book I enjoyed writing and and I think I've gotten better at it. But the, but the template has been pretty solidly in place since then. Now, questions are pouring in. So, can you talk a little this is from Vince visor, can you talk a bit about your experiences adapting your print work to TV shows and movies. Oh, yeah. So, um, this is a weird one I never talk about this because nobody, most people don't know about it and so they don't ask me about it. I, you know, for years I was a freelance journalist, and I when I was writing for the New Yorker I was a freelancer I was not on staff and so I did all kinds of jobs to make ends meet. And one of them was I started working as a screenwriter. I don't know, quite a while ago probably 1214 years ago. There's nothing you would have seen because none of it's been made. But it's it's fairly typical of Hollywood that that you can make a decent living writing scripts for movies and TV shows that that never see the light of day. I have actually never adapted my own work. However, so it's a kind of strange like church and state division thing that I have where it would be weird for me and never say never I might I might do it at some point but I just my nonfiction hat means that it's I've adapted the work of lots of other people, both fiction and nonfiction as a screenwriter. And lots of other screenwriters have adapted my work and in fact there are a few projects in the works now, including a limited series based on say nothing. But you know there's a great team of writers working on that who are much better at this stuff than I am. And I'm kind of available to them as a as a, you know, as a sounding board. I think it would just be weird for me to come in and start. I think it's impossible to adapt a piece of nonfiction into a good movie or TV show without fictionalizing at least somewhat. And I think it would be strange for me as a journalist to take those kinds of liberties and color outside the lines. It's like two different parts of my brain. It's a strange, it's a strange distinction to make but an important one for me. This question interests me too. Does your training as a lawyer help you as a reporter in general, and did it help with this project in particular. Yes, and yes. I mean some of the you know I took out loans to go to law school and it may be that some of this is me rationalizing what in fact was a spectacularly foolish decision to get a law degree when I kind of knew at the time I didn't want to be a lawyer and wanted to be a writer. But so if you'll, you know, if you'll indulge what may be rationalization on my part yeah it helps. I don't know that one needs to go to law school to learn the things that I that helped me, you know, I think there are lots of courts reporters and people who write about criminal justice, who I think, you know, are pretty easily able to acquire the same types of knowledge, but it helps to know the court system it helps to be able to find documents. It helps to have a certain shorthand with lawyers, a lot of my sources were lawyers. A huge amount I mean, truly, you know, I don't know how many pages, I'll take all in but 10s of 1000s of pages of material that I had to kind of distill into this book came from court documents. I have a question about that, like, where is your, you know, when you're going through 10s of 1000s of pages of court documents I feel like I often want to trust my own boredom like if I'm feeling bored I should start worrying about the story I'm working on. But then there comes context in which you may have been feeling bored I guess I wonder like what is your. Do you manage concerns about when you're going through 10 how did you manage that process of 10,000 pages of documents, hundreds of which were probably not useful to you. Okay, so first of all I should say that I feel as though you just, you just articulated what is like for me one of the most important things I've, I've learned as a writer and I feel like I only learned it fairly recently which is to trust your own boredom. I mean that's a perfect way of putting it and I. It took me a long time to I think to. To really appreciate that that if that if your own eyes are glazing over as you go through something, you don't then need to like do to flee take that and present that to the reader that they will glaze over as well. So I very much trust my own boredom I think the thing for me is that the, my process tends to just be very very low yield and so it's always. I'm looking for these like gold threads I'm looking for one line, one image, and it's always been the case that you know sometimes you read a whole book and what you get out of that book is a single image. And with these core documents it's the same way and it's agonizing because you have to go through it all. And if ideally you know they're optically scan and you can control f your way through for certain terms. I had a great conversation at some point with a lawyer friend who had done document review as an associated a law firm, which is kind of the same idea where you're going you're just churning through 10s of thousands of pages of stuff. Who told me gave me this great tip which is that you should always first your search your initial search terms should always be like exclamation points or in curse words that that'll you know you'll get right to the meat of it. But the, it was hard I mean I just, I mean I'll tell you this this crazy story, which is sort of emblematic of the way this whole thing is gone for me. But we'll give you a sense of how low yielded is at a certain point pretty late in the game when the book was close to done. I got an email from a call from a source of mine who was a lawyer, who'd been involved in some of this litigation who said, I have 40 boxes of documents I want to send you. And I'm going to mail them to you like I have a, or it wasn't even that this person was going to get like a man with a van to drive 40 boxes of documents to my home which is just outside New York City. And the problem, and so my I salivated at the prospect was very, very exciting. But the problem is that the Sacklers have been threatening to sue me. And one of the first things they did was they sent me what's called a litigation hold, which basically is a lawyer sent me this formal letter saying you are hereby on notice that we may be suing you. You can't just destroy any evidence that could be used in this eventual lawsuit against you. So, I consulted with my lawyer double day and my lawyer at the New Yorker. And they said, you know you got to take this seriously this means don't throw anything away that you can't throw away notes, you know you can't delete stuff. Because you just have to keep a record in case they sue you. And I told my wife that 40 boxes of documents were going to be arriving, and that we could never throw them away. And she wasn't thrilled that the idea. That's why you're going to have a new house now. Yeah, exactly. There were some sort of questions about like the, you know, where in our house do we do we put such such such documents. So they ended up having to fly to the documents. So they're in this other city. I don't want to name it because the sort of, I don't want to give away who my source was, but I flew to another city in the middle of the pandemic stayed there for four days. Went through every page of these boxes of documents and didn't end up using a single thing. If I had not gone, like only gone through half of them I would still be tossing and turning wondering what I might have missed was the guy who gave it to you disappointed like did he feel like he or were you annoyed at him for sort of over playing his hand. Not at all not at all not at all I was very grateful to him to be honest he may be I hope he's not he's not tuned in here but the I don't think he knows that I didn't end up using anything. Of course I was like, you know I was very very thankful that he made all these available to me was partially because of what if I had if it had been a year earlier I probably would have used a bunch of stuff but by the time I was seeing a lot of this stuff I'd already seen, you know. Yeah. So there's a question from Emma petite, I may be pronouncing the name wrong. In the traditional standpoint how do you even begin to think about structuring this sort of story that spans generations to the chapter breaks come naturally. Oh, and this is sort of related so I'll read that one as well. From Jessica colleague Clark. Can you tell us a bit about how you begin a book at what point in the writing process do you find the beginning. Does someone with your experience still have fall starts. All starts all the time. Yeah so let me. Okay, yeah I can I can sort of take both of those so the. I honestly don't know how it works for other writers I don't know what's normal I do know that my as I've gotten older and done this more and this would be true with with individual magazine pieces as well. It's going to be, it's like 90% reporting and 10% writing, the writing tends to happen very quickly at the end. The thing that's the thing that's weird, I mean I don't know maybe others do this as well but the thing that has has been kind of an evolving thing for me is that I, I now start structuring the story. Very very early in the reporting like my when I devise the structure has gotten earlier and earlier and earlier so it's this thing where the reporting is the vast bulk of the time, and I don't write until the end, but I'm. But what I found is that it's really helpful early on to start thinking what is the structure of this book what is the story that I'm telling how early on really early I mean I you know I couldn't tell you. Exactly but from the very beginning I'm thinking about. You know from the first phone calls I make and things I'm reading the question is like what are the big beats here, what are the big moments, and I'm sort of developing a it's almost like a compost heap of stuff that feels like it's going to be a big significant, you know, worthy of inclusion. And then it's just this questionable how do you arrange those so that there's at a certain point there's a kind of a, you know who are my characters what's the time period. And I just that as an as an organizing principle I find that very helpful because the danger for me is that otherwise I'll just research forever and there'll be these really fascinating rabbit holes and spend. I stumble on something and it's like oh my god I look at these four books I haven't read I should really look into those and then they mentioned these people who are still alive and I should probably call them and interview them and, and I'm wired to enjoy that and find it. There's a kind of compact frankly like a slightly compulsive quality that I have to to turn over those stones. And just the danger is that if I don't if I don't have some real discipline about saying that might be very interesting but it feels extraneous to the story you're telling. Then I'll just do it forever. So, so I'm structuring from fairly early on. I'm always thinking about like where does where do you drop the needle on the record like where does this story begin. When I found this book starts with a deposition. I think Rachel said to me when she read it like that the, you know, deposition like doesn't seem like a naturally all that thrilling way to start. It was amazing that you made it really that's what I was. I see I find this is just me I find nothing more thrilling than a deposition but the. But when I found that I just I knew I want I thought the idea of starting with Kathy Sackler who is less familiar to people than Richard Sackler. The idea of having Mary Joe White, who is a former US Attorney in New York and a big, you know, she's one of the lawyers long standing loyal lawyers for the Sacklers who I think have has has really abetted their ability to get away with what they've gotten away with for so long and Mary Joe White is a very revered figure in legal circles lots of people really admire her. I think it was important for me to, you know, put her out there right where she belongs at the at the side of Kathy Sackler. And then there's this kind of amazing moment in the deposition that it was like in one little scene you sort of had the whole thing. Where you get into this question of like did your family start the opioid crisis, and then you get this reverie where Kathy Sackler talks about this building where her father and uncles used to work, and it just. It just felt like a good transition back to 1913. So, so that felt like a logical place to start but the, the chapter breaks, I don't know, I mean it's. You told me something useful the other day that like I went when you were reading my book draft that you should like that in your earlier books you didn't you would have these long endless chapters and that you suddenly realize that like a reader needs, like at every moment where you think there should be a chapter break there probably should be. I mean I don't listen that's not. This is my own kind of feeling and maybe I'm. I think a lot about the reader I think a lot about. And I think about myself when I'm reading I think about the fact that I'm often tired of like had a glass of wine and a long day and I know I've got 20 minutes between when I lie down in bed and when I fall asleep. And so maybe I'm, I'm being too accommodating, but I have this terror always that. That I'm going to lose the reader and so one of the things I did think about is yeah so the snakehead had these big long chapters he's like, you know probably 30 page chapters. And with say nothing I very deliberately wanted to go shorter and just and write chapters. I'm going to quote my, I'm going to quote my 11 year old son, my 11 year old son is really into magazines right now which is hilarious and warms my heart. I was almost worried because I just felt he should be reading books, you know, longer things he's 11. And we had this funny conversation where I said like you know Lucian you should really could I interest you in some books I'm glad you're reading the New Yorker that's very precocious but you know, be good to read something that sustains a little longer. And he like scoffed at me and said, I don't read anything I can't finish them one sitting. I'm impressed he's reading the New Yorker also. I'm impressed I'm worried but the, but I did think it kind of capture something where I wanted a chapter to be something that you could digest in the city. Yeah. Okay, so there's some more this. What are Patrick's personal views on arts organizations and universities returning or not what some consider laundered money. Um, couple things I think it's incredibly complicated and I don't mean to suggest that from the perspective of these institutions. This is a simple matter I think it's legally complex it's ethically quite fraught. I've heard people make arguments to me where people work at nonprofits of one sort or another where they say I do not care where the money comes from I don't care how dirty it is I can do good things with this. You know, you leave it to me to take this money and turn it into something good. And I can I can see some sense in that kind of argument. Having said that, I think reputation laundering is real. And one of the things I also tried to expose in the book is that the relationship is that when you, when you're on the outside and you hear that there's some great gift, given by some magnanimous plutocrat. There's a tendency, I think, to sort of think my god like you know what beneficence what what charity. And part of what I tried to show in the book is that when you get inside those and you read the like inter office memoranda from the people who actually work at the museum or the university. You realize that often it's a kind of exploitative relationship between the donor and the institution the donors getting a great deal out of it. As Arthur Sackler's longtime attorney says in the book, if you're putting your name on it. It's not charity that's a transaction. That's a business deal. So, I think that, you know, I frankly I'm kind of impressed by some of these institutions that have taken a stand Tufts University for many years, kind of did the wrong thing and didn't just ignore the truth about the Sackler's but deliberately obscured it when Sam Kenyona's book Dreamland, very great book about the opioid crisis that that has sections on the Sackler's came out. There was some discussion about assigning it to Tufts students and the administration killed that plan because they thought it would be awkward for the Sackler's Tufts subsequently took down the Sackler name because medical students basically protested and said I don't want to learn to be a doctor in a country named after this family. The family threatened legal action against the school you've seen NYU subsequently do the same thing. I think most of these places are doing this only under pressure, either from their own students or for people like Nan Golden. But I suspect that in the coming months and years you're going to see it happen more and more. This may be our last question it depending on your response but after a long comprehensive story like this. How do you decide what to do next. Is there ever a feeling of how do I top this and this is from by the door. Sorry if I mispronounced. I mean on the hot you know what do I do next thing I well no I'll take those I'll take those in reverse order. I don't have any of the how do I top this thing I you know it's funny somebody asked me this question about say nothing recently, like whether it was because you know it was widely read and certainly and get more kind of critical recognition that my two prior books, whether that was inhibiting for me not at all. I don't it's just sort of not the way I operate and the other thing to remember is like this is my fourth book like I know that it doesn't. I know that sometimes it works you know sometimes you get a great lottery ticket and sometimes you don't and to me the answer is not to be precious about it it's just to keep working and you know by another ticket and see what happens and so you know I don't worry about that. I am really really tired at the moment. Having done the book in the pandemic and also released a podcast this past year. And so I think I'm going to do some magazine writing for a while and hope that I can just kind of get back into the. It's like a different kind of metabolism doing pieces but I miss it so I'm excited to get back into that. I'll just ask my own tiny little question in our last few minutes, but I read somewhere that you wrote most of the book on your bed, and I did want to know like what pandemic what how pandemic change how the pandemic maybe change the book how it changed your work or writing habits, if at all. And what will you hold on to any of that. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I would not advise writing a book on your bed if you can at all avoid it. It's not good for your back. The, in this case we, you know we have one home office and and my wife has a more serious job than mine so one of us had to be in there and it didn't have to be me. The, it was a weird one I mean the pandemic, you know, there are still some items in archives that I haven't been able to get my hands on and to go back to what I was saying earlier about my own neuroses. It drives me crazy I still think about these letters. These letters at UCLA, there are these letters at National Institute of Medicine. You know there are these archival items that I have been trying to access for a year and haven't been able to. And I wish I could just let it go but it bothers me. So that was frustrating. But I actually found from a reporting point of view that it really weirdly it was, it was a huge boon the pandemic was very very helpful because, as you've experienced to Rachel like a lot of. I find it's the worst part of the job in a way is when you look up somebody's phone number, a stranger, you have to cold call them. A lot of the time all you can find publicly available is their landline. And I did find in the pandemic that particularly at the beginning of the pandemic that when this was when I was making a lot of these calls to former Purdue Pharma employees people who work for the Sacklers just calling out of the blue, that it was amazing to have people like locked down in their home they were much more likely to answer their, their own phone, the, I would get, particularly some of the old timers you know it's just amazing because I would like, it was just awesome because you would, you call me got they would like pick up on the first ring. And if you're like really a book. Like, let's talk about that. There are some people I could, you know, I couldn't get rid of them they would, they would keep calling me. In that regard, I don't know that I can replicate that beyond the pandemic, but it was, it was helpful. Well, thank you for talking and thanks to the audience. Thank you Rachel for doing this.