Patrick Radden Keefe (investigative journalist)

for Experts on Expert.

“I'm Dan Shepherd, I'm joined by Lilly Padman.”

- Hi, yeah. - Today we have an award-winning investigative journalist. He writes for the New Yorker on staff. Patrick Radden Keef is a writer for the New Yorker.

He's also written a couple of, well, several incredible books,

Rogues, Empire of Pain, St. 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 just stunning to look at him. - 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 Keef. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

- That's so good to mention. - Yeah, great to meet you, Patrick. - You'll get good. - What's gonna say? - What about Patrick?

- No, I go by it's funny, so to this day, if I'm walking on the street and somebody says, "Pak Keef, I know it's someone I would to high school with." - Okay, sure, sure, sure. - You're a Massachusetts director?

- I'm from Dorchester. - What's the vibe in Dorchester? We certainly know what it is in Boston. Dorchester's is its own kind of very specific place. It's the biggest neighborhood in the city of Boston.

- Oh, it's in Boston, popper. - It's in Boston, popper. - Okay. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was a city kid. I grew up in a block from the end of the red line, basically.

Dorchester's very, ethically 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 rapic it? - Violent crime. - Oh, no, I love 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. - Yeah, did they buy it? - Are they lowing? - Yeah. - Our neighbors just 1000 people 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's sort of had two careers. He got into urban planning.

And so he was in a low-mass two sisters where I was born. - I know this and he worked for Ducacos. - Yeah, exactly. - And so he was like director for city planning

for law, the director of city setting for Boston, the director of state planning for Massachusetts. And then he ended up kind of working for Mike Ducacos. And then Ducacos 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 that hit Boston ever, right? The big dig? - Well, it was funny 'cause at the time. And 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. It was like the biggest construction project imaginable. - And everyone was right about it. - It was a nightmare. - People hated it.

- There was an elevated highway that ran through the city of Boston and really divided the city into, it was an eye sore. If you see old movies, you see it. And we used to drive on it when I would go back to Ducacos

or 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 the community relations. - Oh, wonderful. (laughing) Go to the Northan and there'd be these,

I rate old Italian grandma's who had an apartment that like a butt in this construction site. And we would have to pay for some proof windows and all that kind of stuff. But the funny thing is, of course, the day they cut the ribbon,

they were the ones who benefited the most. Like suddenly, you're looking at one of these, it's a green one. - Yeah. - Yeah, that's hilarious that they were the most opposed.

- It was really something like that. - 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 your PN, I ended up writing a lot about where we're one or two. More fun, yeah. - Then World War One? - Yeah.

“- I think it's more fun, then World War One.”

- Okay. - I love it. - I love it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Trends war, for instance.

- Yeah, I love it. - I loved it. - We missed, mom, mom is 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 elements in the way they map on to 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 grades, because my mom will get these visiting gigs

and Australia, they went to her barri,

“and they'll basically say, come for six weeks.”

And my dad goes to, - Yeah, yeah. - Oh, a great library, yeah, yeah. - Conversation at dinner must be very stimulating. You've 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 artistry. - I just feel like if I could pick something out of what my mom would 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 want to see movie, we would argue about it afterwards.

- Yeah, it was that kind of house. It wasn't a thing where everybody had to do a book report. There wasn't any kind of performative. - No. - It was already past stuff, it was more just kind of,

- Thinker. - No, you have past interest 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 for something. - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. - I mean, to this day, my parents, I won't mention the movies, but it's just hilarious.

- It will often be some best picture winning movie that my parents will walk out of after 20 minutes silly. - This was terrible movie, as though everybody felt this way. - That's right.

“- You know, in fact, this whole shit, honestly.”

- Okay, so Columbia history, and then you go to Cambridge. - Yep. - And now it gets confusing for me. So at Cambridge, you do international relations.

And then you also go to London School of Economics. - And when you study there, this kind of bullshit degree. It was a time when the London School of Economics was doing from a business perspective, 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 new professors,

but just by taking requirements from other things and kind of putting them together into a bespoke thing that looked like you. - Whatever you do, yeah. - When I was a Cambridge, I desperately wanted to leave.

Cambridge is a very big college. It's very pretty. I found it stifling.

I had never lived in a place that's small,

and I wanted to get into London. I was going into London every weekend, and I just felt like I'm getting out of here. I want to be in London. So I was on a tier fellowship,

I wasn't paying for it, it was all paid for it. 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. - Yeah, exactly.

And this kind of interested 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, information, and spying, and electronic stuff.

And I was like, it's me. (laughing) - Really quick. Let's go there to the LSE. - Can I look at him?

Is that where he was at when he had that feeful? - I don't remember. - He might have? - No. 'Cause he went to Princeton and then he was a banker.

- He was a young banker alone. - Yeah, yeah. - I thought he started this idea. - I was thinking maybe he could just agree there or something that then he could be.

- We went with a QCIA dinner and then-- - Oh, no, maybe you're right. - Yeah, got. - That's right, there was some weird connection. - Yeah, London's School of Economics.

- Wow. - Oh, I think God I was a non-crazy. I just remember this felt very familiar. - Familiar, thank you. - 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 by Zoom and it wasn't a real hang. And then I was in London, I had to fly to Dublin because I had done this TV series and we were up for the Irish Academy Awards.

And so I was flying, it was short flight from London to Dublin. And I ended up seated next to Michael Lewis. - Oh, my God.

“- Kid, I think went to Trinity or something”

where they were visiting Trinity. We talked the whole way as great. - Yeah, what a fun stuff. - Right, yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, it was great. - Okay, so none of this is leading towards luck.

- Yeah, I was always leading towards, no, no.

- The thing you're missing here is my 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 what I wanted to do? - I started reading New York in high school. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I kind of messed around with fiction. I turned out not to be pretty 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. - Yeah, I mean, amazingly great.

But also at the time, everybody. - It was the thing to be honest. - It was the absolute share, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Maybe a little bit.

- I don't think so. - It's not anymore. I think it's if you wait long enough, it's not cliche anymore. - Yeah, I think if you ask a hundred people, maybe three people of road race cars.

- But I think if you're into literature and you're a guy at that time. - Yeah. - But he's a master. - It's total master.

I guess what I mean is for me and for like 1998 Patrick to say, a love Raymond Carver would be a certain kind of guy talking about infinite just today. - Right. - Yeah, so ended up really wanting to write for the New

Worker, 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

"we'll help you for an apartment." It was very much, we love that you're doing this, but you're on your own. - Yeah, if you want to be a writer, it's not a matter of sitting around in a cafe

and saying you're a writer, go on and be a writer. And that took a while. I loved being in school. I found it easy and stimulating and fun

And so I just kind of stayed in school. - Yeah, law comes. - Yeah, because in college, went to grad school for two years in England, which was free, so who wouldn't go?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And that's the woman who's not 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 S.E.S.E. - Which exactly was the same, I don't know. - It's so nice to talk to you with contemporary.

- Yeah. - So you did it too.

- Well, I was trying to get short stories published. So I was, so we're looking at all these journals that would have never had me.

You know, it's 20 and back in those days. - I thought I was right, my car. - Yeah, we were probably competing really each other. - I think I came across our same short same day. - Yeah, these guys again. - They're by the way rarely did they return them. - In my experience. - But occasionally they get a little note. - You just looking for any sense.

No, man, I'm so with you on this. - First you would be the little formed thing, which is like, "Thank you, this does not meet our needs." - Yeah. - And then occasionally what I know now to be someone like 22 year old who is a month out of college, would write in tiny letters in the margins like, "Please keep pitching." - Or something you could hear? - Or something you could hear? - Something you could hear?

- Something you could hear? - Something you could hear? - Something you could hear? - Something you could hear? - That's me. - That's all you need. - That was like a huge down payment for me. - In my future. - They make a difference. - Yeah, so delighted we both have that stack. - My first rejection letter for an article for the New Yorker, not a story.

It's framed in my home office. It's from 1998. - Oh, yeah. - It's a good reminder. - It is. I mean, what my wife says is, you were a junior in college. Well, what the fuck were you thinking? Did you think that they would?

“- But you have to think that. - What are you going to think about?”

- What are you going to think about? - Exactly. - Okay, but the law degree, the proplexes meet, 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 were both going. - 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. - That's the one I like the most. - Yeah. - So I'll give you the first one, which is that it wasn't totally confident that I was good enough for that I was going to make it or the stars are going to line for me.

I wasn't completely confident that there was a life as a writer. And I wanted to back up. I knew I was a relatively smart guy who could kind of grind it out and work. And I was thinking about what would the alternative be if the dream version of your life

doesn't happen, which I mean, the reality is for most people. You don't get that.

- Whatever they're doing is probably not the thing that when they were 17, 18, 19 years old and they closed their eyes that they dream that they were going to do. And so it wasn't that I had a shortage of self-confidence. I was 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, but 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 you off and I worked.

And when I got to Columbia, I had gotten some of my teenage, no, I'm not in high school anymore, energy out. And I also had a big chip of 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. Because it's in front of you, and worse than that. There's this idea Irving Goffin 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 wanted that candle. There's a lot of that kind of thing. And so I worked really hard in college and did really well,

and then got a fellowship to go to kind of prestigious competitive fellowship to go to the UK and did that. And then there were a whole bunch of people where it's like,

“what's the next smaller hoop that you have to jump through?”

And everybody's applying a law school. And what's the best of the law schools than 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 thought, what have I done? You know, why am I here? I would argue your regulating yourself as theme was 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, because that's most of my job, is that I think if you're good at it, it gives you a kind of daily dose of humility because no matter how successful you've been,

or how old you are, how long you've been doing it, most of your job is getting rejected. So most of the day, I'm calling people who don't call me back or hang up on me or don't want to talk. It was good for me to learn really early on that in some ways, if you want to succeed in this line of work,

you need to learn how to metabolize rejection.

“You need to learn how to just take it in and keep moving.”

My wife's a big tennis player, and she talks about the idea of the best players. They lose a point. They immediately just erase from their memory, that point that they lost.

And they're kind of always pressing into the future.

So I had all of that, but even so you're absolutely right. At a certain point, you're like, I've been pitching the New Yorker for six years. Yeah, yeah. Well, you passed the bar in '05, right?

But you do 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 in Wall Street. It gets worse.

I was out of money, and they would give incoming associates no interest loans and start borrowed $10,000 from them. And meanwhile, I'm pitching the New Yorker and pitching pitching. I was supposed to go and work at the law firm, and I kept pushing back the start date, and then in October of '05,

they accepted my first pitch. Took me a while to pay back the $10,000, but I did pay back. To jump ahead in the story, you know, I ended up getting that assignment at the New Yorker where they didn't put me on staff. And so between 2010 and 2011, I went to the Pentagon.

It's about a year at the office of the Secretary of Defense on a kind of a fellowship thing. And there I was pure anthropologist. 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 the VP had come out yet at that point.”

It may not have. I don't think so. Maybe not. That's 16 years ago. So now.

Yeah, but it was soon after-- Okay, so it was right out there. 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. I got gust. Yeah, impressive. Yeah.

And in fact, it was just more mental managers than you've ever seen in your life. Do you know Mike Judges? Be with some butt head office space, all of it? Yeah. He was a physicist before he was a cartoonist.

I wouldn't know that. Yes, and his take on everything, which is what office space came out of us. 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.

It's like this. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. So it's true. Yeah.

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 interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little terrifying. Okay.

So 2020 became 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 won. Even we were talking to Mike. 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 experience like getting the dream you had since 16 years old?”

I mean, it's funny. It was sort of the opposite of Pentagon. It turned out to be so much better than I had even a man. Oh, wonderful. Those six years when I was freelancing were hard.

Because I felt like I was doing really good work. I feel like I'm a pretty decent judge of my own work. I look back at my first book "Chatter" and I think that is not a very good book. You know, there's an opportunity to re-issue it and do translation rights and all that stuff and I haven't just because it's fine.

It's an artifact that's a part of my life. But it's not something that feels of a piece with what I've done since. So I feel as 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.

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

Yeah. Was your wife? She's a smarty pants. 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, national.

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

Right. She can commit financial crime. She just made you one way. 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 where this incredible book and was an expose or brag. Oh, yeah, I know that. Oh, great. So the Delta Force running drugs.

One of the most prolific and successful was the guy in South Carolina who had been the state trooper who had busted the most amount of people on '95. And then he wrote a drunk driving ticket to a guy and he got fired over it. And then he became this fucking super successful drug smuggler. You got to know the rules.

Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah.

She always had gainful employee.

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 breathe their articles and take them apart the way you would try and figure

out a magic trick. And to get to know those people. And now my new book when it was in draft, you know there's five or six of my colleagues. I sent it to in there the best. And they're incredible.

And they read it and give you feedback. Not everybody has the same fixations I do. For somebody like me. Yeah.

Okay. So in 18, you write saying 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 I'm interviewing Amanda Pete recently. Which is, yes, we lived in England during the trouble.

I listen to that interview. Okay. The original book critics circle a word. It was made into an effect show. The thing I most jealous of, it won a Peabody.

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.

Just imagine. What the fixers just go like, you know what I'm shot. Guys, your kickers off here. What's going on? 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 him all. Is it part of it? Is it nominated? Is it nominated or is one? I don't know.

I don't know what just happened. Something happened. The nomination is definitely coming before you end. Okay. So I think that am he did rivalry.

Yeah.

“I'm not even sure how one wins when 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 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 wins of change. Was it eight 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 Wins of Change by the scorpions.

How on earth do you get on to that as a story to tell? 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. A bunch of my best ideas are ideas that he's given. He started a kind of a private intelligence company and then sold that.

And he worked for Madeline all by 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 cover 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. And I sort of did, but secretly I was working with the CIA. Somebody like Michael who can kind of see both sides becomes helpful in helping you find a situation after the fact. To see your skills.

Yes. Okay right. And so he basically called me years and years ago and said you know that's a long 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. 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 it was crazy.

Yeah. And I spent years and years and years trying to get the bottom of it with Michael. Really great. I'm prima facet. 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 is that anyone there could write a huge hit. Yeah. 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 their network exactly. And so they end up going working 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 to them.

I will say when he first told me I said no way that's crazy. And then I started looking into it. I mean, 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, this sort of pretty high-minded stuff. Some of them have done assets, 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 does 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 aggressive.

They're like, oh, could I just get the executive summaries? Not me, 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.

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 terms, what I'm learning about. The influx of all. The money that's happened. This is the meat for me. So I know what 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 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 saying nothing came out, we turned it into this limited series.

And I was a producer on the series. There was very involved in the nine months shoot. And for a bunch of that, I was kind of flying back and forth between New York or I live. And primarily the UK, where we were shooting. But during the summer, when a kid's got out of school, my wife and I just moved to London.

The production goes to an apartment. And so we were living in London that summer. And I was on set one day and I met a guy. He was a fascinating conversation. This guy Andrew, who's visiting the set for the day, who's a guest at the director.

I could have just played a word along 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 the back of an Uber, I have to know the whole life story if they're over the private.

Our children would have a lot to bond over. They're shared humiliation. So I start chatting with this guy. He's Jewish. She started talking about how the Jewish community in London is different from the Jewish community in New York.

This was kind of a funny moment because I'm not Jewish. But I grew up in Boston. I went to prep school in Massachusetts. I went to Columbia. I've lived in New York on and off since the 90s.

It was just a part of me that was sort of like my dude. I've been to more apartments. Yeah. And so I sort of named 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 Noyberger. And that was the moment that the whole conversation took a different direction. Because he knows Julia Noyberger. And Julia Noyberger was the rabbi to Zach Bratler, this kid. He suddenly made this connection.

And he said, I think I might have a story for you. Oh, he was that up front. Absolutely. He knew at that point that I wrote for the Newarker. And he said, I'm out of a story for you.

And I should say, like, most of the time when people say to me, I'm out of a story for you. Yeah, yikes. Sometimes they may have got a movie idea. And it's hard because it's just like the story. You know, 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. What were 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 Times River. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened. And they made this discovery, which is that unbeknownst to them.

He had been leading a secret life. And as a teenager, he'd been moving around London, pretending that he was the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch.

And he basically had said that much.

And I knew, I'm in. Yeah, I mean, I'm in oligarch, probably the next time. No. Stay tuned for our share expert. If you dare.

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Very subject to terms conditions in availability all state North American insurance. Co and affiliates North Brook, Illinois. Yes, so Zack is the son of Matthew and her shell. Yep. Who they themselves are both the children of Holocaust survivors.

And her father was a rabbi. Yeah, her father. Yeah. And they have two boys. They have Joe and Zack.

There are a couple years apart. Exactly.

“And initially, it's pretty hunky dory till 13, right?”

They're mildly competitive.

I think one of the pivotal things just is that at first, of course, the older brothers

much better at tennis. But Zack 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 competitive chess naturally. And then Joe starts attending once a name of the school.

University College School UCS. And Matthew's also in finance. So they're doing well. They're upper mental class. And he gets into the school.

And then when it comes time for Zack to apply for the school, he does not get in. And then he tries again to get in and does not get in. And to me, this is where who knows where this life story is without this moment. The gorilla's justice. We just had a gorilla expert on.

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 bowling this younger one. Pretty bad. It opens up his head.

You know, it's gruesome. And then he does overthrow the dominant male. He becomes that. And then the bullied one kind of gets excommunicated. And he just kind of wanders the periphery for a while.

And then a new female comes. And he sees that she's been accepted. And he's got no place. And then he murders the baby. And then we learn from her sense of stock.

This one has killed now four infants. He got to range from the rejection and the emancipation of the sense. The humans are so similar. And so many ways. How can warp you?

I think that's right. I mean, it's interesting as a whole of their intention. 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 reorient them politically.

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. 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 the exact there was something slightly different going on.”

There would be familiar to anyone with. Do you have some links? Yes, older brother. Okay. So I think there's this thing in 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. They're going to excel at. It's sort of natural at a certain point for the other one to feel like. Okay. Well, you're laying claim to that. I'm going to have to find another way.

There's going to 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 to failure. Yeah. And he is a bright kid, but maybe not academically.

He ends up going to is at the mill. Mill Hill. Explain Mill Hill as a school. So Mill Hill, in some respect, it looks like university college school. In the sense that it's a fancy private school.

It's expensive. It's a beautiful campus. It's on the outskirts of London. But it's not as hard to get into. And you know, the way it was explained to me is in the environment

that Zach Bradley grew up in, which is a kind of highly educated, bourgeois, fairly sort of elite London, Mill Hill. 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 in this school.

That's how you end up at Mill Hill. But you also still have money, so he's at Mill Hill. 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 John was a good, big brother. Yeah, he was a loved him. They stayed close. He was part of a kind of larger family network and friends in all the rest of it.

And he had, I think, an incredible series of natural gifts that maybe didn't express themselves

in being able to get into a certain school at age 13. But yeah, he could have gone a long way with them. He ends up at Mill Hill, and he's surrounded by these children of oligarchs. And so Mill Hill, like a lot of schools in London, I should say, realized at a certain point that there was a kind of a demographic,

which was the offspring of super wealthy foreigners who had kind of made a second home in London. And so Zach, at 13, finds himself surrounded by these kids, is pretty impressed. And this is a great moment for the history of London post Margaret Thatcher, deregulating the bank. So let's talk about the waves in London, because this is kind of now a part of what London is.

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

No, this is three pages. Yes, I don't know. However, the way I thought of it is almost in a movie, the way you occasionally will get the kind of sped up, seeing the Brooklyn Bridge get built. A montage.

So there's this to me really fascinating thing, which is that if you were to go to London in 1950's say, it looks basically like it did a century before. It's a big industrial city. There's factories lining the towns, kind of smoke and coal and laborers working, making things. It's a manufacturing town.

It's also a huge port city, because the towns are one of the most important ports in the world.

There's a trucking executive in North Carolina, in the mid-1950's,

in advance the modern stockable shipping container of a sort that we've all seen. Some people might be in a hall made of shipping containers right now. Exactly, yeah, 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 on to ships and coming off of ships. And if you go to London today, those beautiful buildings are still there. They go old warehouses. But with the new system, essentially, you can have a container on top of a train that arrives at the port, and it goes fluidly around to the ship and the ship goes to another port,

and it comes off and it goes right under 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 towns. 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. It's every single dock closes. So it has 30 plus years of stagnation. Yes.

That's talking to the book about the movie.

It's a long good Friday, incredible crime thriller with Bob Hoskins from 1980,

highly encouraged people to watch it. But that's filmed right at the point where the changes are starting to happen. So basically, that's it. They're like the maximum blight point. They make this Bob Hoskins like crime movie with a young Pierce Brosnan.

“I think it is 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 going to be a money town. Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint what the catalyst's exact 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 letter talks about like these fights that have between first place and coaching what's funny is it's not a story of the halves and the half nuts because the people in court are having the half more. So this is like a very extreme case of this.

So he's entering with a little bit of shame of having not gotten to that. And now he's seen absolutely fabulous wealth.

Yeah, kids would probably have 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 at all at a lesson to find these movies. But at any rate, I think that's really a profound experience to feel dead broke

among all these people. And actually not that unique this book started as an article in the New Yorker and after came out. I heard from all these people, it 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 L.A.

or Miami or Dublin or 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.”

When Matthew and Michelle were going 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. That was a bad luck. 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 Zach watched. Interestingly for me, there's a version of this story we say, look, you kind of blame the Hollywood movies because Zach was obsessed with,

well, for Wall Street and War Dogs, watch them again and again. And didn't watch them as a cautionary tales. He really thought this is what I want to be. And particularly, you wanted to be Jonah Hill who was like, the grotesque stuff of hell.

And you had a kind of a sense of you do anything that you can to just get yours. I understand Zach's state of mind, which is like, this is bullshit. They have it and I don't why wouldn't I have it. Like he's looking at people who aren't more deserving of it.

And he's going, well, fuck, if I'm not going to get given it, I'm going to 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 conversation with a guy 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 Hawking reality bites. And occasionally people like that could be obnoxious, but there was a sense of like, if it's corporate, it's bad, you want to preserve your integrity. Even if it means living in poverty, like at least I've got my pride.

Yeah. 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. Absolutely.

Yeah. In fairness to people, I have teenage kids. I think it's hard for them to imagine what the future is going to look like. Ten years from now or five years from now. Economically, in terms of higher education, what does that look like?

In terms of employment, AI, climate change. I mean, you name it. There's any number of ways in which it's kind of anybody's guess. What your life is going to look like. This is like, I got a very house that 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 that the house. There is no long term. So let's go short. Totally.

He's also a teenage boy. But he doesn't have a girlfriend. That's the conspicuous thing about this book. It's like what's going on with him. It's like a man's fear style.

A little bit.

“I mean, I think some of it was Zach was that he was a really extraordinary kid from a very early age.”

He was always 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 was 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 word. You have your lived experience, but then you're always ressembling it and telling the story and try to figure out the math of it.

You're trying it out on people and seeing what works. And an incredible information retention, unbelievable memory, which is dad has as well. Very helpful for me in work on the book. That is dad is 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 of people. But then he lied.

And there's a sort of weird thing in the story, which is that all the young people I talked to could see through him. The adults completely bought what he was selling, including gangsters and various people who should have known better. But young people would have a thing where he would get to know them and they'd be charmed and they'd be like, "I'll get a little of this guy. He's got so many great stories and won't have you." And then they'd start to get a little uneasy.

Just they'd feel like, "I don't completely..." Well, what kind of a friend of his called the man said, "You're a pathological liar." And he said, "I had this brain trauma." Oh my god, another lie. Oh my god.

You're really getting it. Literally a joke. I can't believe it. Yeah. Oh my god.

Incredible. Wow. There is something obviously quite corrosive about the extreme wealth. Yeah. That's why people hate building it.

Yeah, yeah. There's another thing too. This book is not an op-ed. It's not an argument. No, 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. It's 4% of this. That's exactly the point that I'm making. He was on Instagram from an early age.

This is a kid who's 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 panic. Social media, but I don't want this book to function in that way.

Yeah, yeah. It's what you're talking about. We're at Spillionaires, 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 him? Universe should have six year old know the name. Something is wrong with our society.

If he's part of your kind of marvel. I don't know. But I think that the thing about Instagram or social media in general, is that wasn't delusional. But I do think that if you grow up on these apps and you're in 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 or the fresh start at this hill school.

It's an opportunity. It's a reset.

“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 and the mother being dead. Yeah.

Poor the mother, pating him and being in Dubai. But then he also tells us story, but his father being dead. Part of it was act. 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 munchows and deal 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 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 into it. So he starts telling these lies.

My dad drives two range lovers. Little things. He would lie about where he lived. He would say, oh, my family, what a mansion. I just got to say he told his buddy that he had two range lovers.

And then they had to go to tennis practice together. In Matthew's day, I was going to drive in a Mazda. So he's like, listen, both range lovers are in the shop. Don't bring up the Mazda. He's so good.

He's so good. He's so good. The gymnastics. But I guess you probably get addicted to that. I'm sure also the like high of figuring out this is where the memory comes in.

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 in this sense of thing. But I think I found Haitian zero. I think I found the first guy that he told the son of an oligarch story too. 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 Abelvich, a real rush.

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's that got in.

But he got in there. And we've all been in the 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 kind of milling around. There's a bar and you're sort of sitting there thinking, you know, I'm just going to bail and you're looking at the art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Zach says, "I want to do it." And Foley says, "I work for Chelsea football club."

For Zach, Roman Abelvich is his god. So he meets this guy who works for his idol. He kind of idolizes Putin at this time. He does. He does.

Yeah. He doesn't bring. He does. He's in the building.

There are family photos from this time where he's kind of doing this thing where he thrusses

chest out and sticks his shoulders back and he kind of glows into the camera and this very kind of poop. And that way. Yeah. As if on horseback shirt. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly.

“And Zach, I think just kind of takes a flyer and says,”

"I'm actually this son of an oligarch myself. I've come from a very wealthy Russian family here." Big swing. You're talking to a guy who works for his idol. And he has a lot of riches.

He has Foley, Russia. He's not. He's English. But Foley is exposed to the real thing and Zach 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 Zach was selling in that conversation. But Foley, I interviewed him, subsequent. He said, "He seemed pretty convincing." He was sort of talking to the talk. He was dressed in a very laid-back way.

But he said, "That's exactly the way the kind of offspring of an oligarch." He's like, "Track suit." Whatever.

And so Foley suggests that they get coffee, date chat.

And then they do. And then Foley says, "Oh, you know, they're in these guys. I know who are looking for investors in this real estate project. Maybe I can introduce you to them." Because he's also sad.

I'm in charge of managing my father's money for investing. I still think that if Foley had just sort of been like, "This kid is clearly full of shit and walked away." I could see Zach retiring the story and feel 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." Right? That he doesn't mean Foley.

“But here's the thing, Docs, the parents, Matthew and Rochelle.”

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 Rochelle, has spent every day since 2019, thinking about what are the off-ramps that we missed. Do 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 got to say, as they are described in the book, I don't know that I've ever related more to parents. I feel like every choice they made was one I would make.

I'm so glad you said that. Oh, a hundred percent. 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 getting away that they can still be a voice of reason. I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I would do." If you shame him out of this scenario,

now he's excluded from you, it's just going to get worse. Trying to just walk that line of, there might be a better path for you. And also, "Hey, I love you." And if this is what you want to 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-confirting, read that a person might do where they look at the 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-confirting 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 is a fucking joke. And I think the fact that he had to go to someone that was still prestigious, even though it was for dropouts. That to me is the one thing that I personally am interested in. What the fuck are we doing?

But that's just very you. But I know, I got a whole war with only L.A. Privacy. 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 time.

It's a racket. Everyone that I'm working with who's successful, they went to shitty fucking schools in the New Year's exposing them this crazy competition with a bunch of rich kids. So that is my family.

I try not to be judgmental. That is one thing I'm a little bit. But I think anybody we can see that those environments are, it's funny because my kids go to public. So 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 three kids to that private school, but not comfortable enough that all these years later,

the nature of my parents retirement is not what it would be, it had they not. On some level, they are still paying. You didn't come back from spring break with a tan from skiing and aspect.

And some of your classmates did. Absolutely. But I also lived in Dorchester. I mean, the thing for me was that I lived ten minutes away from Milton Academy, the fancy private school.

I went. They were very, very different worlds. And so, you know, I may be a tune to this thing. I send my kids to public school. You also had a healthy mechanism of tall popping embossed

and that would have probably prevented the kids

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 gives finals and jeans and listening to Nirvana. I mean, it was the 90s again. So it was the last thing that they would do.

They got to ask the kids. They posted a picture of themselves on a private plane. They would get to shake it down. 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 rock-focused. And I realized, like, holy fuck, these people are all incredibly rich. Yeah.

But I hadn't actually caught onto that. In Massachusetts and boarding school, you know, everybody sort of seemed roughly the same level.

And then you go and you actually see the apartments where there's people live in the lives.

My favorite story of that kind is I'm talking to some kids of a friend of mine. And it's two girls or sisters. I love them. One of them's dating a new guy, a woman at school. She was visiting the family in New York.

I'm like, or do they do? You just kind of pussyfooting around it, and then the younger sister goes, "They have this green painting in their apartment." No, no, no, no, no. There we go.

It goes me everything. I say no more. But if you value education and you come from people who do. I totally understand why you would send your kids. If you have 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 you 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 her show. 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 matters. Yeah. I'm not judgmental of the parents. It's the environment. You could see how toxic it was in that institution.

Yes. They know they're living on the oligarch. And they know these kids aren't good students. When I tried to interview Zack's teachers, people who knew him well, including people who had written nice notes to the brothers after his death,

nobody would talk to me. To a point where it felt to me like a decision had been made. 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." 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 to him, they have no clue that he has this persona.

But some weird things are now happening. He seems to have money. He tells them I'm moving into a riverwalk, which is this insanely expensive high rise on the terms. They're wondering is he dealing drugs?

He has a weird phone. He shows his father this H-S-B-C bank account. And the interface is the same as his father. And he says he is 850,000 pounds. 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 going to go to school. He's going to try to be an entrepreneur.

Maybe it'll work for him." People do. Yeah. I can imagine mean this situation.

“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 pounds is probably the most extreme example of what kind of parental intervention would you have. But I have to say and fairness to math you.

I think part of him wanted to believe. He talked to Zack. What are the different business deals you're doing? How is this? Are you paying taxes?

You know, kind of watching through this whole thing and Zack 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? You want to hear him 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 can convince themselves. It's such a thing. What they don't want is for you to confront them and say, "We know.

We need more over. 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?

Well, that's a thing. And I think in Zack'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 Rachelle are pretty sophisticated people,”

and the thought occurred to them maybe the reason that he loves Vladimir Putin or Rowan and Brownville, which is that it's the opposite of who we are. This is what Adolescence is. He's trying to kind of break away from us. So what are you doing?

Is it really going to be that fruitful in that situation to say? We hit those people. If you want to like us. Right. Okay. So through Mark Foley, though, he meets these two characters.

It's a really important character. Tell us about Akbar a little bit.

Akbar Shamji. I'll tell you about him as he at first appears to Zack

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. There are South Asia. I mean, they're ethnically Indian, but from Uganda. So you have this community that came over to Gildo 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 Uganda and economy ends up dominated by essentially the ancestors of these people

who come over to build a road. To the tune of like 90% of the total amount of money. They control the road by this tiny minority. And then idiomine comes in. And in 1972 says,

we're going to 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. There's a whole episode actually in LA, finally enough. And when he meets Zach, he's this kind of middle-aged guy. He lives in Mayfare, which is one of the bansiest neighborhoods in London.

But he actually lives on Mount Street,

which if you know Mayfare is like the fancy street in Mayfare. I told the friend of mine at one point that one of the guys I was writing about lived on Mount Street. He sort of said, no, lives on Mount Street. You know, it's not a thing. His wife is a designer who makes these kind of elegant gowns.

And she's dressed with one of Palcho and Michelle Obama and the real family. This is what Zach wants his mother to buy. Yeah, he's showing her the dresses. Zach meets him. And Akbar is the guy who's got the real estate development

and Lisbon that he's looking for, investment in. Now, it will later emerge that Zach wasn't the only one pretending that he was something he wasn't that actually with Akbar. He's not the guy that he's pretending to be. And in fact, just before he met Zach, he had declared bankruptcy

and he was getting chased by creditors. But he's still driving up bans. And he's a member of all these private clubs in London. There's a whole kind of world around Mayfare, which is private clubs, private casinos, supercar.

Everyone's talented, Mr. Ripley. Yeah, literally everyone. And the night that Zach dies, he's in that apartment. And there's two guys with the map bars, one of them will talk about the other. But it is the interesting thing where he turns out that all three of them

are pretending to be something that they're not. It's like the Spider-Man meeting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the other guy is Indian Dave. Yep.

What's his last name Sharma? Yeah, that's his kind of surrender Sharma. Yeah, 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 catches that Zach never coming up with the money.

He never actually wants to sort of sign a term sheet. Just at the point where Akbar might have been wondering, you know, as this kid for real, Zach says, "Get terrible news. My father is died."

And my mother, who lives in Dubai, has kind of disowned me and I'm going to 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 won a hard park.

And actually when Akbar would meet with him, Zach could only be waiting out in front of the building. He never saw him come up there. They'd be like, "Oh, come meet me in my place." And he'd be standing outside.

And so Zach claims essentially to be temporarily homeless. So he's this billionaire kid who's fighting with his mom and his dad and he has no place to live. And Akbar says, "I have this friend who has this luxury apartment. His name is Render Sharma."

And he's this kind of retired guy who lives in this big apartment overlooking the towns. So he introduces him to Verender. I don't know to this day how and when Zach learns the real identity of Verender.

The kind of face that Verender put on for the world is he's this sort of retired business man and his 50s just kind of hanging out. He works out a lot. He boxes. He lives in this nice apartment.

Drugs. Doing a ton of drugs. Unmarried, I assume. Unmarried. But he has choice to children.

“And the truth is Verender was a gangster.”

Better known as Indian Dave. Who had been around for a long time. He was an extortionist. He was like a leg breaker. He was a debt collector, heroin importer.

He was involved in a pretty significant murder. Implicated in other murders. He was the guy who famously would dangle you off of a building if you weren't paying money. Indian people are.

This guy Indian name is really quite a character. I don't think he's got any. He gave a kind of an edge. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare.

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

They're looking to do deals trying to get rich.

And I'm sure you've been Indian Dave. Doesn't have nearly the money.

“Because I saw this when I was writing about the IRA as well.”

And I've written other stories about criminals. You know, think about that line of work. Because there's no pension. It seems like the party's going to last forever when you're in your 20s and 30s. But when you're in your 50s and your daughter's just had a child.

You're a little old. You're not a leg breaker. Right. 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. They blow the money. 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. One of the big questions in the story is, and I asked, when these guys met Zack because Akbar, he wouldn't meet with me or talking to me.

But I emailed with him a lot. I said, so you meet Zack. He says, my name is Zack Smell off in the center of Russian. Did you Google him? Yeah.

Exactly. How did you not do any due diligence?

“And Akbar's response was, oh, you have to understand the really powerful plugged in”

people. They're not on the internet. And I'm sure you will have encountered this. But there's a certain kind of celebrity who has an AOL email account. You know, we're like a hot mail.

Yeah. So they're all known together. Now I think the night of his death is relevant. And I think we should go to, so that M6 is directly across the river from this river walk apartment complex that is Indian Dave's where he's staying. And they have an outward facing camera.

And you can see on the balcony of this fifth floor apartment, a man runs in jumps on his own accord into the thumbs. Guys, not pushed. When this happens, it's coinciding with Rachelle and Matthew have kind of lost contact with them. There's an email late at night like where are you?

It's doing yummy. He says, oh, good. Everything's fine. And now they're left to try to figure out like what happened in that apartment. The initial story that Indian Dave tells him responses, 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 a.m. 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 they're these end notes. You can sort of check the work.

But I am trying to make them read the way in-of-all would. I wanted to be a story with characters and scenes. I want you to feel as though you can see things in your mind's eye.

And so you're always trying to kind of reconstruct scenes.

And that's hard because a lot of the time you're relying on people's memories and so forth. But for you to just figure out what pieces you're going to real out at what times has got to be the most complicated math of the book. Completely. I was thinking of this, like, I have the whole deck of cards.

And I'm not just going to kind of throw them at you. And I'm not going to give them to you in order. I want to sort of hand them out to you in a way that both you'll be able to kind of digest it in a fluid way you won't feel overwhelmed. But also that it'll be pleasurable.

And it's funny. I sometimes get these questions about, you know, people don't read the way they used to it. And I think certainly the stuff that I do in a long, radical or book, the pleasure of it is actually that it takes longer. I can kind of take you down the pathways before I get to the switch back.

You sort of have to have a bigger canvas to do that kind of thing. So what I was going to say is a lot of time I'm relying on people's memories. In this case, we're showing off you before they even know that Zack 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 getting better. I can't do that better. I decided you were in that moment.

And so after Zack has gone missing, she connects with Akbar,

who she'd never met before.

She knew that they were friends with the never met. And he says, I want to meet you guys at this hotel in Piccadilly. They meet there. And Akbar then calls Indian Dave on his phone and puts it on speaker. And I have the audio of this whole long conversation that they have.

Right, because if they were to just tell you what was said,

“what you need to hear is like, what was their tone?”

How confident were they? It's more than that, because this is what's so fascinating. You know now, it's really in recent decades. It used to be the case. Here's the lawyer in me coming out.

This is like the one good news for law school. If you're on a jury and it's a murder trial, or it's a, I don't know what I'm a salt or something. And there's an eyewitness. There was a sense that nothing is better than I witnessed 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, I witnessed 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 five minutes later, you're already kind of rewriting your memories. This fascinating thing happened with her shell and mouth you wear. Remember, they don't know much about their son's friends.

Zack was very secret about this. They knew this guy for under Sharma.

They thought he worked for Prairie Rubber, and he had a lot of money. And he let Zack stay his place.

“Zack bar seemed like this nice guy who had a whole bunch of different business interests.”

And he was kind of men touring Zack. And then they go in the meat with Zack bar and they talk with her in 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're really shifting. And they seem not reliable and we thought that they were lying to us.

But I subsequently realized that was because their memory of it was colored by what they know about it. They had subsequently learned. Then I got the recording. And it's the most heartbreaking thing. Because what were Sharma, if you heard desperate, they don't know their son as dead. And Akbar lies to them.

And says, Zack just must have gone off to score drugs. We all have to find him. We're going to 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 Zack was dead.

And Indian David Gatson, they don't know his name is Indian David. I think he's this rubber tycoon. And what they keep saying is, we're so grateful to you guys.

Thank you. We've been such incredible mentors to our son.

And you're going to help us find him. And it's so poignant to listen to it. Because when you know the whole thing, you know that these guys are lying. Oh. But it's a crazy, well, you're saying, sorry.

That's for it. And anyone that presents themselves is clear to how I would help you find your child. You're going to be so grateful for it. Yes. But there's another thing too.

You get this wild thing. We're a Rochelle and Matthew have no idea about Zack. Having pretend that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. Until they meet these guys who say, oh, we didn't know that his name was Zack. Brother at all.

We thought his mom lived in Dubai and his dad was dead. So they are learning a lot about all it wants. I mean, you've got the panic of where is he? And you have the panic of who is he? There's so much happened.

Wow. Unimaginable. It's funny.

“I think a lot of people in America still think of Scotland.”

Yard is this great place for they watch. Police procedures on breadbox or something. And it's about how a Scotland Yard really really Fox up the case. And then the brothers essentially have to become detectives themselves and kind of do the investigation.

Yeah. So if I say, you got to read the book. But Indian Dave was not asleep at 1230. No. There's more to the book.

Rock bar did not leave for the night. There's a lot. This is a show. You're going to make a show? It's already been a show.

It's already been a show. Yeah. Yeah. It's riveting. It's so sad for me.

I would think it would 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 back stories.

Family, Indian Dave's kind of criminal history, but then also Zach's family.

And when I first learned about these two grandfather's who had sort of the Holocaust

with my writer brain, what I'm thinking is my whole story is about reinventions. Zach is this kid and reinvents himself. And he's doing it in London, the city that has reinvented itself. And then you go back and he has these two grandfather's 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 going to be? It's tabularaza. 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 brothers and this kind of clue 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 travel, they go to concerts, they love life. 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 a barbed wire.

I only saw a loving father. They had these fathers who had 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 knocks me out is I've been thinking of those ground fathers.

Purely in that sense of reinvention. And what I haven't realized is that the brothers are going to be okay. And part of the reason they're going to be okay, actually, is that they had that lesson. That example. I have had more than one Jewish friend tell me this.

That when they've been struggling with something that feels disrespectful to their grandparents who just made it out and got here to give me this life. Totally. And I'm now going to waste it. I don't think that's a unique experience for folks that are the progeny of survivors of the Holocaust. So yes, it makes sense to me that they could go.

We kind of dishonors them for what they went through to give us this opportunity in this life. And we're going to now quit living because we had our first challenge.

And I will say, they've read the book. It's funny to bring it back to Michael Lewis on that flight. He said, I'm prompted by me. He didn't even know that I was thinking about this.

“But I had this big question, which is when do I show the brothers the book?”

Because I've never shown a piece of work to the people that'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, the only meant two or three times in my career when I've showed a piece of writing that people was about before it was published. And I regretted it every time.

Oh God, we're going to do. So I showed it to them without getting into the whole thing. There are family secrets in the book. There are things that they probably would have if they had editorial control. Is that choked as mother at one point?

Yes, 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 her about it. But you don't need to tell that part. The 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 that stuff in. You know, we launched the book last week and you work in the game. Oh, that's a joke game 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. But I also think there's this fantasy that we have, that your child is a piece of clay that you can just mold. Yeah, totally.

There is a limit to what you're able to do. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. And I think we're all kind of fumbling our way through as parents trying to figure out this solution. But the idea that I mean somebody had sort of said it was just 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 four kids in a wonderful family life. And I think I was expressing some frustration that I like die-dactic lessons that I give my kids.

They just kind of roll their eyes. It was in a spirit of kind of, I'm thinking, look, how did you pull it off? As kids are older and it's all worked out and they have a really close family. We're in a restaurant. And he said, all the lessons you teach your kids aren't going to add up to a hill of beans.

But watching the way you deal with a waiter in a restaurant. It's going to be things like those little moments of observation will shape who they are more so than any words that come out of your mouth in a kind of directed. Yeah, do this don't do that.

“Because if you're seeing behave this way and then I went and seen you not behave that way, right?”

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 too when you're a kid. I just think there's a decency that has gotten lost in recent years.

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

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, my anecdotal experience with that is we spent the whole summer in Nashville where we built the 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've seen the value of that and the danger of anonymity. So the internet is that squared. Completely. And then what percentage of my time in my spending in this totally anonymous way where no one's going to look me in the eyes and a way that 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 above above. But when you're spending a good chunk of your time and a world where you're completely anonymous, I think that's problematic. Well, here's my question. Here's what I wonder.

You guys can tell me how optimistic I should be. In my moments of optimism. What I tell myself is that we as humans are pretty bad at when a new thing comes along. Thinking in a very deliberate way about the role that it should fill in our lives. We tend to allow technological change to just kind of wash over us.

We kind of drink it all down without actually asking any sensible questions about it. But that over time you start to recalibrate and think a little more carefully. I mean, really optimistic cases.

You know, whether you date it to the internet, sort of late 90s, basically,

or you date it to the advent of smartphones, sort of 20 tens. These new things come along. They completely rewrite.

But that there may come a kind of reset where people say kind of all right.

“That was a, you know, I mean, it's a little bit honestly, like there's probably a drug's alcohol,”

sobriety kind of thing where it's kind of like, okay, I did that. And I really went sort of whole hog there for a while. But on reflection, it fucked up my life. And I had to rewrite my relationship with this stuff. I think a lot of people right now are having that conversation.

They're saying, they don't know it'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, oh, oh. I guess I think I wonder is I feel as though everybody's having that conversation,

but then not actually changing. I mean, I'm, I'm the most guilty of all right, but I'm like, God, this is terrible. First it comes in understanding. So it may be totally 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 a nature of things.

And then to your moral panic thing, because I push back unlike Jonathan, height and a lot of these people. Yeah. These are also anomalies. Zack isn't anomaly.

That's not a normal story. It's a spectacular story, why it's worthy of a book in back to the Manisphere doc. It's a terrifying doc. Yeah.

That is a tiny percent. They're 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 threw his podcast and talked to him for like two hours about Zack. Not having watched his Manisphere doc.

I 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 Manisphere looks max or in so extreme, particularly the guys who like have publicists and our end documentaries and so forth. They're way out there.

I do think the 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 the least 16 year old boyfriends.

They're lovely boys. When I'm meeting 16 year 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 panic. If I started seeing it in real life, but I don't see it in real life. Maybe I'm naive. This goes back to the question I raised is that I have very similar feelings. What it means for me is when I step away from the computer and I step away from my phone

and I interact just with regular people. It's like 10 cities, 10 nights. I'm seeing the whole country right now. 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. 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. 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. And the last 20 minutes nobody has a life less full of emergencies than me.

You know, they're actually nothing. They're a 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 time. And for me, it is this physiological thing where I feel myself just kind of reaching. I had to get the new screen put on my phone. But also if you would have asked me prior to drop my phone off how much I'm on my phone or how addicted.

I'd be like, you know, I got it, but I think I'm a low grade. And they were changing my screen. I had two hours to kill them all while they changed my screen. I'm in the storm like, oh, I see something I think my wife would like I go forward to take a picture to send to her. Even if it's not like checking things, I was like, holy fuck on.

I probably grabbed for my phone like 20 times. Well, it's hard because it's now like the Swiss Army knife of life. I used to pay for things. I used to take pictures. I used to listen to music, et cetera, et cetera.

I was a little troubled by how much muscle memory was grabbing for a empty pocket. Well, I loved 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 No 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 do 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 sides in a way

It's more that I've just dropped a little something in your pocket. Yeah. You know, it's got it. Those are the stories. Those are the books out of the read.

“I think we're all also pretty all interested in London as a place.”

Yeah, it is. It is. It is 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 search for truth is terrific. I hope everyone checks it out. It's been a delight to me.

He's been very much not always charming.

I know. He was a model. He modeled. Wow. He's got that.

He's a model. Yeah. Cadillac. What is it for? Steve's brand.

Well, is it? Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Come on.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. Absolutely. Hi there. This is Hermy and Hermy.

If you like that, you're going to love the fact that Miss Monka. We got to discuss something. Yeah. We just didn't armchair anonymous. We just didn't 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 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. You said, are you in Georgia? Well, I said, where are you? Are you in the South?

But I knew it was Georgia. Yeah. But you were trying to play it a little safe. Yeah. I was like, go for it.

I know. You're right. Because he was wearing a shirt that I feel like all my friends in the South. It's interesting. It's interesting.

How there are regional uniforms. Yes. Absolutely.

“That's why I had to get out of Michigan.”

I was going to hit a certain age where I was going to start wearing golf shirts. No. And I was like, I got to get out of here. I can't order golf shirts. That's where you drew the line.

I could see it on the wall. Look, you might have to bring them back. Now that you're in Nashville, you might not re evaluate this. No, I think they think it's charming. I at least I tell myself that they think it's charming.

Then I dress like a scumbag. Oh, all right. And then I have tattoos. But I'm friendly. Yeah.

I think they find that charming. That I'm a heathen. I'm godless. But I'm still friendly. And I offer my services.

The celebrity helps. It probably doesn't hurt. Okay. Back to well. Yes.

So he was very, very, very hot. And he also what we noticed.

And this isn't why I didn't notice this at first.

But then he had UGA paraphernalia in the background. 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 was an 11 year gap. 12, 12 year.

I graduated in 2009. He graduated in 2021. 12 year gap. Yeah. You, you were taking a back.

I was. Really. Rattle. Rattle. Yeah.

Um, and a half in the brain. 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. 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. And I was like, I'm a cooger.

“There's no, there would be something really wrong with you.”

If you didn't find Will. But I had like, he cues. Yeah. Of course you did. And I was, he was very funny.

He's married. And you were mean very forward up to that point. And you were like, go to shame. I didn't meet you before you got married. I think because.

You're basically saying I want to fuck. It was the most aggressive I've ever seen. I loved it. I felt myself in that whole conversation. Like being a cooger.

Like being like a old lady with a cigarette. Who's like hitting on young. Show me. Yeah. What kind of amps do you think?

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

I know. 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 pees and cues. Well, you're going to seem like a gross old ledgerist man.

I know. I'm glad you had that experience. I'm not glad. I feel very. I feel weird right now.

I feel. I feel old. I feel. Um, cooger. I mean, he said, I mean, he's so hot.

Yeah. And he wouldn't be tossing. Yeah, spoiler. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's a hot thing for me.

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. Yeah.

Yeah. I know he's tall. Yeah. He's seated. He's feeling very conflicted about what happened.

Oh, because also my rule generally 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, um, like, should I change my rule?”

Absolutely. If it welcomes across your radar. One other thing. Okay. Was happening during this.

Oh. He was also triggering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Because he will. From UGA is will from UGA. Like, there are so many wills around when I went to school. Yeah.

Handsome southern gentlemen. Handsome white. White. Yeah. He was very white.

Oh, white bread. Why does the driven snow? Gorgeous hair. He spoke about his mom. His mom's a southern bell.

Yeah. Um. 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. Little insecure. Yeah.

I was like, oh my god. I'm so ugly. Like in front of will. I should have. Is it a fun feeling, though?

No. It's not like, you enjoy the reminiscing feeling of youth. Like no part of it. Feeling bad about myself. No.

I know what you're saying. But I think any time I can touch. My feelings from 20 years ago. I also appreciate it. Oh, no.

Yeah. But no. No. I like not feeling. I like feeling confident and feeling.

Try and say good. Good. I'm good around people. But well. Um.

Well. Excuse me. Well. Well triggered some old stuff. Yeah.

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 he was married. He would applaud you. I don't think he needed any other feelings. I don't think so.

I think so. He is well from UGA. Was I being so embarrassing? No, not at all. You weren't embarrassing at all?

I really feel like I was. You're aggressive self is very appealing. It's why I urge you to use it more. But I think it was too much. It was like a very confident and confidence is attractive.

I know. But not for you. But I wasn't so unique. No. I'm saying.

Actually wasn't confident.

“And it's why I think I was over confidence.”

Well, it bright as confidence is why men and women is like they can tap into this while they're insecure. They can tap into their. I wonder what we hear this. No.

You didn't listen to the show yesterday. Yes, but Claire. Claire, my sister in law. She's been down this path for 20. Let's say she's two years younger than well.

For 25 years, she's seen wells effect on women. And she understands this entirely. Yeah. I thought it was a joyous experience. It did something.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Well, thanks. Well, I enjoyed it. I appreciate you.

I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident.

I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident.

I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm going to be a little bit more confident. You're just a moment that you're like if you hadn't met your wife.

I don't know the way you rolled it out. You basically...

“I think you were very clear that you were far.”

No, no, you said. I did.

Yeah, what you've never said, you're so respectful.

You weren't in that moment. It's a better life. Yeah, and welcome to the show. It feels weird, so. It's a lot to handle.

Yeah, I mean, you shouldn't have compassion for us, but also you should understand. These are... You got convinced about this. Okay.

That adds a new layer to the cougar element. It's like your mom. Yeah, you got like more of a mommy. Yeah, that's not. Well, what have you been...

You're messy again. What have you been into? I told you well. Well, did you get... Well, did you make a do-ee again?

Have you gone to your naughty will? You know you have to use a toilet. Big boy.

Guys, we're talking about a full grown adult. Yeah, we should try. 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 they do, it looks like Will and he's 27, play ball. It is interesting. Yeah. Don't only think...

It takes me to my life. On this topic, a commenter pointed out, and I think it's a brilliant comp. Someone said Monica trying to convince you to wear loafers was identical to you trying to convince her to shave her head.

So now you know what it feels like. 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, it's just amazing.

I mean, not a loafers dude. Yeah. It's great. I could wear them. Uh-huh.

It may be even people wouldn't point at me in life, but it's not for me. Exactly. Yeah. So I thought that was...

Thank you, listener. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah.

I don't know what this is. And I guess I'm sorry for trying to convince you to wear loafers. I don't want to 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 a loafer.

No, 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, you like, and that's great. It's fine.

You do like, preppy. Like, as an aesthetic.

You like a man who's preppy.

Oh, man. Yes. And to me... Oh, and to... All of my class warfare baggage.

Hmm. 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 look you and think like, "Oh, we gotta do some of that." And to access style. I make some effort.

You are very... You know you. Uh-huh. You know your style. You have style.

Yeah, right or wrong. You have specific blame on that. Exactly. The perspective of a point of view. Yeah.

That's what style is. Yeah.

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

I'll have you know though that I'm regularly going. How consistent is this style? Because even today in yesterday, I ordered some pants because they look comfortable. But I was in like drawstring kind of clam diggery,

East Coast on a beat. Mm-hmm. But I decided for whatever reason that those pants are fine if I wear a converse and they're not that thing. And I recognize how arbitrary it is.

Well, whatever you liked them. Yeah. Whatever it is, I like it. And I just stick with it. But it could vary from jumpsuits to red wings,

work boots and cuffed Levi's. Yeah, because you've also, at one point you're wearing some Searsucker. And that's very northeast. I think that's out.

That's southern. I think it's also like clam bags. No, it's like Ivy League. Oh, okay. A really associated with some.

It's like Rhode Island Maine. Probably Tom Wolf, that writer. Mm-hmm. 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 experts.

If you dare. Who do I like that's preppy? Yeah, okay, Junior. Yeah, I hate it. Apex preppy.

Hot as fuck. But he's like the standard of preppy notes. That look, JFK Junior look. You love it. I think it's a great.

Yeah. It's V-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.

Mm-hmm. Knows what they like. And it's thought out, like, you know, just used to only wear gym shorts, you know? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And that had to change. And guess what? I changed it. Right.

Yeah. Because he's your voice. He's my husband. Yeah. Yeah.

And now he's addicted. Yeah. Now he likes shopping.

And now everyone always comments on his outfit.

Oh, he loves it. And he loves it. Yeah. And like, it feels good. And he feels good.

He feels put together. It does something outside him. Okay. I want to ask a question about style. I had this thought the other day.

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

But I have the thought. Man or woman. The man. Okay. The style changes so frequently.

Mm-hmm. That I actually don't know what his style is. Right. And so I wondered, like, for me, that's an issue.

Um, I am not attracted to trends. Okay. Personally. I like classic style. It's timeless, classic.

Okay. RFK. Nope. Uh-huh. 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 trend. No. You have, you have taken on enormous pants in the last two 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.

So, 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 all right. I'm much older than you and Will. As we've done. 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.

Yeah. I'm like, no, no. We're sticking with what our style has been. Yeah. It's more than 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 right. And then, but there are still, there are classic jeans and classic looks.

Levi's all kinds of that that work forever will never go away.

Yeah. So, I'll always rely on that. But I'm with you. When someone is just dressing for the trend, I don't really think that's styling.

Well, I just go like, I don't know what they're real styling. 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. Yeah. Even if they're like, my style is slob. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fair. Like, in some people have made an art form out of it. Right. Like, like, sandlers in on the gym, right? He's like, I dress like a fucking sliver, sweatpants and hockey jerseys.

No matter where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah. He wears basketball shorts. He wears just as old.

Yeah. Yeah.

“I think a lot of guys, like, I can't see on there's doing this.”

So I can just wear all this athletic gear, all the time. Yeah. Yeah. 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. I think it looks cool.

But I can't remember what. I've never seen you wear a jersey. Ah, for minimal. Like, would you wear this sweater? Yeah.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of cardigans. I think this would look nice on you.

Yeah. This is a large. I think it would fit me. Yeah. Based on.

Got it. It is. It is over size. It is over size. That's a look.

Yeah. That's popular look. Mm-hmm. It's a look that I like. Mm-hmm.

Although I did want to take it off when I was talking to Will. Because I wanted to see your boobs. Well, be honest. Be honest. Be honest.

Don't be crazy. What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? Why else would you take this sweatshirt off?

I just want to see your shoulders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What if I wanted to get in short shorts when we had a attractive guest.

I was like, I always thought about getting it down into my room.

You're married. I'm not. I get to do it. That's a big deal. That's a big distinction.

I also think I'm male. Yeah. That's also a huge distinction.

“Here's the thing you're not going to want to hear.”

And is it true? I think you'll understand part of this. Most women. Not all. Okay.

I think most men want to see a pair of boobs. Not all women want women want to see a bed bulge. Yeah. I would love to know the percentage. Me too.

Yeah. I agree with you. Me too. I agree with you. I 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 in 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 already are interested in the guy and like the top. And we could hate a woman and we still want to hear. Exactly.

You might not care about anything else being want to see the boobs. It's just different. Yeah. It's different. Yeah.

That's okay. That's how we were all built. The way it is. Yeah. We just built this way.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we're even allowed to say coogers anymore. But I think I can't say that.

There's a coalition of allies protecting coogers. No. Maybe coogers don't like. Maybe older women like myself. Now don't like to be called that.

And now as I'm saying it, I don't want to be called that. It has a negative connotation. We're calling men in like younger women pervert. So if you guys got to have to fucking show their kind of whatever the word is. Not coyotes.

Coogers.

Right. That's not even close to his bad. Well, there is as you said, there's a difference. There is a difference. I can't go attack will.

Sure. You can't attack will. But if we're just saying older people liking younger people. I'm calling one class of people perverts. And then the other one's bitching about being called coogers.

I think that's a little unfair.

Yeah, but you say all the time, you're always on flip flopping.

Like that there's difference between women and men. Yeah. Women do something that's different than what you do. But it doesn't mean that you guys can't show their coogers. It's not even that bad.

Perverts like in a legal. They're just going to like die. Like what's the point? Why'd you own being a cooger? No.

Wow.

“Can you look up how old like you have to be to be qualified as a cooger?”

Yeah. I think 38 to 27 or 40s or older. Oh my god. I'm getting so close. You're good then.

So you don't even pick up this campaign against to end coogers. It's a cute name. No, I don't like it. Well, those things. 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. Coogers are majestic. They're very powerful.

They're a beautiful animal.

They're the prettiest predator we have. No, tigers. In the Americas. Do you hear me? Oh my god.

We call you a culture like that. You've been given a very regal. Don't say you. I don't know if you are. Doogers.

Fuck. This is bad. My time is like I'm like. 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 thinking. You're lucky stars that that's still an option for you. There are some coogers that are hungry and they're starving.

And they can't get any pups. Okay. No. And you should feel bad for those coogers. You're one of the lucky coogers.

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

How did you turn 38? Yeah. One day at a time. It's like a factual. We got to get you.

I think when you start indulging your cougar appetite, you'll blow right through this little awkward phase. And my, oh, this is perfect. There's so young and dumb. I don't want to date them. All I want to do is come over and show me their buns.

No. That's driven worse than I am. I got my husband. I love who dresses. Who is he?

Where is he?

“And then you have the stable of young dudes that you don't even have to fuck and worry about.”

Talk and do on their birthday. I can't even have sex with them. They're going to break my bones because of bone density perimenopause. I'll see you up. Yes.

Oh my god. Let me all break his bones. Yeah. I bet you. Here you go.

There's the cougar. Let her out of the cage. I can't even control her. We got a new, I'm going to announce to the L.A. Times that you, although P22 is gone, we do have a new cougar sighting.

I feel conflicted. I got to take a nap. All right. Let's do some facts. All right.

Okay. A little to no fact. Okay. One thing. So if you, okay.

You're going to be mad at me because you don't like when this happens. Oh. Worldwide box office versus disaster. Yeah. Basically.

There's one teeny, teeny tiny difference between the audio version of this one and the video. One. Because there's something that worked in the video that doesn't work audio. I think. So I said, hey, Emily, you cut this out of the audio, but I left it in for video.

I'm so intrigued. Nothing.

I mean, it's a two 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. Only times you cough. What happens is like. I feel the tickle and the cough.

Like I do that. And then it's still there. Like that did nothing. And I'm trying to drink 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. I don't know. Why are you guys working out? Exactly. I was so panicked.

Panicked. And like trying to do teeny tiny coughs. But new. And it was like. You know, it's like building him.

Oh, my god. And it's.

And then I would then I coughed a couple of times.

Yeah. Couple of coughs. It was still in there. It's still there. And at some point.

I I lean over. And I got to get the 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 six or seven. But by then it's like they like you sound like you're going to throw up. Okay. Because it's so intense because you've been holding it in. And then it looks gross.

So like. I'm not just a king of commands. I'm also a king of cough. 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're 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. In fact, an identity marker for me that I don't cough.

Right. Don't fart. Don't cough. So I went out there and I was like. You know and I like how does this huge cough?

How far did you step away from that? Far. Yeah. 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? Yeah.

But then also I knew you knew it 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 noticed by the way.

Considering I'm looking at the gas always.

Yeah. But I am catching. Yeah. You're one hundred percent of what's happening over here. I am catching all the time.

I'm everything that's going on. Yeah. Like I know that sometimes I know some of your. Tells I won't say I'm here. I'm like oh, like okay, so he's annoyed because he just did that.

And so there's a lot going on in the head. Anyway, I in the video come back in. Mm-hmm.

“And then there's a little conversation about did you go to CVS?”

Because you claim you're just getting a cough. Yeah. Bitch, I know they're in your bag right there. Yes. You're like why do 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 disastrous. So I just wanted that's like I left a cough.

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

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

Mm-hmm. I didn't. That it wasn't what it was. You might have done both. No, it wasn't.

When you're coughing with all your might. You're not you're not clenching your severe things happen when you cough that hard. I understand that it was I was at high risk. Okay, but it did not happen. But it did not happen.

Situation. Okay. And then it happened. You know what happened again when we were at the movie theater. The me when Rob went to a screening.

Mm-hmm. Rob did you hear my coughs? I did. See, and I knew you did. Did you say you did or didn't?

I did. Yeah. I talked a little bit. I knew it was you were getting nervous for me. And then you were getting nervous for me.

And I was getting you a water. I was excited. And it's time I can help with friend. I like it. So.

But it was that same thing. And I just kept throwing mince in my mouth. I thought that would help. It didn't really help. It takes on a life of it's own.

Once you're panicked about it. Yeah. Amplifies all your sensations down there. And now you're convinced. I know.

Yeah. Okay. Now the Peabotties. The awards. Okay.

Winners were chosen. Since we interviewed him.

“Well, remember, I know I said something about the Peabotties.”

And I was like, there was nominations or winners. I don't know what to up. But it was winners. There's no winners. And we didn't get one.

No. Still didn't get one. What is it going to take Peabottie? I'm going to tell you who won. Okay.

For entertainment. Adolescence. Great. Worthy of a Peabottie. Very.

And/or. I love them show. I don't know where they have a Peabottie, but I love the show. Never seen it. Common side effects.

That's on Adult Swim. Okay. So I don't know.

So here's what I can no longer tell myself.

They are digging deep. I mean, they're taking an all-media if they found a winner on Cartoon Network. Adult Swim. Adult Swim. Yeah.

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

Okay. Let's marry weather. Yeah. And Michelle Williams. And Michelle Williams.

Episode of us. Go back in the archives. Forever. That's a Netflix show. Okay.

So a lot of people. He did rivalry. Sure. Jimmy Kimmelive. Okay.

Mussolini Sun of the Century. Okay. So almost everyone show business. Scott nominated. And the pit.

Oh. And Claribus. And the rehearsal.

I know. Okay.

And that's only entertainment.

“Well, I get some relief that there's no podcast.”

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

There is a podcast. Oh. Oh. Keep on. Oh, that's this actually hurts.

Oh, boy. I don't even know what I'm here to list. Podcast and radio. Divine intervention. Great show.

Scam ink. Really good.

When we all go to heaven.

Love it. So just three. Yeah. All right. Y'all can throw in.

You did 15 TV shows. Okay. I know. I'm pretty upset. Now that I knew there was a specific sex.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Next year.

“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. You're one of those.

You guys are those types. We didn't even try. So we didn't lose. Can't lose if we didn't try. 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 Stroke. Mm. And then the long goodbye is listed as number two. Same year, though.

He was famously a street performer in Ireland in Dublin, maybe. Okay. Maybe even when he's living in the car's stitches. Uh, really? Yeah.

He paid his dues. Oh, my God. Also his wife died. That's really sad. Sorry.

It's just in the trivia that they can add. What? That they shouldn't call that trivia. No. What do you think?

Well, he's when the mostly shouldn't call it as trivia. They did. Okay. So don't worry. All right.

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, one in 10 guests. We're saying 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. You know, and I wanted to get his. Me, you didn't it? No, maybe because 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. You do this all the time. You did it earlier with our guests in France. 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 things together. Right.

But you might be at something with Patrick. Yeah. Maybe Patrick would like to be friends. Like, oh, I'm a showbiz guy. He doesn't live here, I guess.

So that makes sense. 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.