Hello and welcome to the long form podcast. I am Evan Ratliffe. I am joined by my colleague

Max Linsky. Aaron is a way on vacation.

That's the first time you've ever called me your colleague.

No. It means a lot. It took us like what? 11 years and now I am your your colleague

You really stepped up in my eyes recently. Finally, I've earned your respect. Really,

uh, really means a lot. Well, my friend, my colleague, my compatriot, who is on the program

this week. On the program this week is Heidi Blake. Um, Heidi is currently contributing

writer for the New Yorker prior to that. She was an investigative reporter and ran the global

investigations team for Buzzfeed news out of the UK. They did an incredible series of stories

about the deaths of Russian dissidents in London, which became a book for her called from

Russia with blood. Amazing book reads like a spine novel. Highly recommend. Sounds like a spine

novel. It's it's unbelievable. Um, there's also a docu-series out of that called Once Upon a Time

in London grad. And she also back when she was at the Sunday Times UK. She blew the lid off

of corruption at FIFA wrote a book about that. So she's done a lot of amazing investigations.

She had a great story in the New Yorker recently called the fugitive princesses of Dubai,

which is kind of what prompted my reaching out to her. And we had a chance to talk about that

and everything else. It sounds like it hits so many of your interests, including soccer. Yeah.

That's perfect story for you. Yeah. Assassinations, soccer, kidnappings, spies. These are all in my

interest. Well, I know your interest because we're colleagues. We also have colleagues at box media

who make the show with them. Thanks very much to them. And now here is Evan with Heidi Blake.

Heidi, it's great to have you on this show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me.

I wanted to start by talking about this most recent New Yorker story, both because I was

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