Hello and welcome to the new abnormal. I'm producer Jesse Caden and this week Molly and I are taking a little bit of a break

So we have some pre-taped interviews on some really interesting subjects that we're gonna be rolling out throughout the week

First up is Noah Hurowitz who covered the El Chapo trial for Rolling Stone and has now written a new book called El Chapo

The untold story of the world's most infamous drug lord and we're gonna talk to him all about that

Welcome to the new abnormal Noah

Thank you so much for having me. We're super excited to have you talk to us about this book because it's very exciting to encounter a book

That is not about Donald Trump or American politics, but has also really important American political

You know implications. Can you talk to us about this?

Yeah, so this book is the product of two and a half years of work. I started

Covering the sort of El Chapo saga in November of 2018 prior to that

I had done some you know coverage of like domestic drug policy in the United States, but I got a gig covering the trial of El Chapo for

Rolling Stone and so I was in the courthouse every day for basically three months straight out of that

Guru this and so I spent the next year 2019 in Mexico sort of bouncing between Mexico City and

Cinaloa and Northern Mexico along the border

You know, it's it's really exciting to finally be putting it out the book is it's about El Chapo

Obviously, it's so much more than that, you know from the from the very beginning

I had very little interest honestly in sort of a

Straight just like biography of a like famous criminal, you know for one thing

There's a lot of media out there already about El Chapo and for another thing

I just I don't think that an overly narrow focus on one person is a great way to understand an issue

But I do think that the story of El Chapo offers us a lot of ways to understand the sort of trajectory of the drug war

You know the the one drugs

...