Pick up the Phone
And other tips people under the age of 30 will hate
The first time I interviewed a witness as an investigator, I botched my entire opening monologue.
I’ve interviewed countless people as a journalist, broadcaster, and podcast host. I’m a decent conversationalist and a good speaker; I have the education for it. Like many things in life, it’s just a skill most people can acquire with practice.
But on this day, I had to write out what I intended to say when the witness answered her phone. Who I was, where I was calling from, who I was technically calling on behalf of, and most importantly, why.
The thing is, people don’t really like journalists. The practice of journalism is, at its core, invasive. I’ve had to call people for all the same reasons an investigator does: someone died, there was an accident, something sordid and confusing happened somewhere, and I need the details. People are more than happy to tell you to fuck off, try to broker a deal to get paid for a story, or simply hang up on you. I don’t blame them.
In a recent episode of High Spirits, Justin and I discussed the lawlessness of poor journalism and how the space created by journalists is one that often decides if people are guilty or innocent. When a journalist plays a role in someone’s ruin or someone’s glory, and they’re wrong, there aren’t the same consequences there are for lawyers and cops. There is no governing system that takes away your Journalism Licence™ and says, “No more, you’re done,” if you happen to royally fuck up someone’s life.
It’s a role that comes with power on the backend. But on the front, when you pick up the phone or brazenly and stupidly show up on someone’s doorstep, there is no paperwork or system that says, “You have to talk to me.” And unless your name has shown up in print on the world’s most circulated publications, people don’t really give a shit who you are by title or name.
It doesn’t feel this way in investigations.
The difference between “My name is Kennedy Chappell, and I’m calling from CXVR” or “The Prairie Times” and “My name is Kennedy Chappell, and I’m an investigator calling on behalf of the Law Office of Tom Jones LLC” carries a different weight. People are afraid of the law; they’re afraid of lawyers, and cops and the people associated with them.
The freedom a person has telling me to fuck all the way off because they don’t want their name printed in a story, and someone telling me to fuck all the way off when they could potentially be involved in a criminal matter? Not the same.
Still, it felt absurd to be so nervous. Talk into the phone the same way you have too many times to count? Yeah, grow up.
When she answered the phone, I looked to the notes I’d written and the whole thing blurred together. I stumbled over my words, somehow managed to misspeak my own name. By the time she had a chance to really speak, I was sweating through my shirt.
Not only was she shockingly and exceedingly lovely, she wanted to talk to me.
Within ten minutes, I knew the hardest part was going to be resisting my urge to ask if she was in the market for new friends.
The context of that call wasn’t horrifying. It was more of a “Do you know so and so who happens to know so and so, and if so, can you verify x, y, z?” It was all pretty simple, and because she didn’t care for the people involved, she was more than happy to be forthcoming.
It was a good “first” call to have. It left me feeling more confident and assured. It made the second call easier, which made the fifth, and the twelfth, and the thirtieth all the same.
You’re probably thinking that this is a piece about how to make phone calls or how to be confident as you do it. It’s not. It’s actually just a piece about picking up the phone at all.
The biggest mistake I made when joining the world of intelligence and investigation was assuming that nothing I knew or had experienced would be applicable. I was stewarded into the industry by an organization that did not have the resources to train me or the sense to truly include me operationally. Instead, I was siloed to managing my non-technical team and invited to dinners and meetings with other executives who made their work seem big and inaccessible, too much for me to understand in such little time. Mostly, I think they just didn’t want me to ask a lot of questions about something that was not working.
I left before that whole thing fell apart, and maybe because I wasn’t there to see the wreckage, I continued to believe that I was uniquely ill-equipped.
I was confident enough to join Permanent Record Research because I knew that I was an asset to what we wanted to build, which was a hybrid of investigations and storytelling, communications, research and people work.
Immediately, I defaulted to delegating investigative tasks to Justin or MJ. Not because I didn’t want to do it or because I don’t crave working just as much as the relentless autist and the bloodhound (you decide which is which), but because I absolutely believed that was the right thing to do. To have me, who doesn’t know the magic, the tools, the workarounds, working those parts of a case seemed like a waste of our time and resources.
But we’re a small team, and I like investigative work. So, with time, I became more involved and more invested in the learning.
I cannot tell you how many times I have hit what I believed to be my limit of understanding and asked Justin, “There’s something I’m not thinking of here, right?” Only to have him shrug and say, “Nah, that’s it.”
In every case, I was massively overthinking my lack of ability.
It’s not that the work is easy. It’s not. It’s tedious and methodical and difficult, mentally and, depending on the case, emotionally. It takes skill, but it also requires the humility of understanding that even with the deepest well of knowledge, there is always more to know. I will always be a student.
So, it’s not easy, and it takes time to learn. But it’s fairly simple in functionality.
Simple in the sense that oftentimes, the most powerful thing you can do is pick up the phone.
I made the mistake of assuming that people who were more well-versed than me, who seemed to have a much stronger and steadier output than I could manage, had accessed some version of understanding that was inaccessible to me. That they knew how to use tools that live in obscurity. That they’d been given some leather-bound book from the library of an OSINT God.
That wasn’t the case. It isn’t.
The reality was often hours on the phone. Case work is human work. It isn’t solved with AI, it isn’t completed with data breach brokers or dark web marketplaces, or a single spreadsheet and one lawyers discovery documents, and I made my life and learning curve infinitely more difficult by believing it would be.
It’s talking to a lawyer, and then local law enforcement, and then a witness, and a perpetrator, or an alleged offender.
Sometimes, it’s listening to someone’s momma or aunt cry about a horrifying thing that happened. Sometimes, it’s trying not to cry yourself as a witness explains something they can’t cry about anymore. Sometimes, it’s putting your composure down to say to another human being—guilty, innocent, mostly unrelated, completely involved—with your own wavering voice, “What you’re describing is awful, and I hope you know the things that happened to you were not ok.” And sometimes, it’s saying to a predator, “Hey, you can lie to me, but I’ve seen photos of your erect penis in a digital photo album with little kids, so what do either of us have to lose right now?”
Every day is different, but humans are mostly all the same. They’re human.
And while doing all this human work, I’ve got to use tools by brilliant designers and access some confidential information here and there that we don’t all get to be privy to, the most useful thing of all has always been people.
Pick up the phone.