Transcript of Patrick Radden Keefe (investigative journalist) New

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

Hi.

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 and a Family's Search for Truth. I fell in love with Patrick.

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

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.

He's an object expert. He's an object expert.

Zach, so good to meet you. Yeah, great to meet you, Patrick. Do you— okay, good. I was gonna say, you're wondering, 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.

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.

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

Oh, it's in Boston?

It's in Boston proper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a city kid. I grew up a block from the end of the Red Line, basically. Dorchester is 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.

What's the bad rap it gets?

Violent crime.

Oh, great. I love that.

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.

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

It was less than $40,000.

Isn't it mind-blowing?

Yeah.

Our neighbor is just 1,000 feet 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.

Incredible.

What did your mom and dad do?

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. I know this.

And he worked for Dukakis. Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And so he was like director Director of City Planning for Lowell, 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 Dukakis lost in '88, and my dad went into the private sector and did real estate stuff.

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

He was.

He was?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which was the biggest thing to hit Boston ever, right? The Big Dig.

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. The biggest construction project imaginable.

And everyone was irate about it.

It was a nightmare. People hated it.

You didn't like the digging.

There was an elevated highway that ran through the city of Boston and really divided the city in two. It was an 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, like, community relations.

Oh, wonderful.

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 they're looking out on this— it's a greenway. Yeah.

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

It was really something.

Yeah, exactly. 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?

Yeah.

And you do history?

Yeah.

Okay. A specific history?

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

World War II is more fun, yeah?

Than World War I?

Yeah.

Nothing's more fun than World War I.

Okay.

Come on.

I love that. Come on. Okay.

Trench warfare and stuff.

I loved it. I loved it.

We missed Mom. Mom was a philosophy professor?

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. So, 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.

She's still active?

So, she's retired from 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 gifts eggs where some university in York or in Perth in Australia they went to, or Bari in Italy, where they'll basically say, "Come for 6 weeks." And my dad goes too. Yeah. What a great life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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.

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

I think so. I mean, everybody read, everybody talked. If we went 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, like, do a book report. There wasn't any kind of performative, like, smarty-pants stuff. It was more just kind of—

Thinkers.

No, your parents interested in the world.

Totally. The thing that I take from her that is, you know, 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. Contrarian. 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," you know, as though everybody felt this way, you know? And in fact, it's just like—

She likes to call bullshit on things.

Yeah, completely.

Okay, so Columbia history, and then you go to Cambridge. 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?

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 all these 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 in 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 2-year fellowship, I wasn't paying for it, it was all paid for. So I thought, okay, I'll go to the LSE. And I was interested in electronic spying by the National Security Agency.

This is your NSA book?

Yeah, exactly. And this kind of interest had started. And so I was looking at the LSE 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.

Uh-huh. Really quick, did Michael Lewis go there? To the London School of Economics? Is that where he was at when he had that fateful—

I don't know. I don't remember. He might have.

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

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

Oh, no, maybe you're right. Yeah. That's right, there was some weird connection. Yeah, London School of Economics.

Wow.

Thank God I wasn't going crazy.

I just remember this felt very familiar.

Familiar.

Yeah, I should be so lucky.

Yeah.

Have you hung with him?

I have once.

He's a charming motherfucker.

He's totally great. So it's funny, I had done his podcast, but it was via 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 a short flight from London to Dublin and I ended up seated next to Michael Lewis. Kid, I think, to Trinity or something, or they were visiting Trinity. We talked the whole way. It was great.

Yeah, what a fun surprise.

Great teammate.

No shit.

It was great.

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

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. Really? That's what I wanted to do. Oh, wow. 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.

Who did you love as a writer at that time?

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. Amazingly great. But also at the time, everybody—

It was the thing to be.

Cliché? Are we cliché?

Maybe a little bit. I don't think so. But not anymore. The thing is, if you wait long enough, it's not cliché anymore.

Yeah, I think if you ask 100 people, maybe 3 people have read Raymond Carver.

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

Yeah. But he's a master. 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, totally.

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 café 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 stayed in school. Yale Law comes. Yeah. I was in college, went to grad school for 2 years in England, which was free. So who wouldn't go? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

You didn't have an agent, did you?

No, not at that point.

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

It's so nice to talk to a contemporary. Yeah.

Yes. So you did it too? 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 thought I was Raymond Carver.

Yeah, we were probably competing with each other in a certain way.

We came across our same short the same day. These guys again. Totally. And by the way, rarely did That's not my experience. Yeah.

But occasionally they will. You get the little note. You just looking for any sentence. 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. Yeah. 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 in cursive, some tiny little thing.

That's sweet. That's all you need.

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

They do.

I'm so delighted we both had that stack. My first rejection letter for an article for The New Yorker, not a story, is framed in my home office. It's from 1998.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's a good reminder.

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—

but you have to think that. What are you gonna wait till you're 26 to start thinking that? Exactly. Okay, but the law degree perplexes me. Why did we want that? Just to stay in school? Yeah, just to stay in school.

She was already going.

She was going. You guys both went. We both went. Yeah, yeah.

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. Those are—

That's the one I like the most.

Yeah. Okay. All right. 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 close 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— Yeah, you were a realist. 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 now 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 because it's in front of you. And worse than that, you know, there's this idea Irving 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. Yeah, yeah. 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, 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. Yeah, yeah.

And then I showed up in law school and I thought, "What have I done?" You know, "Why am I here?" 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.

Yeah. One of the things that I think is actually great about doing the work that I do, not just writing, but actually reporting, 'cause 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. That. But even so, you're absolutely right. At a certain point, you're like, I've been pitching The New Yorker for 6 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you passed the bar in '05, right? I did. But you do— you finally get published in The New Yorker in '06? 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 and pitching and pitching. I was supposed to go 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. Yeah, yeah, I knew this is not my career. It's not what I want to do. I was just looking around.

Yeah. And what was the vibe?

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

That's 16 years ago. So, no.

Yeah, but it was soon after. It was soon after. After that.

2012. Okay, so it was right after. Yeah. 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— Yeah, impressive. Yeah. And in fact, it was just— more middle managers than you've ever seen in your life.

Do you know Mike Judge is Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, all of it? Yeah. He was a physicist before he was a cartoonist. Oh, I didn't know that. 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 working—

You have the nuclear codes. Yeah.

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

Yeah, 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, I'm like, "Sure, 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 was the expectation experience like getting the dream you had since 16 years old?

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. Oh, wonderful. Those 6 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, 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. 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 staff, I had 2 kids.

I was a grown-up.

Yeah. Was your wife— She's a smarty pants. Was she— She was doing all kinds of different things.

We moved to DC. 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. Yeah, yeah, she does financial crime.

Yeah, international.

I mean, she doesn't do the financial crime, right?

Yeah, she doesn't commit financial crimes.

She should think about it. She probably knows exactly. I mean, honestly, she would have the expertise for sure if any international criminal organizations are hiring.

Not to worry, but we did interview this guy that wrote this incredible book, and it was an exposé on Fort Bragg.

Oh yeah, I know that.

Oh great, so the Delta Force running drugs. Well, one of the most prolific and successful was the guy in 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.

You got to know the rules to know how to break them. So tasty. Yeah. 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 5 or 6 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.

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 Peet recently. Yes, we lived in England during the Troubles.

I listened to that interview.

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. Oh, we want one bad. I want a Peabody so bad.

You know, I'm in the Peabody fold now, so I'll speak to someone. That's the way it works. I'm bad. One of the mixers just go You know what?

I'm shocked.

Guys, your ticker's off here. What's going on?

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.

I don't know what just happened. Something happened. The nominations definitely come before you win.

Okay, so I think that am heated rivalry.

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.

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

Is it a nice statue?

Yeah, you get this little kind of bronze looking guy.

Is it directly under the rejection article? They can see each other. 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 8-part podcast.

Did you know about it? Yeah, really good.

Yeah, and it starts exploring this rumor that the CIA had actually written the song The Winds of Change by the Scorpions. How on earth do you get on to that as a story to 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 sides, becomes helpful in helping you find a situation after the fact. Oh, suit your skills. Yes. Okay, 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—

person, everyone knows it.

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

Really quick, on prima facie, did you think that was possible at all?

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

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

Some of them had done acid, certainly. There you go. I also would imagine too, it's an incredible hub for you to tell all kinds of crazy other CIA stories.

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

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 here?" All the stuff that you're kind of hanging on the line, that's the fun of it. Okay, so that's great.

And people should listen to that. Winds of Change. 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 when I'm learning about London, when I'm learning about the Thames, when I'm learning about the influx of all the money that's happened, this is the meat 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?

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 to people people and stay curious. I have a pretty firm conviction, more so now than ever, that you're not going to 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 9-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. You know, 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 a guy a guy. 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 on with this guy.

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.

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

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 "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 Julia Neuberger. And Julian Neuberger was the rabbi to Zach Bretler, this kid. He suddenly made this connection, and he said, "I think I might have a story for you." Oh, he was that upfront?

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..." Yeah, yikes.

It's like someone saying they got a movie idea for you.

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 London." 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. Oligarch. And he basically had said that much, and I knew I'm in.

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

Whoa.

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 American Insurance Co. and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. Yeah, 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? Yeah, her father, Hugo Kranz. And they have two boys. They have Joe and Zach. They're a couple years apart. Exactly. And initially, it's pretty honky-dory till 13, right? They're mildly competitive. I think one of the pivotal things just is that that. At first, of course, the older brother is 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? University College School, UCS. 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 Zach 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? The gorillas.

Yes. We just had a gorilla expert on. Particular. The exact same story.

I brought this up. How so? 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 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 mad he 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 infants. He got deranged from the rejection and the emasculation, in a sense.

Humans are so similar. In so many ways.

How it can warp you.

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 politically.

Yeah. 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 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.

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

Yeah, I don't think that's the pivotal thing. I just think it's a moment of embarrassment for Zach and failure. Totally. Yeah. And he is a bright kid, but maybe not academically. He ends up going to— is it the Mill? Mill Hill. Explain Mill Hill as a school.

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 in 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 rejected from this school and this school and this school and this school." And that's how you end up at Mill Hill.

But you also still have money, so he's at Mill Hill. Yeah, 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, like, 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 to 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 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.

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.

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. There's no point in the book where I give you 30 pages of history on London.

No!

There's 3 pages we learn all this. However, the way I thought of it is almost in a movie, the way you occasionally will get the kind of sped-up up, seeing the Brooklyn Bridge get built.

The montage.

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 is 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 invents the modern stackable shipping container of a sort that we've all seen.

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

I mean, there you go. Yeah. 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. 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 navigate the Thames. 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.

So it has 30-plus years of kind of stagnation. 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, like, 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.

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 his family was of means. In the book, The Broken Ladder, it talks about 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 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, after a while, absolutely fabulous wealth. Yeah. 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 my industry— I'm not as inclined to go down that road. Yeah. 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.

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 live, 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.

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

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 Zak watched. Interestingly for me, there's a version of this story where you say, "Oh, look," you kind of blame the Hollywood movies because Zak was obsessed with Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs, watched them again and again, and didn't watch them as cautionary tales.

He really thought, "This is what I want to be." In particular, he wanted to be Jonah Hill, who was like the grottiest of the pair.

And he had a kind of a sense of, "You do anything that you can to just get yours." I understand Zak's state of mind.

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 it, and he's going, well, fuck, if I'm not gonna get given it, I'm gonna take it.

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 because 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 want to sell out. The punk rock Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. And occasionally people like that could be obnoxious, but there this sense of like, if it's corporate, it's bad. You want to 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.

They have no romantic notion of that at all.

Yeah, no, no, it's the opposite.

It's like, who can I get on the private jet?

So absolutely, yeah.

In fairness to people, you know, I have teenage kids. I think it's hard for them to imagine what the future is going to look like 10 years from now or 5 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 number of ways in which it's kind of anybody's guess what your life is going to look like.

This has got a very House of Cards feel right now. It does.

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

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

Totally. And I think Zack had that.

He's also a teenager. 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? Is it like kind of manosphere style?

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's almost like a stand-up 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 stand-up 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.

And an incredible information retention.

Unbelievable memory, which his dad has as well. Very helpful for me in working on the book that his dad has this incredible memory. Zach had that too. He's charming. Very charming. 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 lost. 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've known better. But young people would have a thing 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 buy it." Well, 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. Oh my God, another line.

Oh my God, you're doing it again. Literally a joke. Like, that's a movie.

Yeah. Oh my God, that's incredible.

Wow. There is something obviously quite corrosive about the extreme wealth.

Yeah, that's why people hate billionaires.

I mean, there's some truth. 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 going to, as a reader, why could this happen to this kid? You're going to feel that, obviously. It's so many things, and it's 4% this.

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 panic about social media. Like, I am morally panicked about social media, but I don't want this book to function in that way. Yeah, yeah. 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? Yeah, exactly.

Why do you know about that?

In 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.

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

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. Yeah. Okay, so when does he start the child of an oligarch persona? 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. That's a common theme for him. Yeah, the arms dealer thing.

Well, and the mother being dead.

And the mother being dead, yeah.

Or the mother hating him and being in Dubai.

But then he also tells a story about his father being dead. Part of it was that, 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 Munchausen's-y a little bit.

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 a soul, and I'm 15 years old, 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 sort of intuits that, 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." 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." He's so good.

He's not happy about it.

Oh my God, the gymnastics. But I guess you probably get addicted to that, I'm sure, also, the high of figuring out.

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

Yeah, he defied Lincoln's statement, "No man's memory is so good that he can afford to be a liar." I mean, that's the thing.

Again and again. But I think I found patient zero. I think I found the first guy that he told the son of an oligarch story to. 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 all.

What's that guy's name? Mark or Colin? Mark Foley. How did he meet Mark Foley?

So randomly, there was an art exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. It was an invitation-only thing. To this day, I don't know how Zak 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, "Am I just gonna bail?" And you're looking at the art. And two of these 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 Zack 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.

He kind of idolizes Putin at this time too. He does. He's super into Putin.

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 out, and he sticks his shoulders back, and he kind of glowers into the camera in this very kind of Putin-esque way.

Putin-esque. Yeah. As if on horseback, shirtless.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And Zach, 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." I hear.

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

Exactly.

And he himself is Russian? Is Foley Russian? He's not.

He's English. But Foley is exposed to the real thing, and Zak tries it out. And to this day, I think there might have been a universe in which none of this would have happened if Foley didn't buy what Zak 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 offspring of an oligarch— like tracksuit, whatever. And so Foley suggests that they get coffee and that 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 introduce you to them." 'Cause he's also said, "I'm in charge of managing my father's money for investing purposes." 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." 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.

But here's the thing, Dax, the parents, Matthew and Rachelle, who I got to know 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.

And I gotta say, as they're 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.

I'm so glad you said that. 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 wanna do..." 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." 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 like, what the fuck are we doing?

But that's just very you.

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

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

And I'm just like, hold on, timeout. It's a racket. Everyone I'm working with who's successful, they went to shitty fucking schools and then you're just exposing 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.

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

And your parents weren't loaded?

No. Well, I'll put it to you this way. They were comfortable enough to send 3 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're still paying for it.

You didn't come back from spring break with a tan from skiing in Aspen. No. And some of your classmates did. 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.

You also had a healthy mechanism of tall poppy in Boston that would have probably prevented the kids that were super rich from— Oh, that's interesting.

Like, there's also a cultural force there that probably helped dampen— The really rich 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.

They would get their ass kicked if they posted a picture of themselves on a private plane. They would get the shit kicked out of them. 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. Yeah, 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.

My favorite story of that kind is I'm talking to some kids of a friend of mine, and it's two girls, their sisters. I love them. One of them's dating a new guy he met at school. She was visiting the family in New York. I'm like, what do they do? He's kind of pussyfooting around it. And then the younger sister goes, they have this scream painting in their apartment. There we go. It tells me everything I need to know.

Say no more.

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.

But again, Mill Hill wasn't that.

I think that the idea was also that he could go to Mill Hill for a period of time, and if you excelled there, then maybe you transfer someplace else. The other thing is, to your point, this is a family where both Matthew and Rochelle, 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. Yeah.

I'm not judgmental of the parents. —environment. You could see how toxic it is. I don't like the institutions. Yeah. They know they're living on the oligarch corruption, and they know these kids aren't good students.

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. Institutionally. Yep. From above. Which is pretty gross. Yeah. You know, you have a student and he dies. And the thing for me is I'm not digging for dirt. I just want to talk to 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," it's a little gross to me. Yeah.

Okay, so he's going down this path, he's getting more obsessed with it. And it's important to say that Rochelle and Matthew, although they are seeing this turn in him, they have no clue that he has this persona. No. 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. Yeah. 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 gonna go to school. He's gonna try to be an entrepreneur." or maybe it'll work for him. People do. Yeah, I can imagine being in a situation being like, 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. 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, and 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." 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—

And what they don't want is for you to confront them and say— No, it's— Bullshit. Yeah.

Yeah. And moreover, I don't even like this. Right. It's not something actually I would be. How do you tell a kid that, "I wouldn't be proud of you"? 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, is he's trying to kind of break away from us. So, what are you doing? Is it really gonna be that fruitful in that situation to say, "Hey, we hate those people. Be more like us." Yeah. Right.

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

Akbar Shamji. I'll tell you about him as he at first appears to Zach and to Zach'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. Like 40,000 of them. 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 to build a railroad.

To the tune of like 90% of the total economy. They control the—

Yeah, by this tiny group. 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 this 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 Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama and the royal family.

This is what Zac wants his mother to wear. To buy.

Yeah, he's showing her the dresses. Zac 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 Zac 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 Zac, he had declared bankruptcy, and he was getting chased by creditors.

But he's still driving a Benz.

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

Everyone's talented, Mr. Ripley. Yeah, literally everyone.

On the night that Zack dies, he's in that apartment, and there's two guys with a MacBar as 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the other guy is Indian Dave. Yep. What's his last name? Sharma? Yeah, well, that's just kind of— Verinder Sharma.

Yeah. Zach name. Yeah.

What does he think Dave is?

What happens is that when Zach meets Akbar, he tells Akbar 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 Zach 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 Zach's never coming up with the money. He never actually he 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?" Zak 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, Zak would always be waiting out in front of the building. Like, he never saw him come out.

He'd pick him up there, always.

They'd be like, "Oh, come meet me at my place," and he'd be standing there. Standing outside. And so Zak claims essentially to be temporarily homeless. So he's this billionaire kid who's fighting with his mom and his dad is dead, and he has no place to live. And Akbar says, "I have this friend who has this luxury apartment. His name is Verinder 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 Zak 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 in his 50s, just kind of hanging out. He works out a lot, he boxes, he lives in this nice apartment. Drug use?

Doing a ton of drugs. Unmarried, I assume?

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 Indian people are so— I mean, this guy, Indian Dave, is really quite a character. I don't like Indian Dave.

I think he's got a cool—

He gave it kind of an edge. No. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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.

And they're looking to do deals. They're looking to do deals. Everyone's trying to get rich. And I'm sure even Indian Dave doesn't have nearly the money.

It's funny, 'cause I saw this when I was writing about the IRA 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 to be a leg breaker. You're not a thief.

Yeah, 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. Yeah, exactly. And they all blow the money.

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 Zak, because Akbar, he wouldn't meet with me or talk to me, but I emailed with him a lot. I said, so you meet Zak, he says, my name is Zak Ismailov, I'm the son of a Russian immigrant. Question, "Did you Google him?" Yeah, exactly. 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." 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.

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 that am I 6 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 5th floor apartment a man runs and jumps on his own accord into the Thames. Yeah, he's not pushed. When this happens, it's coinciding with Rochelle and Matthew have kind of lost contact with them. There's an email late at night like, where are you? At 2:00 AM he says, we're all good, everything's She'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 is, "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 8:00 AM, 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— Yeah, the first thing I should say—

So, you know, I write nonfiction. Everything has to be true. They're not novels. 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, 'cause a lot of the time you're relying on people's memories and so forth.

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

Completely. 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 'em to you in order. I wanna 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 New Yorker article or a book, the pleasure of it is actually that it takes longer. I can kind of take you down the path a ways before I they get to the switchback. You sort of have to have a bigger canvas to do that kind of thing. So, what I was gonna say is, a lot of the time I'm relying on people's memories. In this case, Rachelle 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 just, you know, "I can't imagine." I know how excited you were in that moment. Oh, and so, after Zak has gone missing, she connects with Akbar, 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 on 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.

Right, 'cause 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?

It's more than that, 'cause this is what's so fascinating. You know, now, certainly in recent decades, It used to be the case— 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.

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 5 minutes later, you're already kind of rewriting your memories. This fascinating thing happened with Rochelle and Matt. Matthew, where, remember, they don't know much about their son's friends. Zak was very secretive about this. They knew this guy, Verinder 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 Zak stay at his place. Akbar seemed like this nice guy who had a whole bunch of different business interests and was kind of mentoring Zak. And then they go and they meet with Akbar and they talk to Verinder 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 They're lying to us. But I subsequently realized that was because their memory of it was colored by— What they know now. What they had subsequently learned.

Right. 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, "Zach 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, Akbar knew in that moment that Zach 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 saying 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.

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

Yes. Of course. But there's another thing too. You get this wild thing where Rochelle and Matthew have no idea about Zach having having pretended 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 Brettler at all. We thought his mom lived in Dubai and his dad was dead." I know.

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. Oh, wow. This is incredible. Unimaginable.

It's funny. I think a lot of people in America still think of Scotland Yard as this great place. 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.

Investigation. Yeah, suffice to say, you gotta read the book, but Indian Dave was not asleep at 12:30. No. There's more to the story. Akbar did not leave for the night.

There's a lot. This is a show. You're gonna make a show? It's already been optioned by A24.

Oh, you're making a show?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's riveting. It's so sad.

It's real. I wish it could be just fiction, you know?

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 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 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 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 Rochelle'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 you, 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 gonna be okay, and part of the reason they're gonna be okay, actually, is that they had that lesson, that example.

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 gonna 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 and this life, and we're gonna now quit living because we had our first challenge?

That's the thing. I mean, they both said, you know, they're not particularly religious, but they both kind of invoked, 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? Yeah. Because I've never shown a piece work to the people 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 2 or 3 times in my career when I've showed a piece of writing to the 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 wouldn't know would've, if they had editorial control.

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." 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. Oh, that's lovely. Joe came as well.

They seem like really incredible people.

They are. I think they are.

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 to anybody. I think also sometimes this stuff just happens.

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." I also think there's this fantasy that we have that your child is a piece of clay that you can just mold. Totally. Couldn't agree more. There is a limit to what you're able to do, and it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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? There's so many factors.

Yeah. Telling them this or that, I reject.

Well, it can backfire. Yeah. One of my dear friends back home is a few years older than me, and he's got 4 kids, and I'm a wonderful family life, and I think I was expressing some frustration that the didactic lessons that I give 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? His 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.

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

You've depreciated everything else that you might say.

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.

Yeah, that's such a good example of the restaurant because 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.

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, 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. Yeah, I agree.

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 completely. And then what percentage of my time am I spending in this totally anonymous way where no one's gonna 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. 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 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, so sort of late '90s basically, or you date it to the advent of smartphones, so sort of 2010s, these new things come along that completely rewrite really 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, uh, 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, uh, 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.

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

First it comes an understanding. So I think maybe —down the road.

The first step. My optimism comes from this pattern that's never broken, which is young people watch old people and do not want to 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, because I push back on, like, Jonathan Haidt and a lot of these people. Yeah. These are also anomalies. Zach is an anomaly. That's not a normal story. It's a spectacular story. Story why it's worthy of a book. And back to the Manosphere doc, it's a terrifying doc. Yeah, 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.

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 2 hours about Zach, not having watched his Manosphere doc. Realize 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 maxer 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.

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 doc. 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.

This goes back to the question I raised, is that I have very similar feelings. What it means for 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. Yeah. 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.

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

I guess here I'll dabble in the moral panic stuff, but these technologies are so addictive. Mm-hmm. 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 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 to—

yeah, it's chemical at this point, so it's going to take some real—

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

I had to get a new screen put on my phone, but also, if you would have 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 2 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 for my phone like 20 times.

Well, in part because it's now like the Swiss Army knife of life. I use it to pay for things, I use it to take pictures, I use it to listen to music, etc., etc.

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.

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.

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 need to He knows you got it. Those are the stories. Those are the books I love to read.

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.

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

Well, Patrick, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's 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 charm. I know, so fun. He was a model. He modeled.

Wow. Yeah, he's got that catalog model.

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

Crew! Ding, ding, ding! You gotta be handsome to be fucking with J.

Crew. Come on, come on. It's a delight to meet you, and I do hope you'll come back with your other books. I will.

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

Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Hi there, this is Hermion Permian. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact Back to Miss Monica.

We got to discuss something. Yeah, so we just did an Armchair Anonymous. We just did an Armchair Anonymous, and there was a guest, a man who was a man, yeah, who popped on, and he was so attractive. Yeah, it was, it was shocking.

It was shocking, like Paul Newman level attractive.

From the second I saw him and this plays out in real time.

I knew he was in Georgia. You did. Within 4 words you said, are you in Georgia?

Well, I said, where are you? Are you, are you in the South? Right. But I knew it was Georgia.

Yeah. But you were trying to play it a little safe.

Yeah. Um, that's why I say go for it, you know?

I know you're right.

Because he was wearing a shirt that I feel like all my friends in, in the South wear.

It's interesting how there are regional uniforms.

Yes, absolutely. That's why I had to get out of Michigan.

Again. I was going to hit a certain age where I was going to have to start wearing golf shirts. No, you weren't.

And I was like, I got to get out of here.

I can't wear golf shirts. That's where you drew the line. I, I could see it on the wall.

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

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. Oh, all right. And then I have tattoos, but I'm friendly. Yeah, I think they find that charm, that I'm a heathen, I'm godless, but I'm still friendly and offer my services. The celebrity helps.

It probably doesn't hurt. Okay, back to Will. Yes. So he was very, very, very hot. Startling. He also— what we noticed, and this isn't why I, I didn't notice this at first, but then he had UGA paraphernalia in the background, and I was— and then it was like, oh my God, he went to Georgia. Dream husband. God. It then came out that what years you both graduated.

Yes. And there wasn't a 11-year gap. 12, 12 years.

I graduated in 2009, he graduated in 2021. 12-year gap.

Yeah, you, you, you were taken aback. I was really rattled.

Rattled. Yeah.

Um, and did you think he's so young or I'm so old or a combo?

Exactly. Okay, so normally when this happens, I think, oh my God, they're so— he's so young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And This time I was like, I'm so embarrassed. Like, I'm so embarrassed by my age. Oh wow. I'm so embarrassed that like I think he's cute and I'm like an old lady. No, you—

and I was like a cougar. There's no— there would be something really wrong with you if you didn't find Will attractive.

But I had like PQs.

Yeah, of course you did. He was, he was very horny.

He's married.

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, and I loved it.

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

Show me your abs. Yeah. Like, what kind of abs do you got?

I felt like her. Yeah, good. No. I don't want to be her.

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 going to seem like a gross old lecherous man. I know. I'm glad you had that experience.

I am not glad. I feel very— I feel weird right now. Like, I feel, I feel old. I feel, um, cougar. He said, I mean, he's so hot. And the whole time he's talking. Yeah. Spoiler.

Yeah.

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

Oh, yeah.

And I was like, you were certain he's tall too, which is cool. Yeah, I know he's tall.

Yeah. Deceited.

And then I just feel very, uh, conflicted about what, what happened. Oh, because also my rule generally, yeah, is that I would never date anyone younger than my brother. My brother's 30. Uh-huh. He's younger than my brother, 27. Yeah. So I was also like, hmm, like, should I change my rule? Absolutely.

If a Will comes across your radar—

one other thing, okay, was happening during this. Oh, he was also triggering some old insecurities. Really? Yes, because he— Will from UGA is Will from UGA. Like, there are— there were so many Wills around when I went to school.

They're handsome Southern gentlemen.

Handsome, white, white as hell. He was very white. Uh, white bread, white as the driven snow. Gorgeous hair. He spoke about Mom is— Mom's a Southern belle. Yeah. Um, this is the type of person I could never have, right?

You told yourself you could never have.

And I was like— I felt a little bit back there, a little insecure. Yeah, I was like, oh my God, I'm so ugly, like, in front of Will. Like, I shouldn't— Is it a fun feeling though?

No, it's— it's not like you enjoy the reminiscent feeling of youth? Like, no part of it is fun?

Feeling bad about myself?

No. I know, 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?

Yeah, but no, no, I, I like not feeling like that. I like feeling confident and feeling good. Good. I'm good around people. But Will, um, uh, Will— excuse me, Will, Will triggered some old stuff of like, oh my gosh, like, this is— you never like me. Yeah. So I'm feeling a little insecure about my looks and my body and my age and, um, pretty much the whole package.

Yeah. Oh wow. Wow. Well, I think if he wasn't married, he would applaud you. I don't think he needed any of those feelings.

So, because I think so, he is Will from UGA. Was I being so embarrassing?

No, not at all. You weren't embarrassing at all. I really feel like I was. Your flirty, aggressive self is very appealing. That's why I urge to use it more.

But I think it was too much. It was like, no, I was very confident.

And confidence is attractive.

I know, but, but not for you. But I wasn't that unique. No, for everyone else. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I actually wasn't confident. And so I think I was overcompensating.

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

I wonder if Will will hear this. No, he didn't listen to the show. His sister Claire, my sister-in-law, your new sister-in-law.

Sister-in-law. Yeah, she'll, she'll, she'll relay this. She's been down this path for 20— let's say she's 2 years younger than Will. For, for 25 years she's seen Will's effect on women, and she understands this entirely. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was a joyous experience.

It did something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Will. Thanks, Will. I enjoy it. Appreciate you.

Yeah, you're coming hard at him, Dak. Stop saying that. Stop saying that. That is making me feel so weird.

Duh. Yeah.

Oh, I was so proud of you. Why? What did I say? This is what I'm begging.

This is what I'm always begging for. What did I say?

It's like, get in the driver's seat.

You think someone's hot?

Fucking get at them. In the South, they don't like that. They like demure. No. What did I say that was the most aggressive? Because I think I blacked out.

There was just a moment that you were like, if you hadn't met your wife, I don't know the way you rolled it out. Basically, I think it made it very clear that you would have fucked.

No, no.

You said I did. 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— um, okay, that adds a new layer to the cougar element.

It's like your mom. Yeah, you got like more of a mommy fetish.

Yeah, that's not—

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

Will, Will, Will, what did you get?

Pull your pants down. Will, let me inspect your butt cheeks.

Did you make a doody again?

Have you done— you are naughty, Will. You know you have to use a toilet, big boy. Ew, guys, we're talking about a full-grown adult in case you're triggered. This is not a teen. There's a 27-year-old man in the South. He had his own office decorated with memorabilia. He has a degree.

Yeah, he probably has a child on the way.

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. It is interesting. Yeah, don't roll anything up. Maybe you changed my life. On this topic, a commenter pointed out, and I think it's a brilliant comp, someone said, uh, 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.

And now you know what it feels like.

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

Because it's like, this just— yeah, I'm not a loafers dude. And it It's great. It's great.

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

Exactly. Yeah. So I thought that was— thank you, listener. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Yeah. I thought that was a solid point.

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

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.

Well, because you know what? I— when you said it, I was like, that's true. Yeah, it's not you. I don't want you to be anyone who's not you.

You like— and it's great, it's fine— you do like preppy, like as an esthetic. Oh, you like a man who's preppy. Oh, a man. Yes. And to me— oh, interesting— all of my class warfare baggage, preppy was the last thing I ever wanted.

I think you have good style. I don't think you have— I wouldn't— I'm not like— I don't I don't look at you and think like, God, we gotta do something about Dax's style. Make some effort. You are very, you know you. Uh-huh. You know your style. You have style. Yeah, right or wrong.

You have a specific lane of it.

You have a perspective. Exactly, you have a perspective about— A point of view. Yeah, that's what style is. Yeah. And so I'm not ever gonna try to change that.

I'll have you know though that I'm regularly going, how consistent is this style? 'Cause even today 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 Converse and they're not that thing. And I recognize how arbitrary it is.

Well, whatever, you liked them.

Yeah, 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.

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

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

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

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

Okay.

Full thing. Yeah. Maybe like a flower in my lapel.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Who do I like that's preppy?

JFK Jr.

Yeah, apex preppy, hot as fuck.

But he's like the standard of preppiness.

That look, JFK Jr. look, you love it. I, I think it's great.

Yeah, um, it's the look, right? That would be number one.

Well, I don't think so. I think it— 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, um, gym shorts, you know. And that had to change. And guess what? I changed it, right?

Yeah, because he's your—

he's my husband. Yeah, yeah. And he— and now he's addicted. Yeah, now he likes shopping. And now everyone always comments on his outfits.

Oh, and he loves it.

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

Okay, I want to ask a question about style. I had this thought the other day, okay, because I know someone who like by all accounts probably has good style. They're definitely always on trend, okay? But I had the thought— man or woman? Man. Okay, the style changes so frequently that I actually don't know what his style is, right? And so I wondered, like, for me that's an issue. Is that an issue for you?

Um, I am not attracted to trends. Okay. Personally, I like classic style. Timeless. Timeless. JFK. RFK. Nope. Uh, every now and then I'll get a piece, every now and then, that's trendy because it's like fun. I mean, you're wearing enormous pants.

That's part of the trend. No, you have, you have taken on enormous pants in the 2 years?

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. Okay, skinny jeans are kind of making a comeback. I'm not going there. Okay, I'm not wearing them. You're like me also.

I'm old, right? I'm much older than you and Will, as we've established. And 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, At least I'm like, no, no, we're sticking with what our style has been.

Yeah, it's more that I'm like, I don't like that. Yeah. So sure, it might come back as a trend, but I'm going to skip that trend because I don't like it. Okay. And plus, oh my God, I'm so old. Oh yeah, you're old. 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. Yeah. So I'll always rely on that. But I'm with you. Is just dressing for the trend, I don't really think that's stylish.

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

Yeah, they don't have a perspective.

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

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, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, even if they're like, my style is slob, that's not for Yeah, that's fair.

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

Yeah, he wears basketball shorts. He wears dresses.

Yeah. I think a lot of guys are like, thank God Sandler's doing this so I can just wear all this athletic gear all the time. Yeah, that's never been, for whatever reason, never called to me.

I know, I'm glad.

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

you never—

I've never seen you wear a jersey. Uh, minimal.

Like, would you wear this sweater? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have a lot of cardigans.

I think this would look nice on you.

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

This is a large. I think it would fit me. Yeah, based on how much it doesn't fit.

It is, it is oversized.

It is oversized. That That's a look.

Yeah, that's a popular look.

It's a look that I like. Although I did want to take it off when I was talking to Will because I wanted him to see your boobs.

Well, be honest. Don't be crass. Be honest.

Don't be crass. Why else would you take your sweatshirt off?

See your shoulders?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my décolleté.

What if I wanted to get in short shorts when we had an attractive guest on? I was like, I always thought about getting down into my trunk.

You're married. I'm not. That's true. I get to do whatever I want. That's a big difference.

That's a big distinction.

I also think I'm male, so it's—

yeah, that's also a huge distinction. Here's the, the thing you're not going to want to hear, and is, is a truth. I think you'll understand part of this. Um, most women— not all, okay? I think most men want to see a pair of boobs.

Uh-huh.

Not all women want— women want to see a man's bulge.

Yeah, I would love to know the percentage. Me too. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you on prima facie, my favorite everything the same. Yeah. Um, I, 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, right, without feeling threatened. Yeah. How many would like to? Yes. I think it's way lower than the men and the boobs, but I think it's higher than we think.

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— if they already are interested in the guy and like the top.

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

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

Yeah, and that's okay.

And that's how we were all built, the way it is.

Yeah, we're just built this way.

Um, I don't know, I guess we can do some fat— unless you have more to say about Will or about cougars, or actually, I don't know if we're all even allowed to cougars anymore, but I think I can since now I am one.

What, there's a coalition of allies protecting cougars?

No, maybe cougars don't like— maybe older women like myself now, um, 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.

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

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

Sure you can 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.

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. But it doesn't mean that you guys can't shoulder cougar.

It's not even that bad. Pervert's like an illegal.

Just gonna like die. Like, what's the point?

Like, once you own being a cougar—

no, Rob, can you look up how old like you have to be to be qualified as a cougar?

I think 38 to 27. Oh, 40s or older. Oh my God, I'm getting so close. You're So you don't even— pick up this campaign against— to end cougars. It's a cute name.

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

it sounds like, um, might include women starting at age 35. Okay.

And depending on how young, probably. Yeah, it's the age gap, 10-year age gap or more.

Okay. 10?

I think 11 really sucks. Cougars are majestic. They're very powerful. They're a beautiful animal. They're the prettiest predator we have in America. No. Tigers in the Americas. Did you hear me? We didn't call you a vulture. Like, you've been given a very regal—

don't say you— the class of boogers. Fuck, this is great. This is great. My time is like—

I'm like, uh-oh, this is getting real. Yeah, I feel really—

I feel like— oh boy.

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, no, and you should feel bad for those. How did this happen to me? You're one of the lucky cougars. Okay, well, look, again, I'm just a pervert, so on my side of the street—

you're not a pervert, you're married with children. I know, I know, I know. That's not— how did this happen to me?

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

This is like an actual disaster. We got to get you—

I think once you start indulging your cougar appetite, you'll blow 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.

No, that's even worse.

Then I got my husband I love who dresses nice. Who is he?

Where is he? Jess.

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

I can't even have sex with them. They're going to break my bones because of bone density perimenopause. Frozen. Yes. Oh my God, maybe I'll break his bone.

Yeah, I bet you will. Here you go, there's the cougar. Let her out of there. I can't even control her. We got a new— I'm gonna announce to the LA Times that although P-22 is gone, we do have a new cougar sighting. Ah, I feel conflicted.

I gotta take a nap.

All right, let's take— let's do some facts. All right.

Okay, I have little to no facts. Okay, um, one thing, so So if you— okay, you're gonna be mad at me because you don't like when this happens, but, uh, worldwide box office versus domestic. Yeah, basically there's one teeny teeny tiny difference between the audio version of this one and the video. Why? 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. I'm so intrigued. Nothing. I mean, it's a 2-second thing that happens. I leave in the middle. Okay. And I come back. Okay. Because I had a cough attack. Oh, you sure did.

Yeah.

And attack? Yes.

You cough what, twice outside? Stop. Be honest.

How many times do you cough? Listen to me. Okay. 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 I'm like, I'm drinking some water. That's doing nothing.

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

I don't know what you guys were talking about. Yes, exactly. I was so panicked and trying to do teeny tiny coughs, and it was like building and building. You feel like you're going to suffocate if you don't.

Oh, my God.

And then I coughed a couple of times. Yeah, a couple coughs. It was still in there. It's still there. And at some point I leaned over and said, "I gotta get a cough drop." And then I walked over and then I left actually to get my cough out. Mm-hmm.

How many coughs do you think you did once you got outside?

Like 6 or 7? But by then it's like, they like, you sound like you're gonna throw up. Oh, okay. Because it's so intense because you've been holding it in and then it looks gross. I'm like—

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

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 mark. It's in fact an identity marker for me that I don't cough. Right.

Um, don't fart, don't cough, don't pee.

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

How far did you step away from the— far. Oh really?

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

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

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?

Calling attention to it.

Yeah, I was getting so— but then also I knew you 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.

It's shocking how much I know Notice, by the way, considering I'm looking at the guests always. Yeah, but I am catching 100% of what's happening over here. I am catching all the 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, oh, like, okay, so he's annoyed because he just did that. Okay. Um, so there's a lot going on in the head anyway. I, in the video, come back in, and then there's a little conversation about, did you go to CVS?

'Cause you claim you're just getting a cough drop.

Yeah.

And I'm like, bitch, I know they're in your bag right now. Yes.

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. Real-time disaster. So I just wanted, that's like, I left to cough. Oh. Great. Okay. Um, that's the one fact. That's one. I have 3 facts. Oh, okay. Um, it was a fact. It was a cough. That is why I left. It wasn't for anything else. Cause I think then you were like, oh, you farted. Mm-hmm. I didn't. It wasn't one of those.

You might have done both. No, it wasn't. Listen, when you're coughing with all your might, you, you're not, you're not clenching your sphincter. Things happen when you cough that hard.

I understand that it was, I was at high risk.

Okay, but it didn't— but it did not happen. Situation happened.

Okay. And then it happened, you know, it happened again when we were at the movie theater. The— the— me, you, and Rob went to a screening. Rob, did you hear my coughs? I did. See, I— and I knew you did. Did you say you did or didn't?

I did, and I chuckled. I chuckled a little bit.

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

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

So, 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.

It takes on a life of its own once you're panicked about it. Yeah, it amplifies all your sensations down there, and now you're convinced.

I know. Yeah. Okay, um, now the Peabody's, the awards, okay, winners were chosen.

What, like since we interviewed him?

Well, remember, I know I said like something about the Peabody's and I was like there was nominations or winners. I don't know what's what, but it was winners.

It was the winners. And we didn't— we didn't get one. Nope. Still didn't get one. What is it going to take, Peabody?

Okay, I'm going to tell you who, well, won. Okay, for entertainment: Adolescence. Great. Worthy of a Peabody. Very. Andor. I love the show.

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

Never seen it. Common Side FX. That's on Adult Swim.

Okay, so I don't know. So they— here's what I can no longer tell myself. They are digging deep. I mean, they're, they're, they're taking in all media. If they found a winner on Cartoon Network—

Adult Swim.

Adult Swim.

Yeah.

Is that not on Cartoon Network? I don't know. I think it is. It might be.

Dying for Sex.

Okay, Liz Meriwether.

Yeah, and Michelle Williams. Episode of ours. Go back and The Archives, um, Forever— that's a Netflix show.

Okay, so a lot of people. Heated Rivalry.

Sure. Jimmy Kimmel Live. Okay. Mussolini's Son of the Century.

Okay, so almost everyone in show business got nominated, it sounds like.

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

Holy smokes. I know.

Okay, and that's only in entertainment. There's—

I guess I'm relieved that there's no podcast. There's documentaries.

Oh, you're right, they should make a podcast. Oh God, here it is. Fuck, there is a podcast.

Oh my God, Peabody's.

Oh, that's—

this actually hurts. Oh boy, I don't even know if I want to hear the list.

Podcast and radio: Divine Intervention, great show. Scam Inc., really good. When We All Go to Heaven, love it.

So just 3? Yeah. All right, y'all can throw in— you did 15 TV shows.

Okay, I know. Well, I'm pretty upset. I'm sorry. Now that I've— now that I knew there was a specific section. Yeah. Okay. All right, next year.

I think sometimes you have to submit for these things too. Well, we certainly haven't done that.

Yeah, so we just didn't even try.

Okay, that's why. That's a nice way— those—

you guys are those types, like, we didn't even try, so we didn't lose.

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

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

Exactly. Um, oh, was The Long Good Friday Pierce Brosnan's first role? No, he was in a TV movie called Murphy's Stroke, and then The Long Goodbye is listed as number 2, same year though.

I think he was famously a street performer in Ireland, in Dublin maybe. Okay, um, maybe even one of these living in the car sitches. Uh, oh really? Yeah, he He, he, he paid his dues.

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. No.

What do they— well, they— when— what they mostly shouldn't call it is trivial.

They didn't. Okay, so don't worry. All right. Um, he's a handsome man. Very handsome. And that's all I have to say.

All right, well, I love Patrick. Um, 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.

You do, you get people's phone numbers all the time. I know.

And I, I wanted to get his and you didn't. No. Maybe cuz he's a journalist. Oh, I don't know. But I did. I wanted it.

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

We're all in entertainment. We also might be at things together. Right. But you He might be at something with Patrick. Yeah, maybe Patrick would, would like to be friends, but I just like, oh, I'm a showbiz guy.

He doesn't live here, I guess, so that makes no—

but I go to where he lives quite often, so it could be a friendship.

All right, well, I think we could still get his number. Okay. I love you. Love you.