Patrick Radden Keefe (investigative journalist)

Summary

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Armchair Expert: Patrick Radden Keefe (May 6, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of "Armchair Expert," Dax Shepard and Lily Padman sit down with renowned investigative journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe. The conversation dives into Keefe’s latest book, "London Falling," which explores the mysterious death of a young man in London and his family’s quest for answers. Through personal stories, cultural observations, and reflections on the nature of ambition and parental influence, the discussion offers both a behind-the-scenes look at Keefe’s career and a nuanced exploration of contemporary issues around wealth, identity, and parenting.

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Main Themes

• The intersection of personal ambition, societal pressure, and family legacies
• London as a city transformed by global wealth and status
• The fragility of identity and the consequences of reinvention
• Parenting, grief, and humility in the face of tragedy
• The impact of new technology and social media on youth and culture

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Detailed Breakdown

1. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Background & Path to Journalism

• Dorchester Roots: Keefe discusses growing up in Dorchester, Boston’s largest and most diverse neighborhood. “Ethnically diverse, very socioeconomically diverse...a weird, wonderful place” (03:01).
• Family Influence: His father was an urban planner involved in Boston’s “Big Dig,” while his mother was a philosophy professor examining the philosophy of psychiatry. Both encouraged open intellectual debate and skepticism (05:51, 07:15).
• Circuitous Path to the New Yorker: Keefe studied history at Columbia, then international relations at Cambridge and LSE (“this kind of bullshit degree” — 07:58). His real goal: always to write for The New Yorker (10:06-10:16).
• Persistence and Rejection: Keefe shares the story of pitching The New Yorker for years, framing his first rejection letter from 1998: “My first rejection letter for an article...is framed in my home office” (12:50).
• Law School as a Backup and Social Status Marker: “I wasn’t totally confident I was good enough...I wanted a backup” and was also sucked into “chasing the next brass ring” (13:26-14:00).
• Reporting and Humility: “If you want to succeed in this line of work, you need to learn how to metabolize rejection… Most of the job is getting rejected” (15:33).

2. The Journalist’s Journey

• Breaking In: Published in The New Yorker in 2006, after years of freelancing and briefly working at the Pentagon.
• New Yorker’s Value: “The New Yorker turned out to be so much better than I had even imagined” (19:16).
• Peers and Mentors: “Now my new book, when it was in draft, there’s five or six of my colleagues I sent it to and they’re the best. Not everybody has the same fixations I do, but for somebody like me, this is just all I could ever ask” (21:19).

3. Major Works and Approaches

"Say Nothing" (2018)

• On the IRA, the Troubles, and the complexities of political violence.
• Won the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Peabody.
• “One of the things that’s great...is you get to stand your pieces up beside the best” (19:50).

"Wind of Change" Podcast (2020)

• Investigates the rumor that the CIA wrote the Scorpions’ "Wind of Change".
• “When you look at the history of the CIA, they were doing all kinds of stuff in culture...” (25:16).

"Empire of Pain" (2021)

• Chronicles the Sackler family and the opioid crisis.

"London Falling" (2026)

• Focuses on the mysterious death of Zach Brettler, a Jewish teenager in London who convincingly posed as the child of a Russian oligarch. Explores London’s transformation by global wealth, elite schools, and the pressures these environments place on young people.
• “For me, the story of Zach is great and intriguing and I must get the answers. But what I’m learning about London, what I’m learning about the Thames, what I’m learning about the influx of all the money—that’s the meat for me.” — Dax Shepard (26:24).

4. Deep Dive: "London Falling" and the Case of Zach Brettler

Context & Key Figures

• Zach Brettler’s Background: Son of successful, educated Jewish parents, both from families of Holocaust survivors. Grew up in affluence, but not at the “oligarch” level (34:21).
• Sibling Rivalry and Schooling: Older brother Joe gets into a prestigious school; Zach is rejected and attends Mill Hill, a school known as a refuge for those not offered places elsewhere but is now populated by children of billionaires and oligarchs (37:48).
• Identity Formation Through Exclusion: Not getting into the same school as his brother becomes a subtle turning point: “A moment of embarrassment and failure” (37:40).
• Encountering Extreme Wealth: At Mill Hill, Zach is suddenly on the lower end of the “have-mores,” confronting spectacular affluence in classmates (38:22). Dax: “This is a very extreme case of the haves and the have-mores” (41:48).
• Adopting the Oligarch Persona: Driven by feelings of inadequacy, envy, and the intoxicating proximity to wealth, Zach begins lying about his origins, claiming his mother is dead, or his father is an arms dealer—ultimately posing as the heir of a Russian oligarch (48:22).

London's Background and Wealth Transformation

• Dockland Decline to Financial Hub: Post-1980s, London “reinvents itself” as a money town. Keefe notes the impact of Thatcher-era deregulation and foreign capital, especially Russian and Asian fortunes pouring into Mayfair and private clubs (39:35-41:20).
• Money and Morality: Discussion of how modern London’s “new money” ethos has erased the old upper-class British decorum and modesty. “Now it’s all new money and there’s no shame about it, in fact, a kind of pride in it” (43:22).

The Death and Investigation

• Entanglements: Zach connects with Akbar Shamji, an elite businessman with his own secrets, and “Indian Dave,” a notorious gangster (60:15, 63:43).
• All Pretending: “It turns out all three of them are pretending to be something they’re not—it’s like the Spider-Man meme” (62:31).
• The Night of the Death: Zach jumps from a balcony into the Thames, as captured by an MI6 security camera. The story initially told by "Indian Dave" doesn’t add up. Zach’s parents, desperate for answers, undertake their own investigation (68:39-73:15).
• Family’s Experience: The Brettlers, unknowingly, uncover Zach’s dual life after his disappearance, becoming their own detectives when the official investigation falters. As Keefe observes, “They have to become detectives themselves” (73:39).

Intergenerational Echoes and Grief

• The Brettler family’s story is one of resilience, echoing the reinvention and survival of Zach’s Holocaust-survivor grandparents. “When I looked into my father’s eyes, I never saw barbed wire, I only saw a loving father” (75:49).
• The theme of choosing life and resilience in grief, “You can hold both of those things in” (76:12).
• Parenting humility: “If anything, it just teaches me a kind of humility...There is a limit to what you’re able to do” (78:50).

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Cultural Commentary & Broader Reflections

Inequity and Identity in Modern London

• London’s shift from manufacturing to money, and the psychological toll of being surrounded by “have-mores.”
• The normalization of conspicuous consumption and the erosion of old-money humility (43:22).

Media & Technology

• The influence of social media: “If you grow up on these apps and you’re an adolescent, your ability to draw a fine dividing line between real life and fantasy life, it’s a little blurry” (47:49).
• Digital anonymity and disconnection: “There’s a kind of fundamental decency in terms of the way you treat other people that has been devalued to some degree...Everyone’s interacting on screens is part of it” (80:10).
• Hope for future recalibration: “Maybe we’re just in that phase now where we know this is bad for us but it’s still really hard” (85:26).

Parenting, Decency, and Role Modeling

• On teaching values: “All the lessons you teach your kids aren’t going to add up to a hill of beans. But watching the way you deal with a waiter in a restaurant, it’s going to be things like those little moments of observation...” (79:11).
• On limit of control: “There’s this fantasy we have that your child is a piece of clay you can just mold. There is a limit to what you’re able to do” (78:31).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Resilience and Reinvention

• “They both said, it’s because of our fathers…They had these fathers who’d lost more than we can really conceive of, lost everything, and then somehow forged ahead...You can hold both things in.” – Patrick Radden Keefe (76:12)

On Social Media and Modern Adolescent Myth-Making

• “He wasn’t delusional, but if you grow up on these apps...your ability to draw a fine dividing line between real life and fantasy life, it’s a little blurry.” – Patrick Radden Keefe (47:49)

On Class and Shame in New Money London

• “Now it’s all new money and there’s no shame about it and in fact, kind of pride.” – Patrick Radden Keefe (43:22)

On Investigative Journalism

• “If you want to succeed in this line of work, you need to learn how to metabolize rejection.” – Patrick Radden Keefe (15:33)

On the Ubiquity of Pretending

• “All three of them are pretending to be something that they’re not. It’s like the Spider man meme, you know?” – Patrick Radden Keefe (62:31)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:01 – Patrick describes growing up in Dorchester, Boston.
• 07:58 – On LSE and academic decisions as social maneuvers.
• 10:06 – The lifelong dream of writing for The New Yorker.
• 12:50 – Keefe’s first rejection letter from The New Yorker.
• 13:26 – Law school as both backup and status escalator.
• 19:16 – The New Yorker exceeds Keefe’s expectations.
• 26:24 – What’s intriguing about “London Falling.”
• 34:21 – The Brettler family’s intergenerational context.
• 38:22 – Zach at Mill Hill among children of oligarchs.
• 41:48 – The “haves and the have-mores” dynamic.
• 62:31 – The “Spider man meme” of mutual impersonation.
• 68:39 – The night of Zach’s death and the MI6 camera footage.
• 73:39 – The Brettlers become their own detectives.
• 76:12 – Lessons from Holocaust survivor grandparents.
• 79:11 – Parental modeling > didactic lessons.

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Final Thoughts

Dax and Lily close by praising the depth and empathy in Keefe’s work, likening his writing to Erik Larson's "Devil in the White City." The conversation demonstrates the human complexity behind headline tragedies: the push and pull between agency and circumstance, the allure of reinvention, and the struggle for meaning amidst loss. Keefe’s humility and insight reinforce the essential truth that even the most careful, loving families can find themselves facing the unimaginable.

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For listeners: This episode is a rich exploration of family, ambition, and the social structures shaping modern lives. Whether interested in true crime, cultural history, or just a deeply human story, Keefe’s insights — and the Armchair Expert team’s probing, empathetic questions — offer much to think about.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

[Lily Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Today we have an award winning investigative journalist. He writes for the New Yorker on staff. Patrick Radden Keefe is a writer for the New Yorker. He's also written a couple of, well, several incredible books. Rogues, Empire of Pain, say Nothing, the Snakehead. And he has a new book out now that we're talking about. London Falling. A mysterious death in a gilded city. In a family's search for truth. I fell in love with Patrick.

[Lily Padman]

He's fantastic and he's such a good writer. I loved Empire of Pain.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He's also stunning to look at. He is a handsome man and very charismatic. And then he has stumbled upon this absolutely mind blowing story that took place in London. So please enjoy. Patrick Radden Keefe this message is brought to you by Apple Pay. Checking out online Apple Pay makes it simple. Apple Pay is accepted on millions of websites and app. Just look for the Apple Pay button almost anywhere you do your online shopping. When you tap the Apple Pay button to check out, you don't have to worry about filling out any forms with your shipping address or payment method or for me, my billing address. Instead, use your pre saved information and checkout in seconds. What a joy. Need to make a change? You can easily review and change your card information and shipping details right in the payment sheet. Once you are ready, just double click the side button, authenticate your purchase with face ID and you're done. Whether you're shopping online for everyday needs or treating yourself, skip the hassle. Shop with Apple Pay terms apply. Thank you to our presenting sponsor. Grubhub Gold Days is here which feels like a dangerous time to be ordering food because suddenly everyone in your life is very interested in what you're eating. Grubhub plus members are getting nonstop savings all month long and if you're not a member yet, you can join for just 99 cents a month for six months. That's a 90% discount off of the usual price. Grubhub plus members auto renews and terms apply. Sign up now in the app or at grubhub.com/gold.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's so good to me.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Great to meet you Patrick. Okay, good.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I was gonna say Pat or Pat. It's funny. So to this day if I'm walking down the street and somebody says Pat Keefe, I know it's someone I went to high school with.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, sure, sure, sure. You're a Massachusetts Dorchester. I'm from Dorchester what's the vibe in Dorchester? We certainly know what it is in Boston.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Dorchester is its own kind of very specific place. It's the biggest neighborhood in the city of Boston.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's in Boston.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's in Boston proper.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a city kid. I grew up a block from the end of the Red Line. Basically, Dorchester. Very ethnically diverse. Very socioeconomically diverse. It's just a weird place. It's a weird, wonderful place. I loved growing up there. At times it has had a kind of a bit of a reputation in Boston.

[Dax Shepard]

What's the bad rap?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It gets violent crime.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great. I love that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

That kind of thing. But the thing is, I grew up in a great big Victorian house. They could afford that house in Dorchester in 1979.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Do you remember what the price of that house was?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was less than $40,000.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't it mind blowing?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Our neighbors, just 1,000ft behind us is our first house. And next to us, I can see the tax record. And their house was 48,000. So they're paying tax on a $48,000 house. That's probably worth $4 million. It's so wonderful.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

What did your mom and dad do?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

My dad sort of had two careers. He got into urban planning. And so he was in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is where I was born.

[Dax Shepard]

I know this. And he worked for Dukakis.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And so he was like Director of City Planning for Lowell and then Director of City Planning for Boston, then Director of State Planning for Massachusetts. Then he ended up kind of working for Mike Dukakis. And then duk lost in 88. And my dad went into the private sector and did real estate stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Was he a part of any of the planning of the Big Dig?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He was.

[Dax Shepard]

He was, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which was the biggest thing that hit Boston ever, right? The Big Dig.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, and it was funny because at the time. So I, in what was probably a nepotistic arrangement, I spent two summers in college working for the Big Dig when it was still in process. And everybody hated. It was like the biggest construction project imaginable.

[Dax Shepard]

And everyone was irate about it.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was a nightmare. People hated it. There was an elevated highway that ran through the of Boston and really divided the city in two. It was a eyesore. If you see old movies, you see it. And we used to drive on it. When I would go back to Dorchester when I was a kid from the city, they basically took it down and built a tunnel underneath it. And it was massively expensive and all These kind of cost overruns and took forever, and everybody was incredibly angry about it. And the funny thing is, the closer you were to the alignment of it. So I worked in community relations.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

You'd go to the North End and there'd be these irate old Italian grandmas who had an apartment that, like, abutted this construction site. And we would have to pay for soundproof windows and all that kind of stuff. But the funny thing is, of course, the day they cut the ribbon, they were the ones who benefited the most. Like, suddenly you were looking out on this. It's a greenway. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That's hilarious that they were the most opposed.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was really something. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe it was always planned and charted this way, but from my perspective, you have a very circuitous route to the New Yorker. You go to Columbia first.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you do history.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. A specific history.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Modern European. I ended up writing a lot about World War I and World War II.

[Dax Shepard]

World War II's more fun. Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Than World War I. Yeah. Nothing's more fun than World War I.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Come on. Love that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Come on.

[Dax Shepard]

Hot cake. Trench war for the 70s.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I loved it. I loved it.

[Dax Shepard]

We missed Mom. Mom was a philosophy professor.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, Philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, which is actually in Dorchester, the neighborhood I grew up in, but with a kind of focus on. Be interesting to you guys. Focus on the philosophy of psychiatry, looking at various psychiatric ailments and the way they map onto philosophical conceptions of the self. So multiple personality disorder and depression. And more recently, she's been writing about anorexia. I mean, all kinds of different things.

[Dax Shepard]

She's still active, so she's retired from

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

teaching, but she still writes. And she has these kind of great. Cause my dad's retired too, and my mom will get these visiting gigs where some university, New York or in Perth in Australia they went to. Or Bari in Italy, where they'll basically say, come for six weeks. And my dad goes to. Oh, my God, what a great life.

[Dax Shepard]

Conversation at dinner must be very stimulating. You got a couple of very bright parents. Do you have siblings?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I do. I have a little brother who lives in Dorchester and is a farmer. He's an urban farmer. Oh, wow. And in my neighborhood that I grew up in, and my sister lives in Zurich and is a writer and an art historian.

[Dax Shepard]

I just feel like if I could pick something I'd want my mom to be an expert in, it'd be philosophy, because it's just kind of an endless maze you can follow.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think so. I mean, Everybody read, everybody talked about if we wanted to see a movie. We would argue about it afterwards. It was that kind of house. It wasn't a thing where everybody had to do a book report. There wasn't any kind of performative smarty pants stuff. It was more just kind of thinkers.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you have parents interested in the world.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Totally. The thing that I take from her that is maybe a quality of a philosophy professor, is that she's just the most skeptical person. Any idea, any argument. She always wants to kind of look at it and turn it around if there's something absolutely contrarian. I mean, and to this day, my parents. I won't mention the movies, but it's just hilarious. There will often be some Best Picture winning movie that my parents will walk out of after 20 minutes and say like, this was the most terrible movie. As though everybody felt this way, you know. And in fact, she likes to call bullshit on things. Yeah, completely.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so Columbia History. And then you go to Cambridge. Yep, and now it gets confusing for me. So at Cambridge you do international relations and then you also go to London School of Economics. And what do you study there?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

This kind of bullshit degree. It was a time when the London School of Economics was doing, from a business perspective, a really smart thing, which is that they realized that there were foreigners who would come and pay higher tuition fees for master's degrees than the English students. And so they would invent these new degrees not by creating new classes or bringing new professors, but just by taking requirements from other things and kind of putting them together into a bespoke thing that looked like you. Yeah. When I was at Cambridge, I desperately wanted to leave. Cambridge is very bucolic. It's very pretty. I found it stifling. I had never lived in a place that small and I wanted to get into London. I was going into London every weekend and I just felt like, get me out of here, I want to be in London. So I was on a two year fellowship. I wasn't paying for it, it was all paid for. So I thought, okay, I'll go to the lsc. And I was interested in electronic spying by the National Security Agency.

[Dax Shepard]

This is your NSA book?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, exactly. And this kind of interest had started. And so I was looking at the LLC catalog and they had some again, in retrospect, just ridiculous thing where it was like new media and information and spying and electronic stuff. And I was like, it's me.

[Dax Shepard]

Really quick. Did Michael Lewis go there to the London School Economic. Is that where he was at when he had that Fateful. I don't know.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I don't remember.

[Lily Padman]

He might have.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No, because he went to Princeton and then he was a banker. He was a young banker in London.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought he started as a banker's degree there or something that. Then he went with a cousin to dinner and then.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, no, maybe you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, got.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

That's right. There was some weird connection.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

London School of Economics.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There you go.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank God I wasn't going crazy. I just remember this felt very familiar. Familiar, Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I should be so lucky. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you hung with him?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I have once.

[Dax Shepard]

He's a charming motherfucker.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He's totally great. So it's funny, I had done his podcast, but it was by Zoom and it wasn't a real hang. And then I was in London. I had to fly to Dublin because I had done this TV series and we were up for the Irish Academy Awards. And so I was flying. It was short flight from London to Dublin, and I ended up seated next to Michael Lewis. This kid, I think, went to Trinity or something, or they were visiting Trinity. We talked the whole way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What a fun surprise.

[Lily Padman]

Feedback.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was great.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so none of this is leading towards law, or was it always leading towards law?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No, no, no. The thing you're missing here is my sort of secret, and maybe not so secret desire, really, from when I was in high school, but then especially when I was in college, was to write for the New Yorker.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

That's what I wanted to do.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Started reading the New Yorker in high school. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I kind of messed around with fiction. I turned out not to be very good at fiction.

[Dax Shepard]

Who did you love as a writer at that time?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was like the mid-90s, and I was writing short fiction, so I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver. People like that. Amazingly great. But also at the time, everybody, it

[Lily Padman]

was the thing to deviate.

[Dax Shepard]

He was the absolutely cliche.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Aren't we cliche maybe a little bit?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think so.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But not anymore. The thing is, if you wait long enough, it's not cliche anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If you ask 100 people, maybe three people have read Raymond Carver.

[Lily Padman]

But I think if you're into literature and you're a guy at that time.

[Dax Shepard]

But he's a master.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He's a total master. I guess what I mean is, for me and for like 1998, Patrick to say I love Raymond Carver would be a certain kind of guy talking about Infinite Jest today, right? Yeah. So ended up really wanting to Write for the New Yorker. I started pitching them in college. My parents have always been fantastically supportive of anything I wanted to do, but there was never any version of this where they were saying, why don't you move to New York and we'll help pay for an apartment? It was very much, we love that you're doing this, but you're on your own. Yeah. If you want to be a writer, it's not a matter of sitting around in a cafe and saying, you're a writer. Go out and be a writer. And that took a while. I loved being in school. I found it easy and stimulating and fun and way better than working. And so I just kind of came, I stayed in school.

[Dax Shepard]

Yale Law comes.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. I was in college, went to grad school for two years in England, which was free. So who wouldn't go?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Met the woman who's now my wife there. We started dating. She was going to Yale Law. I was sort of like, I've been pitching the New Yorker now for years. They won't take my pitches. I don't have another plan.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't have an agent, did you?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No, not at that point.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're just like sending them things with the sessions? Yes, I mailed a million of those out.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's so nice to talk to a contemporary.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

So you did it too?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I was trying to get short stories published, so I was submitting to all these journals that would have never had me. You know, I was 20 and I.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Back in those days, I thought I was Raymond Carver. Yeah. We were probably competing with each other at a certain point, but came across

[Dax Shepard]

our same short same day, like these guys again. And by the way, rarely did they return them, in my experience, but occasionally they will.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

You get the little note you're just

[Dax Shepard]

looking for any sentence?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No. Oh, man, I'm so with you on this. First it would be the little form thing, which is like, thank you, this does not meet our needs. And then occasionally, what I know now to be some like 22 year old who is a month out of college would write in tiny letters in the margins, like, please keep pitching, or, you know, something incurred, some tiny little thing.

[Lily Padman]

That's sweet.

[Dax Shepard]

That's all you need.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

That was like a huge down payment for me on my future.

[Lily Padman]

They make a difference.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

They do.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so delighted we both had that stack.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

My first rejection letter for an article for the New Yorker. Not a story is framed in my home office. It's from 1998.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's a Good reminder.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It is. I mean, what my wife says is, you were a junior in college. What the fuck were you thinking? Did you think that they would.

[Dax Shepard]

But you have to think that. What, are you gonna wait till you're 26 to start thinking that?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, but the law degree perplexes me. Why did we want that? Just to stay in school.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. Just to stay in school.

[Lily Padman]

She was already going.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

She was going.

[Dax Shepard]

You guys both went, right? We both went, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But there's two things I would tell you, both of which are true and one of which probably doesn't reflect particularly well on me.

[Lily Padman]

Those are a few.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the one I'll like the most.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay, so I'll give you the first one first, which is that I wasn't totally confident that I was good enough or that I was gonna make it, or the stars were gonna align for me. I wasn't completely confident that there was a life as a writer. And I wanted a backup. I knew I was a relatively smart guy who could kind of grind it out and work. And I was thinking about what would the alternative be if the dream version of your life doesn't happen? Which, I mean, the reality is for most people, you don't get that whatever they're doing is probably not the thing that when they were 17, 18, 19 years old and they closed their eyes, that they dreamed that they were going to do. And so it wasn't that I had a shortage of self confidence. I was a confident guy. But I also knew that just statistically,

[Dax Shepard]

yeah, you were a realistic.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I should think about having a backup plan. The other thing that's kind of more interesting and reflects maybe poorly on me is that I did really well in college. I didn't get into college when I applied the first time, I didn't get into Columbia, which is where I really wanted to go. And I took a year off and I worked. And when I got to Columbia, I had gotten some of my sort of teenage, no, I'm not in high school anymore, energy out. And I also had a big chip on my shoulder because I knew that they had turned me down the first time. So I got to college and I worked really hard and I did really well. And there's a thing that happens to that kind of kid, which is that you start getting sort of channeled into certain activities where you're always chasing the next brass ring just cause it's in front of you. And worse than that, you know, there's this idea Erving Goffman had triangulated desire, which is. There's nothing about that candle that's particularly appealing to me, but I feel really competitive with you and you want that candle. And now that candle is looking great to me. In fact, I need that candle. There's a lot of that kind of thing. And so I worked really hard in college and did really well and then got a fellowship to go to, kind of prestigious, competitive fellowship to go to the UK and did that. And then there were a whole bunch of people where it's like, well, what's the next smaller hoop that you have to jump through? And everybody's applying to law school. And what's the best of the law schools and hardest to get into? It's Yale Law School. And so I just kind of did that in a robotic way. And then I showed up in law school and thought, what have I done? You know, why am I here?

[Dax Shepard]

I would argue you're regulating your self esteem with some accomplishment in place of not getting the thing you want to be doing. You're just kind of booing yourself on this other thing.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. One of the things that I think is actually great about doing the work that I do, not just writing, but actually reporting, because that's most of my job, is that I think if you're good at it, it gives you a kind of daily dose of humility. Because no matter how successful you've been or how old you are, how long you've been doing it, most of your job is getting rejected. So most of the day I'm calling people who don't call me back or hang up on me or don't want to talk. It was good for me to learn really early on that in some ways, if you want to succeed in this line of work, you need to learn how to metabolize rejection. You need to learn how to kind of just take it in and keep moving. My wife's a big tennis player and she talks about the idea of, like, the best players, they lose a point, they immediately just erase from their memory that point that they lost. And they're kind of always pressing into the future. So I had all of that. But even so, you're absolutely right. At a certain point you're like, I've been pitching the New Yorker for six years.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you passed the bar in 05, right?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

But you do you finally get published in the New Yorker in 06?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, it's more dramatic than that. I mean, so in fact, I passed the bar and I had an offer from a law firm to Go and work at this law firm on Wall Street. It gets worse. I was out of money, and they would give incoming associates no interest loans. And So I borrowed $10,000 from them. And meanwhile, I'm pitching the New Yorker. I'm pitching and pitching. I was supposed to go and work at the law firm, and I kept pushing back the start date. And then in October 05, they accepted my first pitch. It took me a while to pay back the $10,000, but I did pay it back to jump ahead in the story. You know, I ended up getting that assignment at the New Yorker, but they didn't put me on staff. And so between 2010 and 2011, I went to the Pentagon and spent a year at the office of the Secretary of Defense on a kind of a fellowship thing. And there I was. Pure anthropologist.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I knew this is not my career. It's not what I want to do. I was just looking around.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And what was the vibe?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's funny because I'm trying to remember if Veep had come out yet at that point. It may not have.

[Lily Padman]

I don't think so.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Maybe not.

[Dax Shepard]

That's 16 years ago, so. No.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. But it was soon after. After. That was soon after 2012.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay. So it was right after.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I got to the Pentagon expecting it to look roughly like seven days in May. And I got in there, and it was the office. I was so shocked by the level of pettiness. I don't even mean it in a demeaning way, but it's people with jobs, and they're trying to make their mortgage work out, and they're thinking about their kids. And because the Pentagon is so sort of overstuffed with people, and there's all this money sloshing around, but then you have all these people who are basically doing redundant stuff. Everybody's kind of got their little rice bowl, and they're protecting it. I sort of thought that the whole thing would be this big. August.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Impressive.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. And in fact, it was just more middle managers than you've ever seen in your life.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you know who Mike judges? Beavis and Butthead. Office Space. All of it.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

He was a physicist before he was a cartoonist.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And his take on everything, which is what office space came out of, is he's like, it doesn't really matter what echelon you enter in that workplace. Someone's birthday was forgotten. And that's all that's going on. Like, does it really matter if you're

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

working you have the nuclear codes.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like that humanity just seeps into anything, which is kind of awesome, too.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, it is. And it's funny because I made a lot of friends during that year, but as a citizen, it was not the most encouraging thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yes. That's a little terrifying. Okay, so 2012, you become full time at the New Yorker. I guess my question, before we get to say anything, is so often we have these fantasies and these dreams. I had one even. We were talking to Mike Schur. He got into that secret society at Harvard, the Lampoons. You know, it's very hard for these things to live up to what our expectations are and what experience. Like getting the dream you had since 16 years old.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, it's funny. It was sort of the opposite of the Pentagon. It turned out to be so much better than I had even imagined.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Those six years when I was freelancing were hard because I felt like I was doing really good work. I feel like I'm a pretty decent judge of my own work. I look back at my first book, Chatter, and I think that is not a very good book. You know, there's an opportunity to reissue it and do translation rights and all that stuff. And I haven't just because it's fine. It's an artifact, it's a part of my life, but it's not something that feels of a piece with what I've done. So. So I feel as though I can tell in retrospect when the work is good or the work is not good. The New Yorker, at the time, I thought it was good. In retrospect, I think it is good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think you can stand those pieces up during those years against any of the pieces they published. But for one reason or another, they felt like I was not seasoned enough by the time they put me on stuff. I had two kids. I was a grownup.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, was your wife. She's a smarty pants. Was she.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

She was doing all kinds of different things. We moved to D.C. the reason I did that Pentagon thing was we had moved to DC in 09 because she went and got a job at the Treasury Department. She's like a proper lawyer.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. She does financial crime International.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, she doesn't do the financial crime.

[Dax Shepard]

She doesn't commit financial crime. She should think about.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Exactly. I mean, honestly, she would have the expertise for sure. If any international criminal organizations are hiring, not to worry.

[Dax Shepard]

But we did interview this guy that wrote this incredible book, and it was an expose on Fort Bragg.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh yeah, I know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great. So the Delta Force running drugs. Well, one of the most prolific and successful was the guy in South Carolina who had been the state trooper who had busted the most amount of people on 95. And then he wrote a drunk driving ticket to a guy and he got fired over it. And then he became this fucking super successful drug smuggler.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

You got to know the rules to know how to break them. She always had gainful employ. I wanted a full time job and for me it's the best job in the world. Some of the people that are my colleagues and my friends now are people who years before I knew them, I would read their articles and take them apart the way you would try and figure out a magic trick and to get to know those people. And now my new book, when it was in draft, you know, there's five or six of my colleagues I sent it to and they're the best and they're incredible and they read it and give you feedback. Not everybody has the same fixations I do, but for somebody like me, this is just all I could ever ask.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so in 18, you write say nothing, which is about a group of young folks joining the IRA during the troubles. I didn't even know this term the troubles until interviewing Amanda Pete recently. She said, yes, we lived in England during the troubles.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

During the troubles. I listened to that interview.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was made into an FX show. The thing I'm most jealous of, it won a Peabody.

[Lily Padman]

We want one bad show.

[Dax Shepard]

I want a Peabody so bad.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

You know, I'm in the Peabody fold now, so I'll speak to someone. That's the way it works. I'm bad shit.

[Dax Shepard]

One of the mixers just go like, you know what, I'm shocked.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Guys, your ticker's off here.

[Lily Padman]

I mean, well, I just sent you something. Did you get it on Instagram? I don't know if they just got announced or something or maybe it was misinformation, but it was like the new Peabody people and like Kimmel is a part of it is nominated, I guess. Is it nominated or has won? I don't know.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I don't know what just happened.

[Lily Padman]

Something happened.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

The nominations definitely come before you win.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, so I think that amp heated rivalry.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm not even sure how one wins one. I think that's why I want one so bad. I don't really understand what the criteria is.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I don't either, honestly. We had a great night.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it a night nice Statue.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. You get this little kind of bronze looking guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it directly under the rejection article?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

They can see each other.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now this is where I become aware of you. In 2020, I presume, during COVID Yeah, you do. Winds of Change, it was an eight part podcast. Did you know about it? Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Really good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it starts exploring this rumor that the CIA had actually written the song the Winds of Chains by the Scorpions. How on earth do you get onto that as a story to tell?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I have this friend, Michael, who ended up being kind of my opposite number in the podcast. He's unlike anyone I've ever known. He's one of my closest friends. He just seems to sort of spin a little bit faster than everyone else. He's got a million ideas. He knows everyone. He's had a whole bunch of different careers. He would tell you, and he's not completely wrong, that a bunch of my best ideas are ideas that he's given me. He started a kind of a private intelligence company and then sold that. And he worked for Madeleine Albright for many years. And he knows a lot of spooky people. And he had this kind of weird thing where he became sort of a totally informal thing where you would have these spies who had had cover identities and fake jobs. It's a real dilemma. Like if you work at an oil company for years, but in fact you work for the CIA with the understanding of the CEO of the oil company that you have this kind of COVID job and then you need to leave the CIA and you want to get another job, but you're not able to tell people you can't put on your resume. Oh, actually, I didn't work at an oil company. I mean, I sort of did, but secretly I was working for the CIA. Somebody like Michael, who can kind of see both side, becomes helpful in helping you find a situation after the fact

[Dax Shepard]

to suit your skills.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Right. And so he basically called me years and years ago and said, you know that song Wind of Change? For those who don't know, it's a power ballad by the West German hair metal band the Scorpions. Came out just after the Berlin Wall fell and became kind of the soundtrack to the collapse of the Soviet Union. You think you don't know it, but you would recognize it as a person.

[Lily Padman]

Everyone knows it.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Michael called me and he said, I just talked to this guy from the agency who said that that song wasn't written by the Scorpions, this slightly ridiculous German metal band. It was secretly written by the CIA.

[Lily Padman]

Crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And I spent years and years and years trying to get to the bottom of it with Michael.

[Dax Shepard]

Really quick on Prima facie. Did you think that was possible at all?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, when he first told me, I said, no, it's completely bananas.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I don't doubt that the CIA would want to do that. But what I doubt is that anyone there could write a huge hit song. That seems impossible.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, yes. When you sort of squint your eyes and you think about like the Hollywood version, the fantasy version, you want there to be some frustrated musician who, you know, actually always wanted to be in a metal band. But like me, they were worried about

[Dax Shepard]

being the rapper club.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, exactly. And so they end up going and working at the Agency. I don't think it was that. I mean, often what happens is it's a little like the Argos situation where what they do is they find people who are outside who really do have skills and then they enlist them. I will say, when he first told me, I said, no way, that's crazy. And then I started looking into it. And when you look at the history of the CIA, they were doing all kinds of stuff in culture. The really crazy thing is that actually because the CIA in the 50s, 60s, 70s was all these guys who went to Yale and were named Prescott. What they were doing was promoting abstract expressionism and jazz. I mean, it was this sort of pretty high minded stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Some of them had done acid, certainly.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There you go.

[Dax Shepard]

I also would imagine too, it's an incredible hub for you to tell all kinds of crazy other CIA stories.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

This is very often the case for me. I'm always thinking about sort of digression and I think indulgent digression is bad. But I love to come right up to the line where you start going,

[Dax Shepard]

hole, what's this book about? And then you're back.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. And I will say there's always some people who feel like my stuff is too digressive. They're like, oh, could I just get the executive summary?

[Dax Shepard]

Not me.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

All the stuff that you're kind of hanging on the line. That's the fun of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so that's great. And people should listen to that. Winds have Changed, it's wonderful. And then of course, Empire of pain in 21. And that brings us to London Falling, which I love. Again, I love the digression. For me, the story of Zach is great and it's intriguing and I must get the answers. But what I'm learning about London, what I'm learning about the Thames, what I'm learning about the Influx of all the money that's happened, this is the meet for me. So I know it starts as a New Yorker article and how does it come across your desk? Why do you get interested in it?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's one of these funny things where when I go looking for ideas, I almost never find them. But I do try to be out in the world and talk and stay curious. I have a pretty firm conviction, more so now than ever, that you're not gonna find the good stories on the Internet. So in this case, I was living in London after say Nothing came out, we turned it into this limited series and I was a producer on the series. I was very involved and it's a nine month shoot and for much of that I was kind of flying back and forth between New York, where I live, and primarily the UK where we were shooting. But during the summer when my kids got out of school, my wife and I just moved to London. The production got us an apartment and so we were living in London that summer. And I was on set one day and I met. It was a fascinating conversation. This guy Andrew, he was visiting the set for the day. He was a guest of the director. I could have just played wordle on my phone, but I do have this tendency to want to see what's going

[Dax Shepard]

on with this guy.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. My poor children. Anytime we get in the back of an Uber, I have to know the whole life story of the Uber driver.

[Dax Shepard]

Our children would have a lot to bond over their shared humiliation.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

So I start chatting with this guy. He's Jewish. He started talking about how the Jewish community in London is different from the Jewish community in New York. This was kind of a funny moment because I'm not Jewish, but I grew up in Boston. I went to prep school in Massachusetts, I went to Columbia. I've lived in New York on and off since the 90s. There was just a part of me that was sort of like, my dude, I've been to more bar mitzvahs than you have. You know, like, don't patronize me. And so I sort of name dropped and I said, oh, well, you know, there's this woman in London who's a rabbi, who's an old friend of my family. Her name is Julia Neuberger. And that was the moment that the whole conversation took a different direction because he knows Julian Neuberger. And Julian Neuberger was the rabbi to Zach Brettler. This kid, he suddenly made this connection and he said, I think I might have a story for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he was that up front?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Absolutely. He knew at that point that I wrote for the New Yorker. And he said, I might have a story for you. And I should say, like most of the time when people say to me, I might have a story for you.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yikes.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like someone's saying they got a

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

movie idea and it's hard. Cause it's just like you have a story. It's not for me. You have to kind of listen to them and hear them out. His whole pitch was, he said, there's a family here in Lo. I'm very close with them. They had a terrible tragedy in 2019. This is 2023 when we're having this conversation. They had a 19 year old son, Zach. He died in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of this luxury building overlooking the Thames river. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened. And they made this discovery, which is that unbeknownst to them, he had been leading a secret life. And as a teenager, he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. And he basically had said that much. And I knew. I'm in.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I need to know a lot more is probably the next thought.

[Lily Padman]

Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking your phone's battery before heading out. That'll get you every time. Of course, your phone dies on the way to meet someone, leaving you wandering around quietly panicking about being in the wrong spot. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North America Insurance Company Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Quints. I'm pretty picky about what I wear. Not in a fashion way, more in a. If this. This bugs me even a little, I'm out way. And this time of year always makes me want to reset a bit, clean things up, keep my closet simple. That's why I keep coming back to Quint. The fabrics feel elevated, the fits are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high quality everyday essentials using premium materials like 100% European linen and their insanely soft flow knit active fabric. Their linen pieces are lightweight, breathable and comfortable. Perfect for spring. And they strike that balance where you look put together without trying too hard. I got their linen pants and honestly, I was surprised how good they feel. Sometimes you think linen could be coarse, but these are so soft and luxurious and nothing really flows like linen. The best part is the pricing. It's 50 to 60% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories. Refresh your wardrobe with quints. Go to quince.comdax for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to Q U I n c e.comdax for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comdax we are supported by Skims. You know, I feel like at this point everyone knows when they drop something new, it's kind of a big deal.

[Lily Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Right. It's a trade off.

[Lily Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Dax Shepard]

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I feel like spring always does this thing where you realize you've been thinking about something for a long time and suddenly it feels like, okay, maybe I actually do something with it.

[Lily Padman]

Totally. It's less pressure, but more like readiness.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like you've been sitting on an idea or a project or even just a perspective you care about, and now you're like, maybe this deserves to exist somewhere outside of my own head.

[Lily Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And Wabi Wob is not trying to spend 40 hours figuring out web design. It just worked, which is kind of the point. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be. Head to squarespace.comdax for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Yes. So Zach is the son of Matthew and Rochelle, who they themselves are both the children of Holocaust survivors. And her father was a rabbi, right?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, her father, Hugo Crin.

[Dax Shepard]

And they have two boys, Joe and Zach. They're a couple years apart.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And initially, it's pretty honky dory till 13. Right. They're mildly competitive. I think one of the pivotal things just is that at first, of course, the older brother's much better at tennis, but Zach really focuses on tennis, and he ultimately beats his brother. And then his brother just stops playing tennis. So they had a little bit of competitiveness, naturally. And then Joe starts attending. What's the name of the school?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

University? College? School? Ucs.

[Dax Shepard]

And Matthew's also in finance, so they're doing well. They're upper middle class. And he gets into the school. And then when it comes time for Zack to apply for the school, he does not get in. And then he tries again to get in and does not get in. And to me, this is where. Who knows where this life story is without this moment.

[Lily Padman]

The gorillas we just had a gorilla expert on. So it's the exact same story.

[Dax Shepard]

You brought this up.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

How so?

[Dax Shepard]

There's a group in Rwanda, and there's a male that's about to make a run at the silverback, the alpha. And in doing so, he's exerting his strength. So he starts bullying this younger one, one pretty bad. Opens up his head, you know, it's gruesome. And then he does overthrow the dominant male. He becomes that. And then the bullied one kind of gets excommunicated, and he just kind of wanders the periphery for a while. And then a new female comes, and he sees that she's been accepted and he's got no place. And then he murders the baby. And then we learn from her since this doc, this one has killed now 4. He got deranged from the rejection and the emasculation.

[Lily Padman]

In a sense, humans are so similar in so many ways.

[Dax Shepard]

How it can warp you.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think that's right. I mean, it's interesting. This is a whole other tangent. It's an interesting thing that I've noticed where there are people who. I was just listening to some conversation about this on a podcast, but there are certain people over the last 10 or 15 years whose politics have changed really radically. And you can often trace the change back to some kind of in group out, group rejection, where they get canceled or they get marginalized in some way, or the group that they thought they were a part of kind of cast them out and that it completely reorients them politically.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, the sovereign citizens, they've killed police officers, they won't carry a government id, they sue municipalities. They're a pretty big group of people. And what they discovered was that without exception, all of the members at some point had written really stable trades jobs or manufacturing jobs, and those went away in their town. And so, yeah, they've been rejected by a system. So the system must be broken or flawed if it would reject me. And that makes sense. I'm empathetic to it.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think that's right. I mean, I think with Zach, there was something slightly different going on that would be familiar to anyone with. Do you have siblings?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Older brother.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Do you?

[Lily Padman]

Little brother, yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay. So I think there's this thing, and the tennis story kind of speaks to it. I had this with my siblings. I see it with my own kids, where there's a kind of sense that in a sort of almost unspoken way, often will kind of pick a lane if one of them occupies the lane, and there's a thing that they're better at or they're gonna excel at. It's sort of natural at a certain point for the other one to feel like, okay, well, you're laying claim to that. I'm gonna have to find another way. There's gonna be another version of life for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't think that's the pivotal thing. I just think it's a moment of embarrassment for Zack and failure.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And he is a bright kid, but maybe not academically. He ends up going to. Is it the Mill?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Mill Hill.

[Dax Shepard]

Explain Mill Hill as a school.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

So Mill Hill, in some respects, it looks like university college school in the sense that it's a fancy private school. It's expensive. It's a beautiful campus. It's on the outskirts of London, but it's not as hard to get into. And you know, the way it was explained to me is in the environment that Zach Brettler grew up in, which is a kind of highly educated, bourgeois, fairly sort of elite London milieu. If you say I go to Mill Hill, or if you say my kid goes to Mill Hill, everybody knows without anybody having to say anything. Oh, so he clearly got reject from this school and this school and this

[Lily Padman]

school and this school.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And that's how you end up at Mill Hill.

[Dax Shepard]

But you also still have money. So he's at Mill Hill.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Absolutely. And I think part of what's so intriguing about this story is that Zach, this kid who ends up pretending that he's the son of a Russian oligarch and basically entering into the underworld in London, probably could have done anything. Like he had parents who loved him. He did have a competitive relationship with his brother. But ultimately Joe was a good big brother who also loved him. They stayed close. He was part of a kind of larger family network and friends and all the rest of it. And he had, I think, an incredible series of natural gifts that maybe didn't express themselves in being able to get into a certain school at age 13. But he could have gone a long way with them. He ends up at Mill Hill and he's surrounded by these children of oligarchs. And so Mill Hill, like a lot of schools in London, I should say, realized at a certain point that there was a kind of a demographic which was the offspring of super wealthy foreigners who had kind of made a second home in London. And So Zach, at 13, finds himself surrounded by these kids. He's pretty impressed.

[Dax Shepard]

And this is a great moment for the history of London post Margaret Thatcher deregulating the banks. So talk about the waves in London. Cause this is kind of now a part of what London is.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, it's funny cause I tried in the book because of that thing we're talking about with digression. All this stuff is in the book. But I should say for people who haven't read it, it's done with a pretty light touch. But there's no point in the book where I give you 30 pages.

[Dax Shepard]

History on this is three pages we learned.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

However, the way I thought of it is almost in a movie. The way you occasionally will get the kind of sped up seeing the Brooklyn

[Dax Shepard]

Bridge get built, the montage.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

So there's this, to me, really fascinating thing, which is that if you were to go to London in 1950, say it looks basically like it did a Century before. It's a big industrial city. There's factories lining the Thames, kind of smoke and coal, and laborers working, making things. It's a manufacturing town. It's also a huge port city because the Thames was one of the most important ports in the world. And the first thing that really changes, Interestingly, it happens in North Carolina. There's a trucking executive in North Carolina who in the mid-1950s, invents the modern stackable shipping container of a sort that we've all seen.

[Dax Shepard]

Some people might be in a home made of shipping containers right now.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Is that what I mean? There you go. So he invents these, and it completely revolutionizes global trade. Because previously, a city like London would have had these huge warehouses for the storage of goods that are going onto ships and coming off of ships. And if you go to London today, those beautiful buildings are still there, these big old warehouses. But with the new system, essentially you can have a container on top of a train that arrives at the port, and it goes fluidly onto the ship, and the ship goes to another port and it comes off and it goes right onto the back of a truck, and off it goes. And you don't need those warehouses anymore. Everything's standardized. And it means you can make bigger ships, which can hold more containers. And those ships are too big to note, navigate the temps. So in the space of 20 years, this whole industry, basically everywhere, kind of east of Tower Bridge, if you know, London had been a shipping town, and suddenly it's not. In 20 years, every single dock closes.

[Dax Shepard]

So it has 30 plus years of kind of stagnation.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yes. I talk in the book about the movie, the Long Good Friday, Incredible crime thriller with Bob Hoskins from 1980. Highly encourage people to watch it. But that's filmed right at the point where the changes are starting to happen. So basically that's at the, like, the maximum blight point. They make this Bob Hoskins crime movie with a young Pierce Brosnan, I think, in his first role as an assassin. And the other thing that happens is all the factories close. And so London has to kind of reinvent itself in the 80s, and it decides we're gonna be a money town.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's hard to pinpoint what the catalyst to Zach's kind of crazy story is. But the thing that to me, feels most relevant is I don't want to call it income inequality simply because. Because his family was of means. In the book, the Broken Ladder talks about, like, these fights that happen between first class and coach and what's Funny is it's not a story of the haves and the have nots, because the people in coach, the have and the have mores. So this is like a very extreme case of this. So he's entering with a little bit of shame of having not got into that. And now he's seen absolutely fabulous wealth, kids with private planes and cars and all this stuff. And then simultaneously, he's starting to consume media. I think some people will read this book and they'll want to point a finger at War Dogs and the Wolf of Wall Street. Probably because of industry, I'm not as inclined to go down that road. I think all adolescents find these movies. But at any rate, I think that's really a profound experience to feel dead broke among all these people.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Totally. And actually not that unique. This book started as an article in the New Yorker, and after it came out, I heard from all these people, but also Zach's parents heard from all these people who were parents who said, obviously our kids situation is different, but I am experiencing this with my own children in New York or LA or Miami or Dublin or, you know, wherever it is that they. Where there's not just a kind of concentration of extreme wealth, but also I think, particularly by English standards, like when Matthew and Michelle were growing up, there was a sense that there was nothing more unclassy than being super blinged out and showing your wealth.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was a new money thing. It was a bad look, completely.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Now it's all new money and there's no shame about it and in fact, kind of pride in it. And I hear you on the movies that Zach Walks watched. Interestingly for me, there's a version of this story where you say, oh, look, you kind of blame the Hollywood movies because Zach was obsessed with Wolf of Wall street and War Dogs. Watched them again and again and didn't watch them as, like, cautionary tales. He really thought, this is what I want to be.

[Dax Shepard]

In particular, he wanted to be Jonah Hill, who was like the Grotius of the pair.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And he had a kind of a sense of, you do anything that you can to just get yours.

[Dax Shepard]

I understand Zach's state of mind, which is like, this is bullshit. They have it and I don't. Why wouldn't I have it? Like, he's looking at people who aren't more deserving of. And he's going, well, fuck if I'm not gonna get given it, I'm gonna take it.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

His is an extreme case, but I think that is just in the water now. I think that is a part of our culture. I mean, it's interesting cause we're roughly the same age. I was having a conversation with a guy I went to high school with the other day, and we're talking about how in the 90s there was a notion that you didn't wanna sell out the punk rock Ethan Hawke and Reality Bites. And occasionally people like that could be obnoxious. But there was a sense of like, if it's corporate, it's bad. You wanna preserve your integrity, even if it means living in poverty. Like, at least I've got my pride. And that is totally alien to young people today. There is no concept of that.

[Dax Shepard]

They have no romantic notion of that at all.

[Lily Padman]

No, no, it's the opposite. It's like, who can I get on

[Dax Shepard]

the private jet, sell myself to?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. In fairness to people, no, I have teenage kids. I think it's hard for them to imagine what the future's gonna look like ten years from now or five years from now. Economically, in terms of higher education, what does that look like in terms of employment, AI, climate change, I mean, you name it. There's any. A number of ways in which it's kind of anybody's guess what your life is going to look like.

[Dax Shepard]

This is got a very house of cards feel right now.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It does, But I think that as a consequence, it means that some people have this sort of slightly all or nothing at the house.

[Dax Shepard]

There is no long term, so let's go short term.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Totally. And I think Zach had that.

[Dax Shepard]

He's also a teenage boy and he doesn't have a girlfriend. That's the conspicuous thing about this book is like, what's going on with him. Romantic.

[Lily Padman]

Is it like kind of manosphere style?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

A little bit. I mean, I think some of it with Zach was that he was a really extraordinary kid. From a very early age. He was almost like a standup comic. He had a kind of zingy way of talking. He was extremely uninhibited and comfortable talking with adults, comfortable talking with anybody. He would sort of make jokes, he would tell stories. But from a really early age, he was also embroidering the truth. I think of it again as like a standup where you have your lived experience, but then you're always re scrambling it and telling the story and trying to figure out the math of it, and you're trying it out on people and seeing what works.

[Dax Shepard]

And in incredible information retention, unbelievable memory,

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

which his dad has as well. Very helpful for me in working on the book that his dad has this Incredible, incredible memory. Zach had that too.

[Dax Shepard]

He's charming, very charming.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But I think to the point about girlfriends, he had this thing, which is that he could make friends really quickly because he was entertaining and he could sort of find points of commonality with people. But then he lied. And there's a sort of weird thing in this story, which is that all the young people I talked to could see through him. The adults completely bought what he was selling, including gangsters and various people who should have known better. But young people would have a thing where. Where he would get to know them and they'd be charmed and they'd be like, God, get a load of this guy. He's got so many great stories and what have you. And then they'd start to get a little uneasy. Just. They'd feel like, I don't completely.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, at one point a friend of his called him out and said, you're a pathological liar. And he said, I am. I had this brain trauma.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God, another lie.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

The guy goes, nick, you're doing it again.

[Lily Padman]

Literally a joke. Like, that's.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, my God, that's incredible.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

There is something obvious, quite corrosive about the extreme wealth.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

That's why people hate billionaires. I mean, they're.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There's another thing, too. This book is not an op ed. It's not an argument. It's a story about people. And so there will be different interpretations of it, but you're gonna.

[Dax Shepard]

As a reader, why could this happen to this kid? You're gonna feel that obviously it's so many things, and it's 4% this.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

That's exactly the point that I'm making, is he was on Instagram from an early age. This is a kid who was born in 2000. Social media absolutely played a role. I don't want this book to sort of be part of the moral panel. Panic about social media. Like I am morally panicked about social media, but I don't want this book to function in that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's what you're talking about, where it's billionaires, the kind of reverence for it. I think about my own younger son, who's now 13. When he was about 6, he came home one day and he started talking about Elon Musk. And I was just like, how the fuck do you even know who that is?

[Lily Padman]

Exactly why you know about that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

What Universe Should a 6 year old know the name? Something is wrong with our society if he's part of your kind of Marvel universe.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't learn Warren Buffett's name until I was like, 25.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Exactly, exactly. But I think that the thing about Instagram or social media in general, Zach. Wasn't delusional. But I do think that if you grow up on these apps and you're an adolescent, your ability to draw, like, a really fine dividing line between real life and fantasy life, it's a little blurry.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

You also have tools now to help with a Persona, as all kids, and especially him, with a fresh start at this hill school. It's an opportunity. It's a reset.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so when does he start the child of an oligarch Persona?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It happens gradually. I mean, I interviewed a bunch of people he went to high school with, and I should say his parents were aware that he lied and embroidered, but they had no idea that he had kind of gone full bore and invented this Persona. He would tell kids he went to high school with that his dad was an arms dealer. He told some of them that his mother was dead.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a common theme for him.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, the arms dealer thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, and the mother being dead and

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

the mother being dead. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or the mother hating him and being in Dubai.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But then he also tells the story about his father. Part of it was Zach. What his parents told me is that from an early age, he was the kid who would claim a migraine. He was always faking injuries of one sort or another. I think when he wanted pity, kind of Munchausens y.

[Dax Shepard]

A little bit.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

A little bit. But I think most people are compassionate or most people are good. And I think that there is a sort of sense in which, if you're him, you realize if I'm the new kid at school and I don't know

[Dax Shepard]

a soul and I don't have money,

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

and I don't have money, and I meet a girl and I tell her, oh, my mother recently died. That is a shortcut to a kind of intimacy that might take me forever otherwise. And he's sort of intuitive, so he starts telling these lies. My dad drives two Range Rovers. Little things. He would lie about where he lived. He would say, oh, my family bought a mansion.

[Dax Shepard]

I just gotta say, he told his buddy that his dad had two Range Rovers and then they had to go to tennis practice together. And Matthew, his dad was gonna drive in a Mazda. So he's like, listen, both Range Rovers are in the shop. Don't bring up the Mazda to my dad.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He's not happy about it.

[Lily Padman]

My God, the gymnastics. But I guess you probably get addicted to that. I'm sure. Also the, like, high of figuring out

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

this is where the memory comes in, though, that he had an amazing memory and an amazing ability to kind of keep it all.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He defied Lincoln's statement. No man's memory is so good that he can afford to be a liar in this.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, that's the thing again and again. But I think I found patience zero. I think I found the first guy that he told the son of an oligarch story to. And the irony is that it's the last person you would want to try it on, because it's a guy who actually worked for Chelsea Football Club, which at the time was owned by Roman Abramovich, a real Russian oligarch, kind of the biggest of them.

[Dax Shepard]

What's that guy's name? Mark or Colin?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Mark Foley.

[Dax Shepard]

How did he meet Mark Foley so randomly?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There was an art exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. It was an invitation only thing. To this day, I don't know how Zach got in, but he got in there. And we've all been in this situation, but he's there on his own. And there's this guy, Mark Foley, who's also there on his own. He's been invited. And so you can imagine everybody's kind of milling around. There's a bar, and you're sort of sitting there thinking, you know, am I just gonna bail? And you're looking at the art, and two of these guys, guys are there on their own, and they fall into conversation. He realizes who Foley is. And the funny thing is, in a way that Foley couldn't have appreciated when Zach says, oh, what do you do? And Foley says, oh, I work for Chelsea Football Club. For Zach, Roman Abramovich is his God. So he meets this guy who works for his idol.

[Dax Shepard]

He kind of idolizes Putin at this time too. He's like, super into him.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He does. He's into Putin. There are family photos from this time where he's kind of doing this thing where he thrusts his chest and he sticks his shoulders back and he kind of glowers into the camera in this very kind of Putin esque way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. As if on horseback.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Shirtless. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And Zack, I think, just kind of takes a flyer and says, I'm actually the son of an oligarch myself. I've come from a very wealthy Russian family here.

[Dax Shepard]

Big swing. You're talking to a guy who works.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And he himself, Russian, is fully Russian.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He's not. He's English. But Foley is exposed to the real thing. And Zack tries it out and to this day, I think there might have been a universe in which which none of this would have happened if Foley didn't buy what Zach was selling in that conversation. But Foley, I interviewed him subsequently and he said he seemed pretty convincing. He was sort of talking the talk. He was dressed in a very laid back way, but he said that's exactly the way. The kind of offspring of an oligarch, you know, he's like tracksuit, whatever. And so Foley suggests that they get coffee and they chat and then they do. And then Foley says, oh, you know, there are these guys I know who are looking for investors in this real estate project. Maybe I can in invest, introduce you to them.

[Dax Shepard]

Because he's also said, I'm in charge of managing my father's money for investing purposes.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I still think that if Foley had just sort of been like, ah, this kid is clearly full of shit, and walked away, I could see Zach retiring. The story and feeling like, okay, well, this one doesn't work.

[Dax Shepard]

But yeah, there's so many Monday quarterbacking you can do. It's like if he had a girlfriend, in my opinion, if he had a real girlfriend, if he didn't go to that school, if he doesn't meet Foley.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But here's the thing, docs, the parents, Matthew and Rochelle, who I got to know so, so well working on this book. I spent hundreds of hours talking to these people. The awful thing for them is, especially Rachelle has spent every day since 2019 thinking about, what are the off ramps that we missed? Did we drive past the exit? Where could we have gotten off along the way? And it's a kind of torture to think that way.

[Dax Shepard]

And I gotta say, as they are described in the book, I don't know that I've ever related more to parents. I feel like every choice they made was one I would make.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I'm so glad you said that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, 100%. So he's becoming obsessed with money and he's telling them, you guys need to buy a fancier car, mom, you should buy these fancy dresses. You know, it's a little bit repugnant. And they know better than to shut him down entirely because they want to keep him connected in a way that it can still be a voice of reason. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I would do. If you shame him out of this scenario, now he's excluded from you, it's just going to get worse. Trying to just walk that line of there might be a better path for you. And also, hey, I love you. And if this is what you want.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's so hard. And one of my worries with the book was that there's a certain kind of cynical read, self flattering, self comforting read that a person might do where they look at this story and they think, oh, well, this is just a story about bad parents who were checked out and didn't see what was going on. And I think it's self comforting because it's like, that would never happen to me. Whereas my whole experience of dealing with this family has been what would I do? I think I would be facing exactly the same dilemma.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll be honest, the one judgmental thing I had is I think this whole private school thing's a fucking joke. And I think the fact that he had to go to someone that was still prestigious, even though it was for dropouts, that to me is the one thing that I personally am interested in. What the fuck are we doing?

[Lily Padman]

But that's just very you.

[Dax Shepard]

But I know I got a whole war with all these LA privates.

[Lily Padman]

I mean, yeah. Depending on where you live here, here it is a huge part of education.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I'm just like, hold on, time out. It's a racket. Everyone I'm working with who's successful, they went to shitty schools. And the New Year's explosion, you know, this crazy competition with a bunch of rich kids. So that is my failing. I try not to be judgmental. That is one thing I'm a little bit.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

But I think anybody would conceive that those environments are. It's funny because my kids go to public school. I went to a fancy private school of this sort.

[Dax Shepard]

And your parents weren't loaded?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No. Well, I'll put it to you this way. They were comfortable enough to send three kids to that private school, but not comfortable enough that all these years later, the nature of my parents retirement is not what it would be had they not on some level, they were still paying.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't come back from spring break with a tan from Skene and Aspen.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

And some of your classmates did.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Absolutely. But I also lived in Dorchester. I mean, the thing for me was that I lived 10 minutes away from Milton Academy, the fancy private school I went. They were very, very different worlds. And so, you know, I may be attuned to these things. I send my kids to public school.

[Dax Shepard]

You also had a healthy mechanism of tall poppy in Boston that would have probably prevented the kids that were super rich from.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Like there's also a cultural force there that probably helped dampen the really Rich

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

kids that I went to high school with, it was flannels and jeans and listening to Nirvana. I mean, it was the 90s again, so it was the last thing that they would do.

[Dax Shepard]

They would get their ass kicked if they posted a picture of themselves on a private plane. They would get the shit kicked off.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No, absolutely. And it would have just seemed kind of gauche. I remember, I'm thinking, I don't want to be outing anybody here. I briefly dated a girl who was from New York when I was a senior, maybe in high school, possibly a junior. Over the winter break, I went and visited her and her family on the Upper east side. And this was a neighborhood where a lot of kids who I went to high school with. And it was actually a moment where you kind of rack focus. And I realized, like, holy fuck, these people are all incredibly rich. But I hadn't actually caught on to that. In Massachusetts, in boarding school, you know, everybody sort of seemed roughly the same level. And then you go and you actually see the apartments where these people live and the lives they live.

[Dax Shepard]

My favorite story of that kind is I'm talking to some kids of a friend of mine, and it's two girls. They're sisters. I love, love them. One of them's dating a new guy she met at school. She was visiting the family in New York. I'm like, what do they do? And she's kind of pussy footing around it. And then the younger sister goes, they have this scream painting in their apartment.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There we go.

[Dax Shepard]

It tells me everything I need to know.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Say no more.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, but if you value education and you come from people who do, I totally understand why you would send your kids if you had the opportunity to give them the best education in quotes, whatever that means.

[Dax Shepard]

But again, Mill Hill wasn't that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think that the idea was also that he could go to Mill Hill for a period of time, and if you excel there, then maybe you transfer someplace else. The other thing is, to your point, this is a family where both Matthew and Rachelle, their mothers were English, but their fathers were immigrants, refugees, Holocaust survivors. Guys who had actually very different histories in terms of their kind of educational backgrounds. But there was a sense in both families that education really mattered.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm not judgmental of the parents.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's the environment. You could see how toxic it is.

[Dax Shepard]

I like the institutions. They know they're living on the oligarch, and they know these kids aren't good students.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

When I tried to interview Zach's teachers, people who knew him well, including people who had written nice notes to the Brettlers after his death. Nobody would talk to me to a point where it felt to me like a decision had been made institutionally from above, which is pretty gross. You know, you have a student and he dies, and. And the thing for me is I'm not digging for dirt. I just to want teachers who knew him. I want to kind of try and bring him back to life a little bit and sort of see who he was. When you say, no, thanks, we have nothing to say. A little gross to me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay. So he's going down this path. He's getting more obsessed with it. And it's important to say that Richelle and Matthew, although they are seeing this turn in him, they have no clue that he has this Persona.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

But some weird things are now happening. He seems to have money. He tells them, I'm moving into Riverwalk, which is this insanely expensive high rise on the Thames. They're wondering, is he dealing drugs? He has a weird phone. He shows his father this HSBC bank account, and the interface is the same as his father's, and he says he has £850,000. So it's getting really quite confusing for them, and they're getting more scared, and again, they want to keep connected to him, and they're like, okay, this kid's not going to go to school. He's going to try to be an entrepreneur. Maybe it'll work for him.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, people do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I can imagine. Imagine being in a situation being like, all right, if you want to prove to me that you're going to be a billionaire, go with God. I just want to talk to you. Totally.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And also, you're 18. It seems that you have money. You could just leave if you wanted to. I don't want you to completely take off. Obviously, the bank statement with £850,000 is probably the most extreme example of what kind of parental intervention would you have. But I have to say, in fairness to Matthew, I think part of him wanted to believe he talked to Zach. What are the different business deals you're doing? How is this? Are you paying taxes? You know, kind of walked him through this whole thing. And Zach told these somewhat credible stories, but then there was also a part of him that thought, maybe he's lying. But if he's lying, the reason he's lying to me is that he wants to impress me, and he wants me to feel like he's okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I was thinking of this dance. What would I tell my child? Like, you want to hear? I'm Proud of you. I'm proud of you because you are you. But they need you to be proud of them for this thing. They have convinced themselves it's such a.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And what they don't want is for you to confront them and say, we know. Bullshit. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And moreover, I don't. I don't even like this.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not something actually I would be. How do you tell a kid that I wouldn't be proud?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, that's the thing. And I think in Zach's case, and again, I don't think that this is actually all that unusual. There's a sense that he's got these false gods. And I think Matthew and Rochelle are pretty sophisticated people. And the thought occurred to them maybe the reason that he loves Vladimir Putin or Roman Abramovich is that it's the opposite of who we are. This is what adolescence is, as he's trying to kind of break away from us. So what are you doing? Is it really going to be that fruitful in that situation to say, we hate those people, Be more like us.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Okay. So through Mark Foley, though, he meets these two characters. They're really important characters. Tell us about Akbar a little bit.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Akbar Shamji. I'll tell you about him as he at first appears to Zack and to Zack's parents eventually. He's in his 40s, he's very well off. He's a very good looking guy. He's charismatic. He's got great kind of manners. He's got a cut glass accent. He went to Cambridge University. He comes from an extremely wealthy family. They're South Asian. I mean, they're ethnically Indian, but from Uganda. So you have this community that came over to build a railroad basically in east Africa.

[Dax Shepard]

Like 40,000 of them.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. But long time ago. And then they stay. And what happens is that the Ugandan economy ends up dominated by essentially the ancestors of these people who'd come over

[Dax Shepard]

to build a river to the tune of like 90% of the total economy

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

they controlled by this tiny minority. And then Idi Amin comes in and in 1972 says, we're gonna expel all the Asians from Uganda. So this family, the Shamjis, gets expelled. Akbar's father, Abdul Shamji, was one of the richest men in Uganda and arrives in London and has to kind of rebuild. Akbar grows up basically in great comfort, goes to Cambridge University and sort of goes from business to business to business. There's a whole episode actually in la, funnily enough, and when he meets Zach, he's the. This Kind of middle aged guy. He lives in Mayfair, which is one of the fanciest neighborhoods in London, but he actually lives on Mount street, which if you know, Mayfair is like the fanciest street in Mayfair. I told a friend of mine at one point that one of the guys I was writing about lived on Mount Street. He sort of said, nobody lives on Mount Street. You know, it's not a thing. His wife is a designer who makes these kind of elegant gowns, and she's dressed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama and the Royal Family.

[Dax Shepard]

This is what Zack wants his mother to buy.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. He's showing her the dresses. Zach meets him, and Akbar is the guy who's got the real estate development in Lisbon that he's looking for investment in. Now, it will later emerge that Zach wasn't the only one pretending that he was something he wasn't. That actually with Akbar, he's not the guy that he's pretending to be. And in fact, just before he met Zach, he had declared bankruptcy and he was getting chased by creditors, but he's

[Dax Shepard]

still driving a Benz.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And he's a member of all these private clubs in London. There's a whole kind of world around Mayfair which is private clubs, private casinos,

[Dax Shepard]

Supercars, everyone's talented, Mr. Ripley, literally everyone.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And the night that Zach dies, he's in that apartment and there's two guys with a Mack bars, one of them. And we'll talk about the other. But it is this interesting thing where it turns out that all three of them are pretending to be something that they're not. It's like the Spider man meme, you know?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the other guy is Indian Dave?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

What's his last name? Sharma. Well, that's his kind of barender Sharma.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What does he think Dave is?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

What happens is that when Zack meets Ackbar, he tells Ackbar that he is the son of a Russian oligarch, that he has hundreds of millions of dollars to invest and he's going to invest in Akbar's project. They become fast friends. I think Akbar gives him a kind of access. What Zack needed was to get past the velvet rope, and they're going to fancy clubs and hanging out and spending a lot of time together. The catch is that Zack's never coming up with the money. He never actually wants. Wants to sort of sign a term sheet just at the point where Akbar might have been wondering, you know, is this kid for real? Zach says, I've got terrible news. My father has died and my Mother who lives in Dubai has kind of disowned me, and I'm in a fight over my inheritance. I don't have access to the money. And he had claimed to live in the most expensive real estate development in London, this place, one Hyde Park. And actually, when Akbar would meet with him, Zach would always be waiting out in front of the building. Like, he never saw him come out.

[Dax Shepard]

Pick him up there.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Always. They'd be like, oh, come meet me at my. And he'd be standing outside. And so Zack claims essentially to be temporarily homeless. So he's this billionaire kid who's fighting with his mom and his dad is dad, and he has no place to live. And Akbar says, I have this friend who has this luxury apartment. His name is Virinder Sharma, and he's this kind of retired guy who lives in this big apartment overlooking the Thames. So he introduces him to Verinder. I don't know to this day how and when Zack learns the real identity of Verinder. The kind of face that Verinder put on for the world is he's this sort of retired businessman and 50s, just kind of hanging out. He works out a lot. He boxes. He lives in this nice apartment. Drug user, doing a ton of drugs.

[Lily Padman]

Unmarried, I assume.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Unmarried. But he has children, so he has two children. And the truth is, Verinder was a gangster, better known as Indian Dave, who had been around for a long time. He was an extortionist. He was like a leg breaker. He was a debt collector, heroin importer. He was involved in a pretty significant murder, implicated in other murders. He was the guy who famously would dangle you off of a building if you weren't paying money.

[Lily Padman]

Indian people are so.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, this guy Indian Dave is really quite a character.

[Dax Shepard]

So I think he's kind of cool. He gave it kind of an edge.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert, if you dare. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. So May is mental health awareness month. And I've been thinking about how we all have those things that keep us up at night.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. And it's so easy to think you have it all figured out on your own, right?

[Dax Shepard]

But the truth is, no one has all the answers. Having someone with you, someone to actually listen and understand, it makes a real difference.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. And that's what therapy can be. It's not about having everything figured out. It's about having unbiased support when you're feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or just unsure.

[Dax Shepard]

And betterhelp makes it easier to find that support. They match you with A licensed therapist based on your needs. With over 30,000 therapists, they usually get it right the first time. And if not, you can switch anytime.

[Lily Padman]

I have therapy tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it. I have nothing to talk about and it's going to be the best session ever. You just get to the root of things.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Dax that's betterhelp.com Dax free audio post production by alphonik.com confidence.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's listening to your gut.

[Lily Padman]

It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help.

[Dax Shepard]

Ask a financial professional how.

[Lily Padman]

Pacific Life, the power of a Promise Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

He and Zach become roommates. Essentially, Zach's living in the same apartment in another room in that building overlooking the Thames. The three of these guys develop this kind of intense friendship.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're looking to do deals.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

They're looking to do deals.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone's trying to get rich. And I'm sure even Indian Dave doesn't have nearly the money.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's funny because I saw this when I was writing about the IRS as well, and I've written other stories about criminals. You know, the thing about that line of work is there's no pension. It seems like the party's gonna last forever when you're in your 20s and 30s. But when you're in your 50s and your daughter's just had a child, you're a little old. You'd be a leg breaker, right?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're not profiting from accounts over years. You've put it. There's no residual income. It's like you're either committing the crimes or you're not.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And they all blow the money.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And they blow the money like crazy. It was even more so with Indian Dave in the sense that he sort of made a point of not owning property in his name anyway, because that would expose. There were hardly any traces of him on the Internet. Like, one of the big questions in the story is, and I asked when these guys met Zach, because Akbar, he wouldn't meet with me or talk with me, but I email with him a lot. I said, so you meet Zach, he Says, my name is Zak Smilov. I'm the son of Russian oligarch. Did you Google him?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, exactly. That's what I heard.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

How did you not do any due diligence? And Akbar's response was, oh, you have to understand, like the really powerful plugged in people, they're not on the Internet. And I'm sure you will have encountered this, but there's a certain kind of celebrity who has an AOL email account, you know, or like a Hotmail.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So they're all now together. Now, I think the night of his death is relevant. And I think we should go to. So the Mi6 is directly across the river from this Riverwalk apartment complex. That is Indian Dave's where he's staying. And they have an outward facing camera. And you can see on the balcony of this fifth floor apartment, a man runs and jumps on his own accord into the Thames.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, he's not pushed.

[Dax Shepard]

When this happens, it's coinciding with Relle and Matthew have kind of lost contact with them. There's an email late at night, like, where are you? At 2am he says, we're all good, everything's fine. And now they're left to try to figure out, like, what happened in that apartment. The initial story that Indian Dave tells in response, he was at my apartment. He had just admitted to us that he was a heroin addict. I went to bed at 12:30. I woke up at 8am and he was gone. My assumption is he went out to get drugs. And he told this to me and my daughter, Dominique, who's Indian Dave's daughter, and Akbar. That is their story. How do we start unfolding?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, the first thing I should say, so, you know, I write nonfiction. Everything has to be true. They're not nonfiction. You can go to the end of my books. Nobody ever does. But there are these endnotes. You can sort of check the work. But I am trying to make them read the way a novel would. I want it to be a story with characters and scenes. I want you to feel as though you can see things in your mind's eye. And so you're always trying to kind of reconstruct scenes. And that's hard because a lot of the time you're relying on people's memories and so forth.

[Dax Shepard]

For you to just figure out what pieces you're gonna reel out at what times has gotta be the most complicated math of the book completely.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I always think of it as like, I have the whole deck of cards and I'm not just gonna kind of throw them at you. And I'm not gonna give them to. I want to sort of hand them out to you in a way that both. You'll be able to kind of digest it in a fluid way. You won't feel overwhelmed, but also that it'll be pleasurable. And it's funny, I sometimes get these questions about, you know, people don't read the way they used to. And I think certainly the stuff that I do in a long Yorker article or a book, the pleasure of it is actually that it takes longer. I can kind of take you down the pathways before I get to the switchback. You sort of have to have a bigger canvas to do that kind of thing. So what. What I was gonna say is a lot of time I'm relying on people's memories. In this case, Rochelle and Matthew, before they even know that Zach is dead, they start having these conversations with people. I didn't even know this at the very beginning, but I subsequently learned they record all the conversations on their iPhone. At a certain point, Rachelle said, you know, we have the recordings. Do you want them? And if you're a journalist, it's, you

[Dax Shepard]

know, I can't imagine how excited you were in that moment.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, and. And so after Zach has gone missing, she connects with Ackbar, who she'd never met before. She knew that they were friends, but they'd never met. And he says, I want to meet you guys at this hotel in Piccadilly. They meet there, and Akbar then calls Indian Dave on his phone and puts it on speaker. And I have the audio of this whole long conversation that they have.

[Dax Shepard]

Right? Because if they were to just tell you what was said, what you need to hear is, like, what was their tone? How confident were they?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's more than that, because this is what's so fascinating, you know. Now, certainly in recent decades, it used to be, here's the lawyer in me coming out. This is like the one good use for law school if you're on a jury and it's a murder trial or it's a. I don't know what, an assault or something, and there's an eyewitness. There was a sense that nothing is better than eyewitness testimony. You get an eyewitness, they go on the stand and they say, I saw it, and here's what it was. We now know that actually eyewitness testimony is unbelievably unreliable. Yeah, it's almost useless to some degree. The more dramatic the thing that has been witnessed, the less reliable you are. And Even in the moment, you know, like five minutes later, you're already kind of rewriting your memories. This fascinating thing happened with Rochelle and Matt where, remember, they don't know much about their son's friends. Zack was very secretive about this. They knew this guy, Varinder Sharma. They thought he was, like, a rubber tycoon. They thought he worked for Pirelli Rubber and he had a lot of money, and he let Zach stay his place. Akbar seemed like this nice guy who had a whole bunch of different business interests and was kind of mentoring Zack. And then they go and they meet with Akbar, and they talk to Varuner on the phone. And what they told me when I asked them about that conversation was I said, what did you think? And they said, oh, we thought they were really shifty, and they seemed unreliable, and we thought that they were long. But I subsequently realized that was because their memory of it was colored by what they know now what they had subsequently learned.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Then I got the recording. And it's the most heartbreaking thing, because what Rachelle and Matthew, who are desperate, they don't know their son is dead. And Akbar lies to them and says, zack just must have gone off to score drugs. We all have to find him. We're gonna get him and bring him back safely to you. I now know. And if you read the book, you'll see why. Ackbar knew in that moment that Zack was dead. And Indian Dave gets on. They don't know his name is Indian Dave. They think he's this rubber tycoon. And what they keep is, we're so grateful to you guys. Thank you. You've been such incredible mentors to our son, and you're gonna help us find him. And it's so poignant to listen to it. Cause when you know the whole thing, you know that these guys are lying. But it's a crazy scenario.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you're so desperate. And anyone that presents themselves as the ally that would help you find your child, you're gonna be so grateful for.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yes, of course. But there's another thing, too. You get this wild thing where Rochelle and Matthew have no idea about Zach having pretended that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. Until they meet these guys who say, oh, we didn't know that his name was Zach, Bret. We thought his mom lived in Dubai and his dad was dead.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

So they are learning a lot about all at once. I mean, you've got the panic of, where is he? And you have the panic of, who is he? There's so much happening now. Wow. This is unimaginable.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It's funny. I think a lot of people in America still think of Scotland Yard as this great police. They watch police procedurals on Britbox or something, and it's about how Scotland Yard really royally fucks up the case, and then the Brettlers essentially have to become detectives themselves and kind of do the investigation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Suffice to say, you gotta read the book. But Indian Dave was not asleep at 12:30.

[Lily Padman]

No, there's more to the story.

[Dax Shepard]

Akbar did not leave for the night. There's a lot.

[Lily Padman]

This is a show. You're gonna make a show.

[Dax Shepard]

It's already been opted by 8 24. It's riveting.

[Lily Padman]

It's so sad and surreal. I wish it could be just fiction, you know?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. I mean, I will say part of the reason, when I finished the article that I did a book is that I was delving into their lives, and I realized that there were these backstories. Akbar's family, Indian Dave's kind of criminal history, but then also Zach's family. And when I first learned about these two grandfathers who had survived the Holocaust with my writer brain, what I'm thinking is my whole story is about reinvention. Zach is this kid who reinvents himself, and he's doing it in London, this city that has reinvented itself. And then you go back, and he has these two grandfathers who virtually their whole families are killed in the Holocaust. They arrive, both of them solo, as middle teens in London in the 40s, and they have to decide, who am I gonna be? It's tabula rasa. I have to kind of invent myself now. And when I first encountered that as a writer, what I thought was, this is perfect. It's a kind of literary echo of Zach's experience. And in my book about reinvention, that's the role that these guys will play. And one of my closest friends, when I sent him the book, as soon as I finished the. The manuscript, he read it and he said, you know, it's so interesting. The book starts as kind of a thriller and a mystery, but then halfway through, I realized, no, this is actually a book about parenting, and it's about grief. I had this amazing dinner with the Brettlers, and this kind of clued me into how to end the book. I'm not giving anything away here. Where we were talking at one point, and I just said to them, if I were in your situation, I think I wouldn't have gotten out of bed. Since 2019. I don't know how I would do it, but you still have a kind of active social and professional life. They truly. They go to concerts, they love live music. They're great parents to Joe, who they're incredibly close with the surviving son. And they both said, oh, you know, it's because of our fathers. There was a thing that Richelle's sister Gabby said to me at one point. She said, when I looked into my father's eyes, I never saw barbed wire. I only saw a loving father. They had these fathers who'd lost more than we can really conceive of losing, lost everything. And then somehow kind of forged ahead in the future. And you're living with the loss. You're not erasing it. You're not denying it, but that you can live joyously. You can hold both of those things in. What kind of knocked me out is I'd been thinking of those grandfathers purely in that sense of reinvention. And what I hadn't realized is that the brothers are going to be okay. And part of the reason they're going to be okay, actually, is that they had that lesson, that example.

[Dax Shepard]

I have had more than one Jewish friend tell me this, that when they've been struggling with something, it feels disrespectful to their grandparents who just made it out and got here to give me this life totally, and I'm now going to waste it. I don't think that's a unique experience for folks that are the progeny of survivors of the Holocaust. So, yes, it makes sense to me that they could go. It kind of dishonors them for what they went through to give us this opportunity in this life, and we're gonna now quit living because we had our first child.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, they both said, you know, they're not particularly religious, but they both kind of invoke, you know, the biblical choose life. And I will say they've read the book. It's funny to bring it back to Michael Lewis on that flight. He said, unprompted by me, he didn't even know that I was thinking about this. But I had this big question, which is, when do I show the brothers the book? Because I've never shown a piece of work to. It's about until it was published. But I felt like I needed to show it to them before it was published, but also I needed to show it to them after it was done. The cement had to be completely dry at that point. And Michael Lewis on the flight said, you know, there have only been two or three times in my career when I've showed a piece of writing to people, it was about before it was published, and I've regretted it every time. And I was like, oh, God, what am I gonna do? So I showed it to them without getting into the whole thing. There are family secrets in the book. There are things that they probably would have if they had. Editorial.

[Dax Shepard]

Zach choked his mother at one point during all this. I imagine that's a very hard thing to have known because you love your child so much, and you might go, yeah, go ahead and tell everybody. But you don't need to tell that part.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

My point is, obviously, I feel enormous compassion for these people, and I became very close to them as I was writing. But nevertheless, when I sit down to write the book, I'm not writing it for them. I have to have that stuff in. You know, we launched the book last week in New York, and they came to the launch, and Joe came as well.

[Dax Shepard]

They seem like really incredible people.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

They are. I think they are.

[Dax Shepard]

And then some part of me just is willing to chalk it up to, I don't know that it was any of those external forces that might have been the path this brain was on. I don't know that blame needs to go to the school or to the parents or anybody. I think also, sometimes this stuff just happens.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Somebody asked me the other day, you know, did I get any parenting lessons from this or something? And I pushed back a little and said, if anything, it just teaches me a kind of humility, where I think that obviously you want to do everything you can to help your child and support your child. But I also think there's this fantasy that we have that your child is a piece of clay that you can just mold.

[Dax Shepard]

Couldn't agree more.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

There is a limit to what you're able to do, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And I think we're all kind of fumbling our way through as parents, trying to figure out the solution. But the idea that, I mean, somebody had sort of said it was just all a little too pat. Right. It's like, what parenting lessons do you take from this?

[Lily Padman]

There's so many factors.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Telling them this or that I reject.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well. And it can backfire.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

One of my dear friends back home is a few years older than me, and he's got four kids and a wonderful family life. And I think I was expressing some frustration that the didactic lessons that I give to my kids, they just kind of roll their eyes. Yeah. It was in a spirit of kind of. I'm thinking like, how did you pull it off? As kids are older and it's all worked out and they have a really close family, we're in a restaurant. And he said all the lessons you teach your kids aren't gonna add up to a hill of beans. But watching the way you deal with a waiter in a restaurant, it's gonna be things like those little moments of observation will shape who they are more so than any words that come out of your mouth in a kind of directed do this, don't do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Because if you're saying beh and then I'm witnessing you not behave that way, guess what? You're also a hypocrite. You've lost all credibility.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

You've depreciated everything else that you might say.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm like, okay, great. So what I know is like, don't listen to a thing this guy says because that's not at all what he's doing.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, but that's such a good example of the restaurant. Cuz it's not like, what did they accomplish? Those aren't the observations, it's the little ways of being that you just are a sponge to when you're a kid.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I just think there's a decency that has has gotten lost in recent years. I don't mean to sound like an old fuddy duddy saying it was better when I was young, but I think most people would agree. I think Covid was part of this. I think everybody interacting on screens is part of it. But I just feel as though there's a kind of fundamental decency in terms of the way you treat other people that has been devalued to some degree.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. My anecdotal experience with that is we spent the whole summer in Nashville where we built a house and it's a small town and I noticed right away, oh, I can't drive like I drive in la because I'm going to see these people at the Tasty Freeze. Yeah, I'm not anonymous. I just started really computing all the different behaviors I have in LA that I could not have in this small town. I was seeing the value of that and the danger of anonymity. So the Internet, is that squared?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Completely.

[Dax Shepard]

And then what percentage of my time am I spending in this totally anonymous way where no one's going to look me in the eyes and go, wait, you just said that to another human being. And so, yeah, normally I would be like, yeah, we're just getting Old and we're blah, blah, blah. But no, when you're spending a good chunk of your time in a world where you're completely anonymous, I think that's problematic.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, here's my question, here's what I wonder, and you guys can tell me how optimistic I should be in my moments of optimism. What I tell myself is that we as humans are pretty bad at. When a new thing comes along, thinking in a very deliberate way about the role that it should fill in our lives, we tend to allow technological change to just kind of wash over us. We kind of drink it all down without actually asking any sensible questions about it. But that over time, you start to recalibrate and think a little more carefully. My really optimistic case is, you know, whether you date it to the Internet to sort of late 90s, basically, where you date it to the advent of smartphones. So sort of 2010s, these new things come along, they completely rewrite really all, Almost every aspect of how we deal with each other. But that there may come a kind of reset where people say kind of, all right, that was, you know, I mean, it's a little bit, honestly, like, there's probably a drugs and alcohol sobriety kind of thing where it's kind of like, okay, I did that, and I really went sort of whole hog there for a while. But on reflection, it fucked up my life and I had to rewrite my relationship with this stuff.

[Lily Padman]

I think a lot of people write are having that conversation. They're saying the Internet's bad. Like, I mean, just hearing a lot of people say that the Internet is scary. It's a scary place. Whether you're changing your actions based on it. I think more people right now are starting to be like, uh, oh, I

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

guess the thing I wonder is I feel as though everybody's having that conversation, but then not actually changing behavior. I mean, I'm the most guilty of all, right? But I'm like, God, this is terrible. Where's my phone?

[Lily Padman]

Comes an understanding. So I think maybe he'll down the road.

[Dax Shepard]

The first step, my optimism comes from this pattern that's never broken, which is young people watch old people and do not wanna do what they do. Minimally, you've got a whole group of young people that are watching the dumb, embarrassing older people live on the Internet. It'll be not cool in some sense. That's the nature of things. And then to your moral panic thing. Cause I push back on, like, Jonathan Haidt and a lot of these people. These are also anomalies. Zach is an anomaly. That's not a normal story. It's a spectac why it's worthy of a book. And back to the manosphere doc. It's a terrifying doc.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That is a tiny percent. There are not boys walking around calling women bitches and all that. I don't think that's an epidemic or a pandemic. I think this is a small group of people that you could make a doc about.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

The one thing I would say on that, and I admit I haven't watched the doc, though I did have a whole conversation. I feel like an idiot because I did Louis Theroux's podcast and talked to him for like two hours about Zach not having watched his manosphere dog shout out. Really? I should have done my homework. But what I would say as a father of two teenage boys is that I agree with you. I think that the manosphere looks max or incel extreme. Particularly the guys who like have publicists and are in documentaries and so forth. They're way out there. I do think that downstream of that it changes the culture, it changes the way that people talk and relate to each other. I think it's changed.

[Dax Shepard]

So that's my fear. But I'm around Lily's 16 year old boyfriends. They're lovely boys. When I'm meeting 16 year old boys, I'm not seeing the dudes in this dock. So I'm just constantly trying to remind myself, like, have I met some dudes recently that were doing push ups and talking about bitches? I haven't. And I meet a lot of kids. Yes. I can find enough to make a doc about, but I'm not as panicked if I started seeing it in real life, but I don't see it in real life. And maybe I'm naive.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

This goes back to the question I raised is that I have very similar feelings. What it means for me is when I step away from the computer and I step away from my phone and I interact just with regular people. It's like 10 cities, 10 nights. I'm seeing the whole country right now. And it is amazing the way you get out there and you talk to people. And most people, fundamentally, even people who I in some cases have really vehement political disagreements with, fundamentally are pretty decent.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the danger I think is that we're letting ourselves believe that the Internet world is the real world and it's actually downgrading our assessment of everyone. And I don't think that's true or fair.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I guess here I'll dabble in the moral panic stuff. But these technologies are so addictive, and I'm speaking purely for myself here. I feel the twitch. And what's so insane, right, is it's like something could have come in in the last 20 minutes. Nobody has a life less full of emergencies than me, you know, like there's. There's actually nothing very significant or dire that I need to be checking my phone every 20 minutes for. So I've got it. But I just hope that we are able to overcome. I think we're in that phase now where we all know this is bad for us, but it's still really hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep.

[Lily Padman]

It's chemical at this point, so it's gonna take some real.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, for me, it is this physiological thing where I feel myself just kind of reaching.

[Dax Shepard]

I had to get a new screen put on my phone. But also, if he would've asked me prior to dropping my phone off how much I'm on my phone or how addicted I'd be like, you know, I got it. But I think I'm a low grade. And they were changing my screen. I had two hours to kill at the mall while they changed my screen. I'm in the store, I'm like, oh, I see something I think my wife would like. I go for it to take a picture to send to her. Even if it's not like me checking things. I was like, holy fuck, hon. I probably grabbed from my phone like

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

20 times in part because it's now like the Swiss army knife. I use it to pay for things. I use it to take pictures, I use it to listen to music, et cetera, et cetera.

[Dax Shepard]

I was a little troubled by how much muscle memory was grabbing for an empty pocket. Well, I love the book, and I know you're a little nervous about the digressions, but I don't think you should be. One of my favorite books is the Devil in the White City. Like, what a book? I get a fucking serial killer. I get the whole history of the world fairs. I get the architectural history of Chicago. Let's go.

[Lily Padman]

I mean, yeah, what you did with the Purdue family was so great. You get to learn so much that's making it feel more fiction wise, like you're learning about the characters.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, that's my hope. I think, done right. Certainly what I'm trying to do is give you all those little asides in a way where it never feels as though you're kind of stuck in quicksand. It's more that I've just dropped a little Something in your pocket and you didn't even notice. You got it. Those are the stories. Those are the books. I love to read.

[Dax Shepard]

I think we're all also pretty all interested in London as a place. It's fast. Yeah, it is. It is. It's a great city.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I'm going there in a few weeks. We'll see how it goes.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Patrick, London falling, a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family search for truth is terrific. I hope everyone checks it out. It's been a delight to meet you. You're very much in that. Lewis. Charming.

[Lily Padman]

I know. So cool.

[Dax Shepard]

He was a model. He modeled.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, he's got the catalog.

[Dax Shepard]

Model.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, catalog.

[Dax Shepard]

But it was a prestigious brand. What was it? Come on, J.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Crew.

[Dax Shepard]

J.

[Lily Padman]

Crew. Ding, ding, ding.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta be handsome to be fucking with J.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Crew. Come on. Come on.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a delight to meet you. And I do hope you'll come back with your other books.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I will. This was so fun. Thanks for having me, guys.

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely. Hi there. This is hermium, permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check.

[Lily Padman]

Ms. Monica, we got to discuss something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So we just did an armchair anonymous.

[Lily Padman]

We just did an armchair anonymous. And there was a guest, a man who was a man.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Who popped on. And he was so attractive.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was. It was shocking.

[Lily Padman]

It was shocking.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like Paul Newman level attractive.

[Lily Padman]

From the second I saw him, and this plays out in real time, I knew he was in Georgia.

[Dax Shepard]

You did? Within four words. You said, are you in Georgia?

[Lily Padman]

Well, I said, where are you? Are you. Are you in the south?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Lily Padman]

But I knew it was Georgia.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but you were trying to play it a little bit safe.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I say go for it, you know?

[Lily Padman]

I know you're right. Because he was wearing the A shirt that I feel like all my friends in. In the south wear.

[Dax Shepard]

It's interesting how there are regional uniforms.

[Lily Padman]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I had to get out of Michigan. I was going to hit a certain age where I was going to have to start wearing golf shirts.

[Lily Padman]

No, you weren't.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, I got to

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

get out of here.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't wear golf shirts.

[Lily Padman]

That's where you drew the line.

[Dax Shepard]

I. I could see it on the look.

[Lily Padman]

You might have to bring them back now that you're in Nashville. You might re Evaluate this.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I think they think it's charming. I. At least I tell myself that they think it's charming that I dress like a scumbag.

[Lily Padman]

Oh. All Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I have tattoos, but I'm friendly.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think they find that char. That I'm a heathen. I'm godless, but I'm still friendly and offer my services.

[Lily Padman]

The celebrity helps.

[Dax Shepard]

It probably doesn't hurt.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, back to Will.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Lily Padman]

So he was very, very, very hot.

[Dax Shepard]

Startling.

[Lily Padman]

He also. What we noticed. And this isn't why I didn't notice this upcoming first, but then he had UGA paraphernalia in the background. And I. And then it was like, oh, my God, he went to Georgia.

[Dax Shepard]

Dream husband.

[Lily Padman]

God. It then came out that what years.

[Dax Shepard]

You both graduated.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And there was an 11 year gap. 12. 12 year gap.

[Lily Padman]

I graduated in 2009 and he graduated in 20. 21.

[Dax Shepard]

12 year gap. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

You.

[Dax Shepard]

You. You were taken aback.

[Lily Padman]

I was that really rattled.

[Dax Shepard]

Rattled.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm so young or I'm so old or a combo.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. Okay. So normally when this happens, I think, oh, my God, he's so young.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And this time I was like, I'm so embarrassed. Like, I'm so embarrassed by my age.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Lily Padman]

I'm so embarrassed that, like, I think he's cute and I'm like an old lady.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you and I, there would be something cougar there. No, there would be something really wrong with you if you didn't find Will.

[Lily Padman]

But I had, like, PQs.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, of course you did.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And I was like, he was.

[Dax Shepard]

He was very horny.

[Lily Padman]

He's married.

[Dax Shepard]

And you were being very forward up to that point. You were like, well, it's a shame I didn't meet you before you got married, I think, because you were basically saying, I want to fuck. It was the most aggressive I've ever seen you with a caller.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And.

[Dax Shepard]

And I loved it.

[Lily Padman]

I felt myself in that whole conversation, like, being a cougar, like, being like a old lady with a cigarette who's like, hitting on young.

[Dax Shepard]

Show me your abs.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What kind of abs do you got?

[Lily Padman]

I felt like her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Good.

[Lily Padman]

No, I don't want to be her.

[Dax Shepard]

I know this. This is. Well, this is what I've been relegated to permanently. If I'm talking to any woman under 40, I'm like, watch your P's and Q's. You're gonna seem like a gross, old, lecherous man.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm glad you had that experience.

[Lily Padman]

I am not glad. I feel very. I feel weird right now. Like, I feel. I feel old. I feel cougar y, as we said. I mean, he's so hot. And that's he's talking. Yeah. Spoiler. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And that's a hot thing for me to be hearing. And. And he's talking about my old school. And he's got great hair.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And I was like, you were certain

[Dax Shepard]

he's tall too, which is.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I know he's tall.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He's seated listener.

[Lily Padman]

I just feel very conflicted about what. What happened. Oh. Because also my rule generally is that I would never date anyone younger than my brother. My brother's 30.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Uh huh.

[Lily Padman]

He's younger than my brother.

[Dax Shepard]

27.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. So I was also like, like, should I change my rule?

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely. If a Will comes across your radar.

[Lily Padman]

One other thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Was happening during this.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Lily Padman]

He was also triggering some old insecurities.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Lily Padman]

Because he. Will from uga Is Will from uga. Like, there are. There were so many Wills around when I went to school there.

[Dax Shepard]

Handsome Southern gentleman.

[Lily Padman]

Handsome.

[Dax Shepard]

White.

[Lily Padman]

White as.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he was very white.

[Lily Padman]

White bread.

[Dax Shepard]

White as the driven snow.

[Lily Padman]

Gorgeous hair. He spoke about his mom. His mom's a Southern belle.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

This. This is the type of person I could never have.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. You told yourself you could never have.

[Lily Padman]

And I was like, I felt a little bit back there.

[Dax Shepard]

A little insecure.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. I was like, oh, my God, I'm so ugly. Like, in front of Will. Like, I shouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it a fun feeling, though?

[Lily Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not. Like, you enjoy the reminiscent feeling of youth.

[Lily Padman]

Like, no part of it is feeling bad about myself. No.

[Dax Shepard]

I know what you're saying, but I think anytime I can touch my feelings from 20 years ago, I also appreciate it. Does that make sense?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. But no. No, I. I like not feeling, like, feeling confident and feeling good. Good. I'm good around people. But Will.

[Dax Shepard]

Will.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Excuse me.

[Dax Shepard]

Will.

[Lily Padman]

Will triggered some old stuff of like, oh, my gosh. Like, this is.

[Dax Shepard]

You never like me.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. So I'm feeling a little insane. Insecure about my looks and my body and my age and pretty much the whole package. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Lily Padman]

Wow. Will.

[Dax Shepard]

I think if he wasn't married, he would applaud you. I don't think he needed any of those feelings.

[Lily Padman]

I think so. Because he is Will from uga. Was I being so embarrassing?

[Dax Shepard]

No, not at all. You weren't embarrassing at all.

[Lily Padman]

I really feel like I was embarrassing.

[Dax Shepard]

Your flirty, aggressive self is very appealing. It's why I urge you. You to use it more.

[Lily Padman]

But I think it was too much.

[Dax Shepard]

It was like I was very confident. And confidence is attractive.

[Lily Padman]

I know, but.

[Dax Shepard]

But not for you.

[Lily Padman]

But I wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You're so unique. This is for everyone else.

[Lily Padman]

Know what I'm saying? I'm saying I actually wasn't confident and so I think I was overcompensating.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, bread is. Confidence is why men nag women is like, they can tap into this while they're insecure. They can tap into their.

[Lily Padman]

I wonder if Will will hear this.

[Dax Shepard]

No, he didn't listen to the show.

[Lily Padman]

His sister. Sister Claire. My sister in law.

[Dax Shepard]

Your new sister in law. Yeah, she'll. She'll.

[Lily Padman]

She'll relay this.

[Dax Shepard]

She. She's been down this path for 20. Let's say she's two years younger than Will. For. For 25 years she's seen Will's effect on women and she understands this entirely.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I thought it was a joyous experience.

[Lily Padman]

It did something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Thank you, Will.

[Dax Shepard]

Thanks, Will. I enjoy.

[Lily Padman]

I appreciate you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're coming hard at him.

[Lily Padman]

D. Stop saying that. Stop saying that. That is making me feel so weird.

[Dax Shepard]

It does. Oh, I was so proud of you.

[Lily Padman]

Why? What did I say?

[Dax Shepard]

This is what I'm always begging for.

[Lily Padman]

What did I say?

[Dax Shepard]

Get in the driver's seat. You think someone's hot fudgeing get out in the South.

[Lily Padman]

They don't like that. They like demure.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Yeah. No.

[Lily Padman]

What. What did I say that was the most aggressive? Because I think I blacked out.

[Dax Shepard]

There's just a moment that you're like. If you hadn't met your. I don't know, the way you rolled it out, basically, I think it made it very clear that you would have fought. No, no, you. You said.

[Lily Padman]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but you've never said. You're so respectful. And you, you, you weren't in that moment. Yeah. Welcome to the show. It feels weird, so it's a lot to handle. Yeah. I mean, you shouldn't have compassion for us. But also you should understand these are. You gotta clean your butt cheeks.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. That adds a new layer to the element. Is like your mom.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You got like more of a mommy fetish.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. That's not.

[Dax Shepard]

Will, what have you been. You're messy again. Will, what have you been into? I told you, Will.

[Lily Padman]

Will, what did you get?

[Dax Shepard]

Pull your pants down, Will. Let me.

[Lily Padman]

Duty again.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you done? You are naughty, Will. You know you have to use a toilet, big boy. Guys, we're talking about a full grown adult in case you're triggered.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. This is a.

[Dax Shepard]

This is not a teen. As a 27 year old man in the south, he had his own office decorated with memorabilia. He has a degree yeah.

[Lily Padman]

He probably has a child on the way.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just fun to watch a new paradigm emerge, which is like, yeah, you have a new age class now. If the dude looks like will and he's 27, play ball.

[Lily Padman]

It is interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Don't rule anything out. Changed my life on this topic. A commenter pointed out, and I think it's a brilliant comp. Someone said Monica trying to convince you to wear loafers was identical to you trying to convince her to shave her head. So now you know what it feels like.

[Lily Padman]

And now you know what it feels like.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I was like, that's a great observation. And it's spot on.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Cause it's like this just.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Not a loafers dude.

[Lily Padman]

And it can't. It's great. It's great.

[Dax Shepard]

I could wear them and maybe even people wouldn't point at me and laugh, but it's not for me.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I thought that was.

[Lily Padman]

Thank you, listener.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I thought that was a solid.

[Lily Padman]

And I guess I'm sorry for convince. Trying to convince you to wear a loafer.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd almost rather make a different truce, which is like, I still want to keep begging you to shave your sides. And you're free to keep begging me to wear loafers.

[Lily Padman]

No. Because you know what? I. When you said it, I was like, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's not you. I don't want you to be anyone who's not you.

[Dax Shepard]

You like, and it's great. It's fine. You do, like, preppy. Like, as an aesthetic. You like a man who's preppy.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, a man.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And to me.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

All of my class warfare baggage, preppy was the last thing I ever wanted.

[Lily Padman]

I think you have good style. I don't think you have. I wouldn't. I'm not, like, I don't look you and think, like, we got to do something about Dax's style.

[Dax Shepard]

Make some effort.

[Lily Padman]

I. You are very, you know, you.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Uhhuh.

[Lily Padman]

You know, your style. It. You have style.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Right or wrong. You have a specific lane. I mean.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. Have a perspective, point of view. Yeah. That's what style is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And so I'm not ever going to try to change that.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll have you know, though, that I'm. I'm regularly going, how consistent is this style? Because even today and yesterday I ordered some pants because they look comfortable, but I was in, like, drawstring, kind of clam diggery east coast on a beat, like. But I decided, for whatever reason that those pants are fine if I wear a Converse and they're not that thing. And I recognize how arbitrary it is.

[Lily Padman]

Well, whatever. You liked them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, whatever it is, I like it. And then I just stick with it. But it could vary from jump jumpsuits to Red Wings work boots and cuffed Levi's.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, because you've also at one point, you're wearing some seersucker and that's very northeast.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's south. That's southern.

[Lily Padman]

I think it's also like clam bakes. No, it's like Ivy League.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay. I really associated with like Rhode Island, Maine, probably like Tom Wolf, that writer. That's who I want to look like next Easter. I've already proclaimed.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Full thing. Yeah, maybe like a flower in my lapel. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Lily Padman]

Who do I like? That's preppy JFK Jr. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Apex preppy. Hot as fuck, but he's like the standard of preppiness.

[Lily Padman]

That look, JFK Jr. Look.

[Dax Shepard]

You love it.

[Lily Padman]

I think it's great. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the look, right? That would be number one.

[Lily Padman]

Well, I don't think so. I think again, it's someone who just clearly has a point of view, knows what they like and it's thought out. Like, you know, Jess used to only wear. Wear gym shorts, you know, and that had to change. And guess what? I changed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right? Yeah. Cuz he's your boy.

[Lily Padman]

He's my husband and he. And now he's addictive. Yeah. Now he likes shopping. And now everyone always comments on his outfit.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. And he loves it.

[Lily Padman]

And he loves it. And I love it. And like, it feels good. And he feels good. He feels put together. It does something out outside in.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I want to ask a question about style. I had this thought the other day.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I know someone who, like, by all accounts, probably has good style. They're definitely always on trend.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But I had the thought.

[Lily Padman]

Man or woman?

[Dax Shepard]

Man.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

The style changes so frequently that I actually don't know what his style is.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I wondered, like, for me that's an issue. Is that an issue for.

[Lily Padman]

For you? I am not attracted to trends.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Personally, I like classic style.

[Dax Shepard]

Timeless.

[Lily Padman]

Timeless.

[Dax Shepard]

Classic. Jfk, rfk.

[Lily Padman]

Nope. Every now and then I'll get a piece. Every now and then that's trendy. Because it's like fun.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, you're wearing enormous pants. That's part of the trend. No, you have. You have taken on enormous pants in the last. Last two years.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. I wouldn't say. Okay. I don't think that's because it's a trend. I really just like the way that looks.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I. Skinny jeans are kind of making a comeback. I'm not going there.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I'm not wearing them.

[Dax Shepard]

You're like me also. I'm all right. I'm much older than you. And, Will, there is a point where you go, I can't play the game anymore. And so I don't know if you're like me.

[Lily Padman]

At least.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, no, no. We're sticking with what our style has been. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's more that I'm like, I don't like that. So, sure, it might come back as a trend, but I'm gonna skip that trend because I don't like it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And plus, oh, my God, I'm so old.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, you're eight.

[Lily Padman]

And then. But there are still. There are classic jeans and classic looks, Levi's, all kinds that. That work forever and will never go away, so I'll always rely on that. But I'm with you. When someone. Someone is just dressing for the trend, I don't really think that's stylish.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well.

[Dax Shepard]

I just go, like, I don't know what their real style is.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

They don't have a perspective.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't know what they want to be in most.

[Lily Padman]

Like, they might look great, but they don't really have a perspective. But also. Okay, here's the thing. I prefer that to looking like a slob.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Even if they're like, my style is slob. That's not the. For me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's fair. Like. And some people have made an art form out of it. Right. Like. Like, Sandler's in on the joke. Right. He's like, I dress like a. I wear sweatpants and hockey jerseys no matter where I'm at.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. He wears basketball shorts. He wears Jesses.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think a lot of guys, like, thank God Sandler's doing this so I can just wear all this athletic gear all the time.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's never been. For whatever reason, never called to me.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm glad I'll get a jersey every now and then. I, like. I think it looks cool, but I.

[Lily Padman]

You never. I've never seen you wear a jersey of minimal. Like, would you wear this sweater?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, of course.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a lot of cardigans.

[Lily Padman]

I think this would look nice on you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'll buy it off you. How much?

[Lily Padman]

This is a large.

[Dax Shepard]

I Think it would fit me based on how much it does?

[Lily Padman]

It is. It is oversized. It is oversized. That. That's a look.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's popular look.

[Lily Padman]

It's a look that I like. Although I did want to take it off when I was talking to Will.

[Dax Shepard]

Cuz I wanted him to see your boobs.

[Lily Padman]

Well, be honest. Don't be crass.

[Dax Shepard]

Be honest.

[Lily Padman]

Don't be crass. Gentleman.

[Dax Shepard]

Why else would you take your sweatshirt off? Wanted to take your shoulders.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My decollete.

[Dax Shepard]

What if I wanted to get in short shorts when we had a attractive guest on. Really? I was like. I almost thought about getting. Getting down into my.

[Lily Padman]

You're married. I'm not. I get to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want. That's a big difference.

[Lily Padman]

That's a big distinction.

[Dax Shepard]

I also think I'm male, so it's.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, that's also a huge distinction. Here's the. The thing you're not going to want to hear and is. Is the truth. I think you'll understand. Part of this. Most women. Not all.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I think most men want to see a pair of boobs.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh.

[Lily Padman]

Not all women want. Women want to see a bulge. Bulge. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I would love to know the percentage.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you on prima facie. My favorite thing to say. Yeah, I do agree with you. But I also. I'm prepared to be shocked by how many women, if in a very safe situation, could view it safely without feeling threatened.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

How many would like to.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's way lower than the men in the boobs, but I think it's higher than we think.

[Lily Padman]

I think what's true is that it really depends on the person attached to the bulge. Women might be interested in the bulge if they, like, they already are interested in the guy and like the top.

[Dax Shepard]

And we could hate a woman and we still want to see her.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. You might not care about anything else, but you want to see the boobs. It's just different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's different.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's okay. And that's how we were all built.

[Lily Padman]

That's the way it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We're just built this way.

[Lily Padman]

All right, well, I guess I can do some fat. Unless we have more to say about Will or about cougars or. Actually, I don't know if we're even allowed to say cougars anymore, but I think I can since now I am one.

[Dax Shepard]

What? There's a coalition of allies protecting cougars?

[Lily Padman]

No. Maybe cougars don't like. Maybe older women like myself now don't like to be called that. And now as I'm saying it, I don't, I don't want to be called that. It has a negative connotation.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we're calling men who like younger women perverts. So if you guys got to have the shoulder, whatever the word is not coyote. Cougars. Tough, right? That's not even close to as bad.

[Lily Padman]

Well, there is, as you said. There's a difference. There is a difference. I can't go attack Will.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure you can't attack Will. But if we're just saying older people liking younger people and we're calling one class of people perverts and then the other one's bitching about being called cougars, I think that's a little unfair.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, but you say all the time you're always on flip flopping like that there's a difference between women and men. Yeah, women do something that's different than women.

[Dax Shepard]

But it doesn't mean that you guys can't shoulder cougar. It's not even that bad.

[Lily Padman]

Pervert's like an illegal just going to like die. Like, what's the point?

[Dax Shepard]

Like, why don't you own being a cougar?

[Lily Padman]

No. Rob, can you look up how old like you have to be to be qualified as a Cougar?

[Dax Shepard]

I think 38 to 27, 40s or older.

[Lily Padman]

Oh my God, I'm so close.

[Dax Shepard]

You're good then. So you don't even pick up this campaign against to end cougars. It's a cute name.

[Lily Padman]

No, I don't like it. Well, it does say it sounds like

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

might include women starting at age 35.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And depending on how young, probably. Yeah, it's the age gap.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

10 year age gap or more.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, 10.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think 11. Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Cougars are. Cougars are majestic. They're very powerful. They're a beautiful animal. They're the prettiest predator we have in America. Tigers in the Americas. Did you hear me? We didn't call you a vulture. Like, you've been given a very regal.

[Lily Padman]

Don't say you.

[Dax Shepard]

The classic Ubers.

[Lily Padman]

This is great. This is great.

[Dax Shepard]

This is great.

[Lily Padman]

My time is like, I'm like, oh,

[Dax Shepard]

this is getting real.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. I feel really, I feel like, oh boy.

[Dax Shepard]

What you should be feeling is gratitude that you are a cougar of the caliber that could ensnare one of these cubs just fine. So you should just be thanking your lucky stars that that's still an option for you. There are some cougars that are hungry and they're starving and they can't get any pups okay? And you should feel bad for those cougars. You're one of the lucky cougars. Okay, well, look again, I'm just a pervert, so on my side of the

[Lily Padman]

street, you're not a pervert. You're married with children.

[Dax Shepard]

I know, I know, I know.

[Lily Padman]

That's not. How did this happen to me?

[Dax Shepard]

How did you turn 38? Yeah, one day at a time.

[Lily Padman]

This is like an actual disaster.

[Dax Shepard]

We gotta get you. I think once you start indulging your cougar appetite, you'll blow right, right through this little awkward phase. I'm like, oh, this is perfect. They're so young and dumb. I don't want to date them. All they want to do is come over and show me their buns.

[Lily Padman]

No, that's even worse.

[Dax Shepard]

Then I got my husband I love who dresses nice.

[Lily Padman]

Who is he?

[Dax Shepard]

Where is he, Jess? Oh, and then you have this stable of young dudes that you don't even have to worry about talking to on their birthday.

[Lily Padman]

I can't even have sex with them. They're gonna break my bones because of bone density. Perimenopause.

[Dax Shepard]

Rosie.

[Lily Padman]

Yes. Oh, my God. Maybe I'll break his bone.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I bet you will. Here you go. There's the cougar. Let her out of the cougar.

[Lily Padman]

I can't even control her.

[Dax Shepard]

We got a new. I'm going to announce to the LA Times that although P22 is gone, we do have a new cougar sighting.

[Lily Padman]

Ah, I feel conflicted. I gotta take a nap.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, let's say, let's do some facts.

[Lily Padman]

All right? Okay. I have little to no facts. Okay, One thing. So. So if you. Okay, you're gonna be mad at me because you don't like when this happens,

[Dax Shepard]

but worldwide box office versus domestic.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Basically, there's one teeny, teeny tiny difference between the audio version of this one and the video.

[Dax Shepard]

Why?

[Lily Padman]

Because there's something that worked in the video that doesn't work audio, I think, in my opinion. So I. I said, hey, Emma, will you cut this out of the audio? But I left it in for video.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so intrigued.

[Lily Padman]

Nothing. I mean, it's a two second thing that happens. I leave in the middle.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And I come back.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Because I had a cough attack.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you sure did. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And attack. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

You cough what, twice outside?

[Lily Padman]

Stop.

[Dax Shepard]

Be honest. How many times do you cough? Listen to me, okay?

[Lily Padman]

What happens is like, I feel the tickle and the cough, you know, And I like to like. Like I do that, you know, and then it's still there. Like that. Did nothing. And I'm trying to drink some water. That's doing nothing. And really quick.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't it great when you're in that state? You're so preoccupied with this disaster. Like, you. You. We could have been on fire probably at that moment. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I don't know what you guys were talking about.

[Dax Shepard]

That's exactly.

[Lily Padman]

I was so panicked. Panicked and, like, trying to do teeny, tiny cops, but new. And it was like, you know, it's like, building, and you feel like you're

[Dax Shepard]

going to suffocate if you don't.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God. And. And it's. And then I would. Then I coughed a couple times.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, a couple coughs.

[Lily Padman]

It was still in there. It's still there. And at some point, I. I leaned over, I said, I got. I got to get a cough drop. And then I walked over, and then I. I left, actually, to get my cough out.

[Dax Shepard]

How many coughs do you think you did once you got outside? Like six or seven.

[Lily Padman]

But by then, it's like, they, like. You sound like you're going to throw up.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Because it's so intense because you've been holding it in, and then it looks gross. And like, I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not just the king of conveyance. I'm also the king of cough. So, you know, I know about coughing.

[Lily Padman]

I know, but this is a different kind of. You cough so much that, like, yours is different. You cough so much, you're not stifling them. You just cough. You feel fine. Coughing, it's part of who you are, and it is what it is, you know, and it's not an identity. It's, in fact, an identity marker for me that I don't cough.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Don't fart, don't cough. Don't pee.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, a lot of don'ts. So I. I went out there and I was like, you know, and I, like, had this huge cough.

[Dax Shepard]

How far did you step? Away from the far.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Oh, really?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. I did not want you guys to hear it.

[Dax Shepard]

I love the idea of you running up the street and the neighbors looking out, and you're just out there.

[Lily Padman]

I just, like, my biggest fear throughout that whole thing was you guys stopping and like, are you okay? Or like, do you want some water?

[Dax Shepard]

Paying attention to it.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I was getting. But then also, I knew you KN. Noticed, but, like, you. Then you were trying to not notice it. Oh, my God, it was horrible. So anyway, I left, and then I came back.

[Dax Shepard]

It's shocking how much I noticed Is, by the way, considering I'm looking at the guest always. Yeah, but I am catching 100% of what's happening over here.

[Lily Padman]

I am catching time. Everything that's going on. And it's like. Like, I know that sometimes, like, I know some of your tells I won't say on here, but I'm like, like, okay, so he's annoyed because he just did that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And so there's a lot going on in the head. Anyway, I. I in the video come back and there's a little conversation about. Did you go to cvs because you

[Dax Shepard]

claim you're just getting a cough drop? And I'm like, bitch, I know they're in your bag right now. Yes.

[Lily Padman]

And then you're like, why'd you leave? And I was like, to cough. And then there was a little conversation about that. That's not in the audio.

[Dax Shepard]

Real time disaster.

[Lily Padman]

So I just wanted. That's like, I left a cough.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great. Okay. That's the one fact.

[Lily Padman]

That's one. I have three facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Lily Padman]

It was a fact. It was a cough. That is why I left. It wasn't for anything else. Because I think then you were like, oh, you farted. I didn't. That. It wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You might have done both.

[Lily Padman]

No, it wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

When you're coughing with all your might, you. You're not. You're not clinching your swing. There are things happen when you cough that hard.

[Lily Padman]

I understand that I was at high risk.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. But it didn't.

[Lily Padman]

It did not happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Situation happened. Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And then it happened. You know, it happened again when we were at the movie theater. The. The me when Rob went to a screening. Did you hear my coughs?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I did.

[Lily Padman]

See, I. And I knew you did. Did you say you did or didn't?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

And I chuckled.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I chuckled a little bit.

[Lily Padman]

I knew. I knew it was. You were getting nervous for me, and then you were getting nervous for me, and I was getting.

[Dax Shepard]

I handed you water. I was excited. Anytime I can help a friend, I like it. So.

[Lily Padman]

But it was that same thing. And I just kept throwing mints in my mouth. I thought that would help. It didn't really help.

[Dax Shepard]

It takes on a life of its own once you're panicking about it. It amplifies all your sensations down there. And now you're convinced.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Now the Peabody. The awards. Okay. Winners were chosen.

[Dax Shepard]

What, like, since we interviewed him.

[Lily Padman]

Well, remember, I. No, I said, like, something about the Peabody, and I was like, there was nominations or winners. I don't know what's what. But it was winners.

[Dax Shepard]

It was the winners. And we. We didn't get one.

[Lily Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Still didn't get one. What does it get to take? Peabody.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, I'm going to tell you who. Well, one. Okay. For entertainment. Adolescence.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. Worthy of a Peabody.

[Lily Padman]

Very. Andor.

[Dax Shepard]

I love the show. I don't know why it's worthy of a Peabody, but I love the show.

[Lily Padman]

Never seen it. Common side effects. That's on Adult Swim.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

So I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

So the. Here's what I can no longer tell myself. They are digging deep. I mean, they're. They're. They're taking an all media. If they found a winner on Cartoon Network.

[Lily Padman]

Adult Swim.

[Dax Shepard]

Adult Swim.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that not on Cartoon Network?

[Lily Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it is.

[Lily Padman]

It might be. Dying for sex.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Liz Meriwether.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. And Michelle Williams.

[Dax Shepard]

Williams.

[Lily Padman]

Episode of Ours Go back in the archives forever. That's a Netflix show.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, So a lot of people.

[Lily Padman]

Heated rivalry.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Lily Padman]

Jimmy Kim Alive.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Mussolini. Son of the century.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So almost everyone in show business got nominated. It sounds like.

[Lily Padman]

And the Pit. Oh, and Pluribus. And the Rehearsal.

[Dax Shepard]

Holy smoky.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And that's only in entertainment.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I guess I'm relieved that there's no podcast.

[Lily Padman]

There's documentaries. Oh, you're right. They should make a podcast. Oh, a. God. Here it is.

[Dax Shepard]

There is a podcast. Oh, my Peabody.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, that's. This actually hurts.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy. I don't even know hear the list.

[Lily Padman]

Podcast and radio. Divine intervention.

[Dax Shepard]

Great show. Scam Inc. Really good.

[Lily Padman]

When we all go to heaven.

[Dax Shepard]

Love it. So just three?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

All right. Y' all can throw in. You did 15 TV shows. Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I know. Well, I'm pretty upset.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sorry.

[Lily Padman]

Now that I've. Now that I knew there was a specific section.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Or next year.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think sometimes you have to submit for these things, too.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we certainly haven't done that.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. So we just didn't even try.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

That's why you guys are those types. Like, we didn't even try. So we didn't lose.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, I'm just saying we should lose if we didn't try. We can do it next year.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't miss 100% of the shots that you don't take.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. Oh, was the Long Good Friday Pierce Brosnan's first role? No. He was in a TV movie called Merchant. Murphy's Stroke and then the Long Goodbyes listed as number two. Same year, though.

[Dax Shepard]

He was famously a street performer in Ireland in Dublin, maybe.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe even one of these living in the car sitches.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He. He. He. He paid his dues.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God. Also, his wife died. That's really sad. Sorry. It's just in the trivia that I'm looking at. What? That they shouldn't call that trivia.

[Dax Shepard]

No. What if they. When what they mostly shouldn't call it is true. Trivial.

[Lily Padman]

They didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay?

[Lily Padman]

So don't worry.

[Dax Shepard]

All right?

[Lily Padman]

He's a handsome man.

[Dax Shepard]

Very handsome.

[Lily Padman]

And that's all I have to say.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, well, I love Patrick. I really had to resist. I have that inclination. I get, you know, 1 in 10 guests where it's like I get his phone number and hang out with him and talk about things.

[Lily Padman]

You get people's phone numbers all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

I know, and I. I wanted to get his.

[Lily Padman]

And you didn't.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Maybe because he's a journalist. Oh, I don't know. But I did. I wanted it.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, that's interesting. Okay. That's kind of telling. Like, you do this all the time. You did it earlier with our guests that you danced in front of, and maybe you think it's. You're able to do that because they're in entertainment, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

We're all in entertainment. We also might be at things together.

[Lily Padman]

But you might be at something with Patrick.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, and maybe Patrick would like to be friends, but I just like. Oh, I'm a showbiz guy.

[Lily Padman]

He doesn't live here. I guess so. That makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

No, but I go to where he lives quite often, so it could be a friendship.

[Lily Padman]

All right, well, I think we could still get his name. Number.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.