Patrick Radden Keefe

And I think the challenge is that by the time you sort of arrive at the logical terminus, you know, you kind of get to the real extreme of somebody who does bad things on that scale.

You've been telling yourself these stories along the way to justify each little kind of incremental deviation so that it's almost too late.

It's kind of too late to see clearly.

And I think that there's an added layer to this when you're a billionaire.

You know, as somebody who's not a billionaire, I... Oh, not yet.

Give a guy a chance.

Give a writer a chance.

Journalism, the path to billionaires.

This is what they say, you know.

I think from the outside, I guess I had presumed that if you were really, really rich, you could avail yourself of the best advice money could buy.

And what I found with the Sacklers, and it's not just them, I mean, you see this in other stories too, it's kind of the opposite.

You actually are sort of cursed because you're surrounded by all these people whose living is dependent on you, on your favor.

I mean, we see this with Donald Trump, right?

It's not that he's clinically delusional, it's that he's surrounded by yes-men.

So I think there's probably a natural human tendency not to want to confront the downstream consequences of your own bad decisions, but I think it's really amplified when...

when you're a very wealthy person who's kind of surrounded by people who are there to reaffirm all your worst impulses.

I think that...

there is a kind of fake it till you make it tradition in which Zach was operating.

And it is true that some people fly too close to the sun and in Zach's case, it killed him.

But I think there are actually a lot of other people who manage in a kind of messy way.