Ronan Farrow

Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dak Shepherd. I'm joined by Panakum Madman. You're so excited that you realize it's a week, six years.

I don't really understand what you realize that it's Madman. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I switched the P in the M. It's Panakum Madman. Panakum is not really fun.

Like a Pongipit. And they're falling their spikes at the bottom. Oh, that's kind of like me. Well, especially if Madman's your last name, Pongipit Madman.

You guys, we have a fucking real life Douglas Houser MD today, a doogie, Houser. I really, as Monica and I have talked about a bunch since interviewing him, I thought this was stuff of fiction. Yeah. I did not think people went to college at 11 years old.

Vonderkiss. Vonderkiss. Ronan Farrows here. And boy, do I hope you listen to this one because I was so blown away with every single aspect.

Now Ronan Farrow, one, I believe a Peabody for his work with the New Yorker in uncovering the allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein. Yes. Weinstein. Oh my God.

Now I'm saying he's not so much Harvey Weinstein. Yeah. Oh my God. I'm so fucked up now.

Harvey Weinstein. So Harvey Weinstein. You should we should have left Harvey Weinstein. I'm laughing at you.

Okay. I'll just be clear. Also Ronan, you know, he worked for the government before he did that. He's a lawyer.

He's the son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. He's just an altogether fascinating person. He has a new book called Catch and Kill. And he also has a great podcast of the same name, Catch and Kill.

So I think after listening to him, you're definitely going to want to check that out. So please enjoy Ronan Farrow, AKA, Thonin Rarrow. He's an actress. But Ronan, I have to, I'm going to start with an admission.

Please. I'm going to own some of my baggage. I was so excited to have you. We really are happy.

But I must admit, increasingly over the last two days of reading about you and stuff, you are from New York. You're very well-spoken. You're very well-dressed. You have great hair.

Even right now, I'm wearing my gym shoes so I can go to Barry's boot camp after. Well, you're wearing the shoes. I don't know. Let's just say that.

Thank you. There are Adidas boosts. I think over the years as I've seen you on television and stuff, my terrible hang up, my class warfare hang up, where I always feel less than by people who are East Coast and well-spoken. I think was initially triggered.

I was like, I have a chip on my shoulder and I'm very embarrassed to admit it. Because I'm now consumed a bunch of your stuff. And I'm legitimately now an enormous fan of everything you've done. I'm also completely blown away with your story.

I had no idea you're a legit Wunderkin, which we've never spoken to a real life. We've been wanting to. I feel like I'm such a disappointing Wunderkin. I can hardly calculate the tip now.

That's supposed to be good at numbers, but it's no more. Yeah, but you're the youngest graduate of Bard. Does that still hold? I believe that still holds.

Yeah. That is so fascinating. How old? I started college at 11.

Oh my God. Wait, what? What? I saw a real life do the house or?

And I went to like like so many lawyers. I basically failed doctor at heart. So I sucked at organic chem and then I went to law school. But I did I deferred my start at law school for two years.

So I could be 18 instead of 16. And started last year at 18. You had a two year gap year? I had a two year gap year.

And what did you do in those two years? I mean, that's when I started working for this guy, Richard Holbrook, who was this kind of veteran diplomat character who figured heavily in my first book, which was called War on Peace and was about how we're ravaging the State Department and cutting the budget and not respecting diplomats. And obviously we're seeing some of the consequences of that. Yeah.

And that was right now with the impeachment stuff. Yeah. And that was that with the Obama administration? So at that point, this was way back now.

You're getting there now. 31, are you? How triggering is that? Because all of our guests are older than Monica.

So in her mind, just like me, she's like, well, I could still do that a couple of years. How old are you? I got out of context. I would never ask.

But I feel like they cut the context for the program. OK. So we are the kids on this program right now. But I started college at 17.

That's better than most. Not better than you. It's certainly not male. Well, I started working for Holbrook while he was doing kind of just foreign policy freelancing.

Like he was advising the Kerry campaign. That's how far back we're talking. She's like a consultant. Yeah.

I mean, he was just what establishment Democrats do between regimes. He was going around with Matt Lanovret and stuff. And I worked for UNICEF for a little bit as a youth spokesperson in a couple of African countries. And then later, after law school, I went back in during the Obama administration.

It was in Afghanistan and Pakistan. How do you get on the track of ending up in college at 11? Like, when does that process start? Well, you know, to your point about me being slightly annoying and for a lot of knowledge.

No, no, no, no. It's me. It's me. It's me.

It's not you. No, it's me too. And it's incumbent on me to be conscious of it. I mean, I look, I famously had a childhood with a lot of pain and turmoil and trauma and like death and destruction in a literal sense.

Yeah. But also had a tremendous amount of privilege and really feel very fortunate. And, you know, I always had access to incredible educational opportunities and I, but where not everybody does. And part of that was like I tested in a certain way early on and then they put me in a Johns Hopkins God, it's called the Center for Talentity Youth.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a neuro camp. Basically.

You take the SAT really young for that. So really quick. What ages are we talking at that point? Eight?

Yeah, that's a camera. The exact age, but it's around there. So you start taking the SAT at eight nine ten. And then, you know, I got a score where people said, okay, you're already skipping all these grades and taking your high school credits early and tested in a certain way.

So can you tell us what it is? It's I did get a perfect essay to whatever it was at the time. You got a sixteen hundred. Well, okay.

Well, see, you remember when that was an important big number. It's a huge number. Right now people are like, what the hell is the sixteen hundred? Because they've got some funky other number.

That's true. They added a third category. I mean, I think I still have PTSD from all to be clear. I did not get my high score the first time around.

Like I took it a couple of times. Okay. So I just want to get into the particulars a little bit because leading up to that test, there's steps before you're even taking the SAT. So your mother, I assume, is like this fucking kids pretty bright.

Or did you just have this crazy pension and desire in appetite for learning? Or were you making mom happy to mom kind of label you? Shit, he's on to something. And then steer you that way or was it self-generated?

So I definitely didn't have a helicopter mom pushing things. You know, single mom, I have ten adopted siblings. Oh my goodness. Special means, physical disabilities, mental health issues that they've had to surmount.

And so she was busy. Yeah. And basically she was incredibly supportive. I think it was self-generated.

I mean, I think there's always an element of wanting to impress either mom or like the figurative mom. Like I definitely have a like a yawning bottomless cavern of insecurity that I'm constantly filling. Sure. Me too.

Yeah. I mean, who among us doesn't? It's really shy. I was like, I don't.

I'm good. And we've had some of this objectively, the most attractive human beings on planet Earth in here. And you ask them, what do they see when they look in the mirror? And they see the same dark oil I see.

You know, it's boggling. No one can have a sense of themselves. Well, it's fascinating to me, though, that everyone has a different species of insecurity. There's always that thing that like just hits you where you live, when someone insults you about it, or where you really need validation and praise about it.

I don't know that I'm self-aware enough to know what my thing is. I think it's all the things. If you get terribly addicted to something at some point, you will end up in a way where I've ended up. And you'll have to do a force that by God, you'll find out what they are.

You will find everyone I've worked with in the program has about two or three fears that are pretty much governing their entire life. Are they always the same two or three? No, people have different things. So mine, you know, I have a huge tree that people think I'm stupid.

I have a huge status fear. I'm constantly obsessed with my status and ranking and every scenario I'm in. And then I have this huge financial and security thing growing up kind of without money. And then my mother working very hard to get money.

So all my things kind of just all lead back to that. And always when I'm getting a matter of emotion, always somebody, I'm like, one of these three things right now is going off. That's what's happening. Fascinating.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I'm sure that's true of me. It's what's chilling about it too is those things never go away, right? Like I seem to matter how financially secure you are.

You always feel that same. I'm lucky enough to find out that getting lots of money didn't solve the problem in recognizing. Oh, it's all a mental racket. It's either feels secure.

We're out of the oven. We're out of the oven. It's funny though, because I was actually having a conversation with a very drunk friends last night who was saying similar to what you just said. He said my great insecurity is that people think I'm dumb.

And this is someone who just would have never crossed my mind that people would think he's dumb. Like he's always struck me as a reasonably smart person. And I put him in that category and not that I don't also love my dumb friends. I didn't categorize him that way.

And he just has this profound insecurity about it. For what I also would not have put you in the category of anything but extremely smart. Yeah. They're not rooted in any foundation.

Well, I was just like second and learned to read. OK. I went to knock on the door and the two people who can't learn to leave and they go down with the people who have some serious mental challenges. Yeah, that's tough.

And yeah, I can't shake it. It doesn't matter what degree I get or what accolade I understand. I mean, I don't have nothing to do with intelligence. Yeah, by the way, I have shaken up.

You should have met me 20 years ago. I was insufferable. And so I have made progress. No, me too.

I was I was so much more in the vice grip of insecurity and I think also quinned up a long, long time. So OK, sounds like my wife similar to your mom in that she has bottomless empathy and bottomless capacity to take on causes. And what I sometimes will say to her is it's beautiful. It's lovely.

And also, you have a bandwidth and there's certain people that you've brought into this circle and you kind of got to stake out an X amount of your bandwidth for those people. This is the great existential conversation for many of my siblings. So my mom adopted all these kids and was adopting like in the 70s when it wasn't invoked and she was getting called crazy for it. And then in standing by my sister, my sister had this allegation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen also was like Smirrod and Blacklisted.

She's been really treated terribly unfairly. And I think is also on the other hand, rightly regarded as a hero in some circles. Sure. Your mom is a hero to me.

And I think that's correct. I mean, she's a hero to me. And what I took away from the altruism was my god, I don't think I'll ever have the strength to do quite this. Up end my whole life, give up the possibility of being totally comfortable on the level that I would have if I didn't have working kids.

Yeah. She's really limited who she can be partners with. Tremendously isolating. Yeah.

I'm like, fame is already isolating. Yeah. So she made a lot of sacrifices. I really know her well enough to know sincerely for the greater good.

And I think for her, that's rooted in she was raised with super, super Catholic. Like she still has all of her handwritten notebooks from when she was nine and 10 years old. And they're all super detailed illustrations of Christ on the cross with this crown of thorns and her writing diaries about going to lords and bathing in holy water. And like she was super.

She was a holly. Yeah. And you know, getting wrapped on the knuckles by by nuns, she was Catholic boarding school. And you know, then she was also a hippie and she's lots of fun and stuff.

But I think that she retained the philosophy of that that kind of hair shirt. Like I got to do good. sacrifice for along the way. So much of that.

Yeah. It definitely didn't work raised with the philosophy of, you know, happiness is king. It was very much like you have been given privilege. You better go out there and make the world a better place.

That is all that matters. Yeah. And I think for a lot of my siblings, they did not take as I did from it this like, Oh, how inspirational. This is difficult, but it's great.

They really, I think not unfairly. I mean, everyone has their own experience of it. So I won't say they like all of them, but some of them, I think really walked away with a ton of resentment of that. Sure.

Because, you know, they could have had a totally comfortable childhood and instead it was, you know, chaos. And yeah, you feel like you deserve or you're entitled to a parent who's got, you know, in a lot of time, that's significant. And she was a fantastic mom to all of us, but it is a very different situation growing up with, you know, a few kids versus growing up with so many kids with so many special needs who also often were adopted older. So it's not just physical, special needs, or mental health, especially it's 10 years of abuse before we even met some of my siblings.

Yeah. You know, in really tough developing country orphanage type situations. And I'm very inspired by them and how they've overcome incredible challenges, but it definitely makes for a childhood where you have great sense of perspective. And also it's hard at times.

Yeah, it's because on the surface, it was privileged. And now I'm realizing, Oh, I had it way better for my own personal self is desires of having all my mom's attention at all times. Well, we've all got our shit. And you know, I really focus on the privilege and positive stuff because there's plenty of it.

Is it likely that amid that chaos, you were like, well, I better be God damn Sears Tower of accomplishment to get noticed? Absolutely. But not actually, I think the last half of what you said is not right. I think I felt like I had to be a kind of like the model child in the family, not to stand out or get attention and not to set an example, but to just make life easier.

Um, you know, it was not one of those situations where like I didn't have an authority figure. She was a great mom. It wasn't always an authority figure, but I had a sense of empathy and understanding as I would with a friend where I realized like, Oh, this is this is a lady who said, I have to do a really good thing. And is shouldering an immense burden.

Yeah. And you know, I better be an easy one. Yes. With a little bit part of it.

What order are you in this? They're for younger than me. Okay. So you're middle.

Yeah, middle ish middle. And when they're older, but they came after you, some of them. Right. I think there's also, you know, there's a, I can remember the term in gay lit.

There's like the best boy in the world theorem, you know, that gay sons feel need to overcompensate in some tremendous way. That makes sense. Like you're going to let them down in your mindset at that age. You're going to let them down eventually on this one part.

You're not going to get married in there. You're not going to go to your wedding. So you better crush the other. Yeah.

And also just that, you know, you're going to get teased or ostracized or something. So you're not going to be alpha in these particular traditional ways, but you're going to be really dominant in these other ways. Yeah. And you know, I find now, as I'm in positions where I'm hiring people for my team and stuff, they're all sorts of great arguments for hiring in a diverse way, whether it's people of color or people from various gender and sexuality minorities.

But one of them is definitely that you get these incredible journeys where people kind of have to sort themselves early and find themselves early. Well, they've overcome a bunch. Yeah, it's not even that you're selecting for that, you know, checking that diversity box that they bring a perspective. Yes, they've honed in on what they're good at.

I think early, like growing up as minorities feel like, okay, where's the lane? What do I excel at? Because I got to go gung ho at that because yeah, there's all these other elements that Monica's a state champion cheerleader. Just like, you know, two times.

I'm so not surprised. So I do have a bow in my hair right now. So it's pretty cool. You were trying to look even younger because you're intimidated by running 31 years.

And you know, I run into this in my stories too. Everyone has a different journey that informs how they respond to, Hey, can you. Tell this incredibly invasive personal account of something that's going to up end your life if you tell it publicly and put you at odds of all these powerful interests and, like, for the Catching Kill podcast that I'm doing now. So that's a book, but it's also a podcast.

Right. So I wrote this book, Catch and Kill. It's this series of stories that I broke about Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein and the various tools deployed by powerful people to suppress stories and the press manipulate news outlets and have tablets by stories for them to kill them. That's where the term, Catching Kill comes from.

Oh, okay. And it's also it's a memoir of a very low point in my life where I was like physically deteriorating and not sleeping. And I was on the run from literal spies that Harvey Weinstein hired this Israeli private intelligence firm called Black Cube. And they sent like a femme fatale with false identities after my sources and me and to Russian spies that hung out outside my apartment and chased me around.

And I'm like, really quick. I have to imagine in those moments, it's both scary and intimidating at times. And then at other times though, where you're like, I'm in a goddamn James Bond movie and this is exciting. Was there an excitement associated with it as well?

Not at the time in the midst of it because I was losing my job and scared shitless. Yeah. But in the aftermath, writing the book, definitely I had to make these decisions like, okay, priority number one is the reporting has to be airtight and incredibly respectful of the real life people were affected by this. There's lots of fact checking lots of legal review.

But then also there was this process of it's an incredible dramatic story that can be a balloon in terms of getting what I think is an important story to the widest audience possible. So in terms of structure, let's write it in a way that is a page turner and propulsive. Yeah. Thankfully, people have gotten that.

I haven't been eaten alive for making it dramatic and honestly, it's fun. Like I should go through these incredibly heavy stories you need to then alternate with some levity and I'm proud of how it came out. But now I'm doing this sort of accompaniment podcast, the Catching Kill podcast, straight forward name. And it's like, if you finish a book that you love, the ideas then you get to spend half hour or 45 minutes with each of the characters and their little true crime documentaries about that character's life story.

So for the people who liked the plot of the book and want more, there's new stuff. And in some cases, it's people who didn't speak for the book, but figured in the plot, we did this episode with this wonderful woman who was an assistant to Harvey Weinstein in the 90s. And after we met, she who I had talked to around the initial Weinstein story I did in 2017 and she wasn't ready to talk. Her name didn't come out at all.

And it's been this long journey that she talks about of why she didn't speak. And a lot of it is circumstantial and will be true for anyone. You know, it's the career repercussions. It's having to tell your spouse.

It's having to tell your parents. Yeah. But to our point, we were talking about earlier, if you bring your own story to that decision, I mean, she talks a lot about being Chinese, British and those two cultural forces, you know, the sort of stiff upper lip thing of the English and also the kind of what she described as the model minority pressure of being Chinese. Yeah.

Yeah. Both of them making it extra hard for her to speak. Yeah. Which are fascinated by.

Yeah. When I was reading about catching kill, I was I was wondering what would be your most generous reasoning for why people protect people they admire, who they love. They're like, there's loyalty. There's some kind of evolutionary wiring in there to really ignore the truth.

I think many of us are really vulnerable to that. In terms of protecting bad guys. Yeah. On occasion, it's well, I think we're built as a species to former judgments based on the limited data points we have.

And so, you know, I could name any number of names here, but pick your favorite person comes out and says, well, but I loved working with Roman Polanski or Woody Allen or Bill Cosby. And it's like, of course, you loved it. Of course, it's going to be great to you famous person on especially famous guy on set. You're not an underage girl or, you know, a model that has just been drugged or whatever it is in that scenario.

And, you know, I am not perfect in that respect either, but I try in cases where there's someone that I like and even care about and feel loyal to, who's incredibly accused of this sort of thing, just step outside of my own experience of that person. And acknowledge that there is another universe that I don't get to see firsthand. Sure. And I think it's just about respecting the unknown as well.

Like a great example of what you're talking about is I broke these stories about CBS. Les Moonves and a chain of executives under him, including in the news division and many, many dozens of people talking about how a culture of harassment kind of gets baked into a company's practices. Corporate culture is a real thing and it can turn bad in these ways. Right.

And it's all these different factors from the legal department to a board that's saying these sort of crazy mustache twirling villain, this things in the board meetings that they're saying, like, you know, I don't care if it's dozens of women accusing me. Right. Right. The time did bring after after I brought that story.

Literally, that was a very close to it. I remember in the wake of I did two stories back to back about Moonves and in the wake of the first one, which had six women accusing him of a salted harassment. And there were very serious stories. It was people like Iliana Douglas, wonderful actress saying, you know, he jumped on top of me, held me down in this business meeting and not super cool professional conduct.

Right. Right. Right. And yet there was even after those first six came forward, a real contingent of CBS talent, but also in the wider Hollywood community, people who raced to his defense.

And there were people who came out and said, you know, that's not the less that I know. Sure. And of course, that was true for them. I'm sure.

Right. But it's like it never entered into their calculus. What I knew already at that point, which is there's another six coming with even more extreme violent claims back by a whole lot of evidence. And I just think there's wisdom in, like I said before, respecting the unknown, you know, if there's a sign that there might be a wider pattern than you're aware of, just don't say anything for a few minutes.

Well, OK, great. So this is this you'd be the perfect person to ask about this because I don't feel like there's room currently to take the non binary option, which is either you come out and condemn the person or you come out and defend the person. Is there room or is it wrong to say, let's say I don't know, Louis, OK, but I do hear many of his friends end up on Stern or any of these places. And they're now put in a position where they have to kind of publicly say they don't like this person who they do like and they love is the room for me to go look, I love this person.

And I absolutely believe the accusers and I think this person has a problem. And I also love them. And to be honest, we'll continue to be friends with them and hope I'm a part of some growth and solution. Like, is that option on the table and should it not be or should it be?

Yeah, it's really tough. I mean, first of all, it's not really for me to say like I'm not, you know, the high priestess of what people should say about people accused. Well, you are in a unique position that you really are the vanguard of the Me Too movement. So I would hope that people would consider your opinion on how we course correct to be relevant.

Well, I mean, this is a bit of a sidebar, but I actually I don't really agree with that characterization. I see how people could see that from away from it. But from my perspective being in it, there's a really sharp distinction. I mean, I'm an investigative reporter.

I report on all kinds of corruption and malfeasance. And to me, it was actually philosophically very important that the stories I've been fortunate enough to break about sexual violence weren't distinct from any other serious kind of story. I think that these kinds of claims had been almost ghettoized for years and years and described as something that was distinct from any other kind of criminal. Like tabloid.

Tabloidy, not news impossible to bring out of the realm of he said she said. And I just even based on my legal training, understood that's not the case. It's in some cases, it's he said she said. And in some cases, it's actually backed by tangible evidence, whether it's an audio recording or a video or a paper trail of settlements to conceal something or there's eyewitnesses who saw some leave a room and saw how distraught they were.

There's all sorts of mechanisms. Yeah, was your take uniquely corporate corruption? Not just corporate, but just systems. Why are systems where by learning about this, hopefully we're not just learning about an individual.

We're learning about the ways they get aided and abetted and how that is baked into our culture, our corporate practices, our government practices. There's all sorts of legislative implications to the reporting that I've done on NDA's, for instance, and a bunch of reporters have now done really good, important work kind of exposing how for years and years, non-disclosure agreements were just used very freely to conceal crimes. Monica and I have one. No, we do.

I don't have one. Yeah, remember when you first started working at a babysitting? No. Yes, you signed an NDA.

No, there is nothing wrong. I mean, not much of a lawyer, but I took contract law one L year. I'm very aware there's all sorts of valid uses. And I have signed many an employment contract with a standard non-disclosure clause.

The reporting I've done is specifically on the application of NDA's to conceal criminal activity. Yes, yes. I just wanted to say like, Oh, that's never flexed the toilet in the front. No, we do.

That was a percent. You have one. I love that you forgot. I promise you we don't.

We'll solve this. Stay tuned for more on farm shareings. If you dare. I think it's fair.

It just shouldn't be applicable if you have a. If I committed a problem. I totally do some crimes. Then that is not generally.

I'm against them. Yeah. Across the board. I kind of am because even if it's not criminal, it's still a way to inflict power on somebody in general and even just treatment, behavior, all of that stuff, even if it's not like a criminal thing or a.

Well, but let's just for us in our exact situation, let's say, so you're coming into the house and you're going to be exposed up every aspect of our life. And then now you're in a position, if you were a piece of share, which you're not to go write a book about the fact that I fart too much and I. You know, just like embarrassing people need to know. And bear to talk about that on here all the time.

Well, embarrassing growth stuff that could potentially let's even say diminish my income because Samsung doesn't want a guy who's got to pulse a flatulence to sell a refrigerator. And now totally. So in some way, I think some probably be a non-disparagement clause. Oh, I mean, that's what we do.

I mean, the two are related and there's a lot of what we said. Like, I think I've observed that Chris and Dax haven't had sex in three months. Like, you know, there's just I totally agree. But let's say that you do something to me.

I get fired because of that. Let's say that also affects my income moving forward. Sure. If I'm trying to get another job and I can't because I can't really say, well, this is actually.

What happened? I don't think that's fair. I know. I agree.

So are you seen an underpants? Sounds like that would be the compromise. I think they're always going to be valid applications of confidentiality clauses of some kind. I mean, I'll give you a more clear cut example.

You're a scientist, you know, working in a lab on some incredibly sensitive technology for, you know, whatever, a car company and they have to be able to limit contraction. When some way you bring that to a competitor, there's there's all very clear cases where I don't think this is a terrible social able to have this legal institution. I agree to your point, Monica that they were overused widely and particularly in the context of the kinds of stories I did. Just years of working with sources who were scared shitless because they had signed the bad version of this, which is, you know, Harvey wants to pay me a million dollars to destroy all evidence of the crime he did.

Yeah. And never speak about it again. That's one of the episodes of the podcast is about this young woman, Amber Gutierrez, who participated in a policing and got a recording of him admitting to groping her. It's a very dramatic crazy story.

Oh, wow. And then he gives her a million dollars and she signs away her right to ever talk about it and has all her devices scrubbed of the recordings. And thankfully for me, she finds a secret way to preserve a copy of it out. Do you have a bad idea?

Yeah, I feel like if a criminal active, you know, something criminal has happened that should pretty much avoid an NDA. Is there any room legally for that to be part of how they're constructed? So that should be the case and there's conversations happening in different legislative bodies now about how you make that more clear and like actually preemptively preventing them from being used in cases of sex crimes. I think that that actually is now the case in California in the wake of this reporting.

Yeah, if you sign an NDA, you should probably say, well, I will sign this. But what I want included in this is that this excludes any kind of sexual misconduct towards me or something. The car in various jurisdictions that is now mandatory already. Oh, right.

California, I think you cannot at this point do the kind of agreement I just outlined of it is expressly for the purpose of covering up sex crimes. So lawyers who are engaged in brokering that kind of agreement should know that they can't do that and they should put a stop to it if someone was trying. And now just, you know, juicy gossipy way. Do you have a sense of global sense or cumulative sense of what Harvey paid out over the years?

I mean, I won't speculate other than saying it's obviously it's in the seven figures because you know, yeah, so it's a lot of money and it is one of the remarkable things about that story and so many others that there was a whole echelon of powerful person. It was just buying their way out of criminal accountability for a long time. Well, I watched that loudest voice in the room, which was incredibly well acted by Russell Crow who just want to add that. Did you watch that?

I didn't watch it, but I know Gretchen a little. Yeah, I'm sure you know the particulars of all these things, but they were paying out, you know, tens of millions of dollars. I mean, it really added up to huge amounts of money. Well, that's where I think the reporting is especially important because we need as many journalists as possible digging into cases of corporate culture, normalizing that sort of thing.

And I think it's pretty widespread. I mean, I've done now just reporting on NBC on CBS. It wasn't just a single rogue studio. Like the Weinstein Coffee Tier Point Fox was one of the leading examples.

I hope that we're seeing the death of this idea that powerful guys figure heads of these companies are so indispensable that it's worth concealing potentially criminal activity. It just it never is bad for the bottom line. You know, in the CBS story, when word leaked that we were about to run at the New Yorker, not even when the article itself hit like 10 hours before when I think the Hollywood reporter put out of he saying, you know, run about to put out this CBS reporter. I had been much rumored for months and sitting with my fact checker and we're of course just focused on the one thing we have to do with getting the reporting right and kind of trying to tune out the noise.

But meanwhile, the news cycle around this is starting and he turns his phone towards me and CBS's stock is just, you know, plummeting and it lost like a billion dollars of value. And on the one hand, you know, you hate to see that happen based on speculation. I mean, that's done way for the actual facts, investors. On the other hand, I hope that's a lesson for companies everywhere.

They thought they were doing the right thing for the bottom line covering this up. And this was a board that knew that there was a criminal investigation at one point. They knew that there were payouts and they kept him in power. And I hope now people have internalized the lesson.

Like, actually, there's a cost to that. I imagine you gather all of your information and you're structuring and writing and you're doing all these things and you're fact checking. And that has this whole, I would imagine excitement to it. Like you're really on to something.

You've really got something. And I wonder what the journey is from going like, fuck, I got this story is good. It's solid. I'm very proud of it.

And then the panic, the chatter, the probably legal threats, the stock dropping, you now really are responsible for like a billion dollar movement. Do you lose your conviction at all? You go like, Oh my God, if I've got this wrong now, I am fucked. Or are you at that point?

You're so solid on it? Or what's that? You just you only get to that point if you're so solid on it. I mean, to give you an example, I had a major political story that would have been the kind of thing that, you know, would take over the news cycle for a week or something.

And we had it fully drafted and multiple sourced, but I and my editors just decided at the 11th hour, not multiple sourced enough. We wanted another voice in the room for this particular thing that had happened. And it's just never worth putting it out unless you're so, so, so rock solid. And as you pointed out, all of these stories generate these crazy legal threats and attacks on me personally.

And so there's really no temptation to put it out prematurely. I wish I could credit myself for that. It's the New Yorker has this absurdly high standard of fact checking. So things only really progress to that point.

If you know, it's going to weather the storm. So I guess that's a way that you're bolstering some confidence as you have the vote of this institution, the New Yorker that's behind you, that could lead your own confidence a little bit. And I think just to make it more specific for people, because there's no reason anyone at home would necessarily know what that process looks like. It's not like you're doing secret research in a void and then saying, we feel confident.

So we're going to put this out and see how people react. The fact checking process entails going to everyone who's mentioned and saying, okay, here's what we are reporting and here's the evidence and getting all their rebuttals. So no one who's a subject of this kind of reporting is this kind of reporting meaning, investigate reporting is shocked. And you kind of know what the responses are going to be and calibrating it to those responses.

It still can be a shit storm when it comes out publicly and even, you know, you see people admitting to things in fact checking and then still being underhanded in the public discourse. And sure, sure. Yeah, I would imagine though that you're getting a lot of opportunity to exercise your muscle of constructing a real argument for the other side, which I think is one of the healthiest things people can do. And seems to be one of the things people are most reluctant to do, which I give it a real real shot.

What is that other point of view? Absolutely. And you know, it's a way in which I think the legal training helps because that's very much embedded in legal thinking. And sincerely, you know, my work involves burning a crazy amount of my bridges all the time.

But I do think that if you're going to be in the crosshairs of some kind of tough investigative reporting better to have it be an outlet like the New Yorker that's really going to sincerely want to hear you out. Right. And all the time I listen to someone during a fact checking process and think, okay, actually, I see that point or they presented this piece of evidence that's persuasive and it changes the tenor of the thing. I've had sometimes, I guess, a provocative view of some of these situations.

I am of the opinion, not certainly not the one seeing things, certainly not in many of them. But in some of them, I do have a hunch both people sincerely believe they're telling the truth. I think we do process experiences so differently, again, with the baggage of fears and insecurities we all carry as we already discussed, I have events in my life that you would think would be. There's no way we would remember this differently.

My brother and I watching my mom get beat up by our stepdad. That's a very memorable experience. He has it in a completely other house that we lived in. We have it in different houses.

And we have, like, you know what I'm saying? When I experience in my own life, that kind of dissonance of like, how could we have this drastically different memories of this experience? And yet I witnessed it all the time in benign things. Aren't there many cases where it's like, I believe her and I kind of believe him.

I believe that they may have had completely different experiences walking away from the situation. So I certainly in principle think that can be true. I think that in the stories that I've chosen to report, they're actually on a specific subset that is about sufficiently violent criminal allegations that you don't get into those greater issues as much. I mean, the prominent examples of stories about sexual violence that I've reported really are sometimes there are less violent anecdotes in there that are meant to establish an MO.

But they're always rooted in very, very serious criminal claims where there just wouldn't be a lot of room to have a reasonable interpretation of events that would be totally consensual. Is it frustrating? Because I can tell by that answer, you're making a real distinction as you totally should between what you've reported on and what I will just say when I read the Aziz account. Of course, that's a different universe.

Yes. And is it frustrating to, and I think I might be guilty of having sometimes lumped you into all of the stuff. And is it frustrating at all that what you're doing is such a specific thing? Yeah, I mean, this is where we got back to the distinction I talked about earlier.

Like, I'm not the high priestess of the MeToo movement. Toronto Burke who founded the MeToo movement and created that term and is an activist working in the trenches with survivors advocating for them. She's the high priestess of the MeToo movement. And those are different jobs.

I mean, I admire her so much. She's a truly badass individual. And I'm really grateful as a reporter that you can put out facts into the world. And then there are activists who have an agenda and turn them into change.

That's a meaningful part of how our culture should work. But actually to preserve the independence of this kind of reporting, I don't even get involved in that. I don't really have an agenda. Of course, I care about the issue.

I have a belief that, you know, a variety of the issues I've reported on need more attention on them. But I really maintain the posture of going wherever the facts take me and not going forward with the story. If I don't feel like it's rock solid and not being an advocate for my sources. You're trying to respect them and make them feel protected in the process.

But you're not carrying water for their set of facts until you have the evidence to back it up. So that is a hard distinction. And yes, I think for outsiders who just hear a swirl of names and they understand there's a lot of social change happening around this issue. There's no reason to necessarily understand like this person is a reporter and this other person is an activist and this other person is a source who came forward.

But it is relevant because I was talking to my wife about you. I guess maybe it was when you were on Bill Maher recently and she made a point to say to me, Ronan's commitment is to investigate situations. That that is what your kind of mission is. Your mission isn't to like you're not trying to go expose every person.

You believe in everyone should be heard and everything should be investigated. I love your wife. I love for even more hearing that. She's heard my talking points.

Thank you, Chris. I was I thought maybe you're because I am very supportive of the movement and yet at the same time I kind of reject believe all women. I just don't believe all anybody. Yeah.

No, and it's actually it's antithetical to what I do to say believe all anybody. I've always been very clear. I talk about this a lot. You know, my ethos is listen to all survivors of sexual violence.

Listen to all women. Listen to many categories of people we weren't listening to for too long. And I think the best service you can do to claims of this type is to investigate them thoroughly and even adversarially. I was having this conversation for one of these episodes of the podcast with a young woman named Emily Nestor, who was one of the first Weinstein accusers to come forward and had documentation to back it up and so forth.

So her account of events was very important to the early phases of reporting. And she was reminding me that I basically I grilled her to the point where it was an extraordinarily unpleasant process for her. Right. I've made sources cry with my question.

I mean, it's a. You have that every question that you're denoted. Your denoucers are going to ask ultimately, right? That's right.

Yeah. Kind of like when you prepare a witness, right? For testimony, you have to act as the prosecution, even if you're the defense. Yes.

With the important distinction that I'm not, I don't have the agenda of preparing them. I just literally have the objective of finding out what's true. Right. And God bless every source who puts up with that, signs up for it, understands like that's part of the process.

And I try to do it in a way that's compassionate and makes them feel safe. But also, you know, I think ultimately they understand that's important. Well, as I was reading about your life and your wonder kin status and then graduating at 15 and then went on to Yale Law School, got a doctor in law. I didn't say it was Yale.

Well, buckle the fuck up. Then you're a Rhodes Scholar too, right? Oh my God. No, it's insane.

It's for positive. But in he passed the New York bar. So I have to imagine at some point you at least were considering practicing law. You know, you get into this tunnel vision when you're in any closed universe like that, like legal profession, in my case.

And I think I knew going into law school, even going to Yale Law, for people who don't know law schools, Yale Law is kind of, it's the Montessor School of Law Schools. Is there a Bill and Hillary? It is where Bill and Hillary. Yeah.

They turn out a lot of the great sort of legal professors and judges, but the stereotype about the places, like you kind of don't learn black letter while they're in Haiti for saying this. But people don't go there and then litigate. I mean, a vast majority of them, in fact, do. And there's plenty of great, practically, there's incredibly a law, but just relative to the competition, relative to Harvard Law, even, there are quarks to you.

Like you don't have to take property. There's sort of basic, you don't have to take tax. Like there's basic gaps in your legal knowledge and emerge with. And actually, I love that about the place because you can have this incredibly kind of philosophical legal education.

And I was very, very fortunate to be able to go there and use it as training that didn't necessarily have to be for practicing or to a big law firm. So I was a summer associate at a big firm, but I knew pretty early on that I wanted to do something a little more public servicey, I guess. Right. So looking at the road, it would appear from the outside and correct me if I'm wrong that this specific focus of your journalism seems to have found you.

Is that when is that? I grew up you worked in the Obama administration and you were doing work in Afghanistan and Pakistan with how the US government is interacting with non-governmental and civilian populations over there, right? Yeah. So I was there in 2009 and there was a resurgence of what came to be known as coin strategy counterinsurgency strategy.

It was a school of thought, the champion by General Petraeus. And the idea was you send the soldiers into the communities and there's a series of steps where you clear out the enemies, but then you're actually living with the local population and trying to win them over. And there's a huge body of debate about is this a terrible approach? Is this a good approach?

And ultimately, I wrote a book about failures of our policy in Afghanistan or on a piece to buy now. But in this case, what I was writing about is how our militarization of foreign policy that happens as we scale back our investment in diplomacy can backfire. And how Afghanistan is a great example of that. And there's many, many great books about how we've messed up Afghanistan over and over again.

And it's this quagmire and famously the graveyard of empires. And I don't know that I'm going to be able to offer any new insights into that in this conversation. But I think that whatever the merits of that counterinsurgency strategy that we were just talking about, it did not work there. Right.

Did you have the sense I did as you're flying over Afghanistan? There's nothing to capture. It's the most kind of theoretical place to have a war. There's no town to overrun.

There's nothing. It's just mountains and deserts and you fly from one previous Soviet base to another previous Soviet base. And you realize like, this isn't really a thing you can get your arms around. Yet everyone's there.

You know, again, I'm not making a case for organs are involved. Well, what blows my mind is we just keep making this mistake of thinking and it's, you know, often it's out of the Pentagon, you know, our military brass just is able to sell our whatever the White House is at the time on this idea that we can win. Right. Right.

And it's just not how it works over and over again, going back to the proxy wars of the Cold War era. The whole country of Afghanistan as it exists now is a creation of proxy wars gone wrong. Yeah. And that's not going to change.

And we would need many more hours to discuss like what should happen in the right, but in the context of what I was writing about in the time I was there, there was a small, but vocal contingent of diplomats saying we should try to negotiate our way out because this military solution isn't going to work. Right. And I think there was ultimately something to that and we're finally years late kind of coming around to that idea. People are just now starting to speak out, right?

There's more negotiations happening with the Taliban and so forth. And there's been fits and starts that it's complicated. But certainly we lost a window of opportunity where I think there was a viable negotiation path that we didn't take because there was a frenzy of military action and a White House in this case, the Obama White House in the thrall of these celebrity generals. Right.

And I would have had the appearance of defeat if we left at that exact time or something. That's always part of the political incentive. Yeah. There's, I do think that there's a real phenomenon in domestic politics where there's sort of an intoxication that comes along with the war.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Obama, I think as an individual was very much not susceptible to that. He wanted to get us out of places isolationist in that way, but also was a political pragmatist and understood the need to follow in line with the military.

That's the various points. And you see an interesting thing between the terms of the Obama administration, where the first term was marked much more by rejection of diplomacy. And I go through all these examples of that in that book. And the second term, they did belatedly kind of come around to, okay, we need to invest more in diplomatic activities.

Well, wasn't his big, I can't remember what I was watching or reading, but his big self-admitted failure was how he dealt with Israel, right? That was something he set out to do with Great Fiverr and it just he didn't do what he was hoping to do. I mean, you have four hours to talk about it. Okay.

Well, then let's scan it. It's for part two. I feel like I want to start having dinner with you because there's so many of these. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. Almost half the time, ostensibly, for the relationship. Well, you both. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to do the thing. And then you are also then appointed by Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State to work with youth or advise on youth in the land of global role. And in the wake of the Arab Spring, it was kind of related to that.

Right. Yes. You must know so much about that region. I can't believe you're 31.

I'm intimidated. I feel like you're failing. I feel like I know so little. You know, you talk to these guys like Steve Call who've just spent decades writing about nothing but that.

And there's no bottom to that. Well, you're going to be a specialist in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's your line for? Right.

I have enough of a knowledge from the years I've spent there and the investment I've put into reading the history and so forth to I think understand the contours of what I was writing about in that case. But I would not call myself an expert. Okay. Sorry, I have a real quick question about being young.