Is London Really Falling? Patrick Radden Keefe's Search for Truth in the Most Invisible of Cities

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, 06/25/2026. Been another traumatic week in The United Kingdom. Another change of PM. Starmer is gone. Looks like Andy Burnham's gonna take over. New York Times describes he's had a terrible inheritance. Why can't Britain hold on to prime ministers? CNN asks. It's the economy. The economy, of course, in The UK is particularly bad, still deep in the shadow of Brexit and many other things. One man who knows a great deal about The United Kingdom is my guest today, Patrick Radden Keefe. He was a graduate student at LSE many years ago, and his new book, London Falling, a mysterious death of a gilded city in a family's search for truth has done extremely well as a number one New York Times best selling book. It's a portrait, at least according to the New Republic, of a crisis ridden country. So I'm thrilled that, Patrick is joining us. Patrick, do you see this book, which, has got a great deal of press? I know you're a bit podcasted out, so hopefully, this would be a slightly different subject from the way you usually talk on podcast. Is this a book about the crisis of The UK? Of course, there have been so many crises.

00:01:59 Patrick Radden Keefe: I don't really think of it that way. No. I mean, I do think that there is I think part of the reaction to the book, part of the reason that it has resonated the way that it currently is with British readers is a sense of kind of malaise about, the direction that everything has taken. But that was not the spirit in which I wrote the book. I mean, I was in the first instance very drawn to, on the one hand, this kind of quite intimate story of a family who loses a child. And then, I guess, more broadly, the history of London itself, sort of London as distinct from The UK, at large. I mean, I was sort of interested in the way in which this city, which I know quite well and love very much, has changed, in recent decades.

00:02:50 Andrew Keen: Few months ago, we had Andrew O'Hagan on the show. His novel, Caledonian Road, in some ways, I'm I'm sure you're familiar with the book, covers, the same ground as your book except it's fiction, whereas yours is nonfiction. But it does have in the way you treat the narrative, Patrick. It reads I don't know whether, this is again somewhat of a cliche, but it reads a little bit like a novel, doesn't it?

00:03:19 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I think to some degree, that's probably by design. I am very aware when I sit down to write, particularly these days, that everybody has a phone in their pocket that is making claims on their attention. And so I've always been drawn to stories that are stories that, you know, even if they're true stories that are stories about people. And so I am absolutely looking for a story that is inherently dramatic and that I can tell in, hopefully, a seductive enough manner that I can engage somebody who might not otherwise, be a big reader, somebody who, you know, reads many books or reads nonfiction books or would be drawn to other elements of whatever the inquiry in question is. I think I think narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.

00:04:17 Andrew Keen: You were on the show a few years ago talking about Empire of Pain, your best selling book about the secret history of the Sackler dynasty, which, of course, has had a terrible tragic impact on The United States. This book is a much more, as you say, a private tragedy, the tragedy of the Brettler family, who, as it happens, I grew up with in London. So I know them privately. And I was I remember when the, your original article came out in the New Yorker. Of course, I read it because I like your work, plus I know the Brettlers. And I wondered whether you were gonna turn it into a book. And when I heard you were gonna turn it into a book, I thought, well, is there a book there? And I wasn't sure. Then I read it, and, of course, there is one. But did you have those questions you must have had in terms of writing this article, which was a long article for the New Yorker. What was it about? Fifteen, twenty thousand words?

00:05:15 Patrick Radden Keefe: It was 15,000. Yeah.

00:05:17 Andrew Keen: Did you, did you I'm assuming you tussled with whether or not you should or could turn it into a book.

00:05:26 Patrick Radden Keefe: Well, yeah. I mean, there's sort of two distinct questions. The I should say I've been writing for the New Yorker over twenty years. I write these long articles. You know, what kind of my average piece would probably be 10,000 words or so. This was long even by those standards. There have been four occasions in twenty years where I've finished a piece and felt as though I had more to say. The nice thing about writing at that kind of length is that usually I feel as though I've, you know, when I've done 10,000 words on a on a subject, I feel stuff said everything I'm capable of saying on the subject. This was one where I knew before I'd even finished the piece that there was a book here. The so that part I didn't wrestle with. I was quite sure there was a book in it. And it's you know, you don't always know with that kind of certainty. I actually have since published a piece. I published a piece in April, and I had a moment where I thought, oh, is this a book? Is it not a book? I had about a week where I went back and forth, and I ultimately decided it wasn't. In this case, I knew, before I'd even finished writing the piece, and I had started to tell the Brettlers, listen. I think there might be more here. I think this could be a book. But there was a big question for me, which was, are they in it for that longer haul? And I had spent a great deal of time talking with them, interviewing Matthew and Rochelle and their surviving son, Joe, for the piece. But I basically came to them and I said, I think there could be a pretty terrific book in this material, but I will only do it with your blessing. I'll only keep going if you are in it for the longer the longer haul, and it'll be a long haul. And they wanted to read the finished piece before they, before they gave me an answer, which I respected. And they read it, and they thought about it, and I think they talked amongst themselves. And then they came back to me and said, yeah. Let's do it. And, and at that point, I was off and running.

00:07:26 Andrew Keen: Do you think they made the right decision? I mean, as a parent, we all tussle with this. It's the tragedy they experience, of course, of losing a son is one that'll is the ultimate nightmare of all parents who've got kids too, and I know you write about that and think about that in the book. And because I know the Brettlers, it occurred to me, of course, that perhaps it wasn't the right thing to enable such a prominent writer as yourself to make their private tragedy so public. But do you think they made the right decision?

00:07:59 Patrick Radden Keefe: I mean, I do. I don't you know, I let's think about the best way to answer this. So, you know, my premise generally, and I mean this sincerely, not just in a kind of self interested way, is that it's good to tell one story, is that the truth, you know, often will out in the end. And you wanna be careful about who you tell it to. You don't wanna entrust it to just anyone, but they did some due diligence on me. And, I think they sort of had a sense of the kind of person that I was on the basis of the types of questions that I was asking them, the conversations we were having. I think that they you know, I certainly sent them some of my work. I think that, you know, I've been doing this a long time, and I think my work speaks for itself. And often when I'm trying to persuade people to talk with me, I say, I'm kind of an open book. You can, you know, you can go online and read things that I've written if you want a sense of how I

00:09:01 Andrew Keen: Well, you're a best selling book. That's for sure, Patrick.

00:09:04 Patrick Radden Keefe: Well, I mean, the listen. I mean, there is a kind of public profile that I have now that I hadn't always had previously, but I should say the Brettlers had no idea who I was when we were introduced. They had not read my work. They had not heard of me. And so they because they're very conscientious, they did due diligence. You know? They did some homework, and they decided to tell me the story. So, I, you know, I don't think it was a mistake to do so, and I should say that I think they feel pretty good about the book that came out of this and the whole process. Having said that, I don't want to, in any way, diminish what a massive decision that was for them and what a great leap of faith it was, because as you say, it is it's a very private story. And the fact that my books have been bestsellers and that there was a kind of a it was a it was a safe assumption that if this book you know, I've I've certainly early in my career, I published books that came out and nobody read them. You know? And now that's not the case anymore, but what that means for them is that there was a certainty when they entrusted the story to me that a great many people would end up reading it. And there's I have always tried to be as transparent as possible with the Brettlers, and I've always told them it's gonna be weird. There's there's no way that it won't be weird to read about yourself as a character in the third person in something and then to see a stranger on the tube reading that book or to see that book in a bookshop window. It there's no getting around the strangeness of that. But I but I think, you know, as recently as my most recent conversations with them, which was just a couple of days ago, I don't think they have big regrets about having talked with me.

00:10:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the book, as I said, is doing extremely well. It came out a couple of months ago. It's really got over 5,000 mostly almost, mostly well, more than almost mostly positive five star reviews on Amazon. I didn't mean it in the sense that they should trust you over another journalist. I mean, you're you're clearly a remarkably credible journalist. I mean, more about just the spilling of this private story of grief and the terrible story of the death of their son so publicly. I assume you've thought about it yourself as a parent. Could you imagine what you would do?

00:11:33 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I listen. I, I think about these things all the time. Obviously, part of my part of the way in which I resonated emotionally with this story from the first time I heard it is that I'm a parent myself. I'm a parent of two boys. The boys are adolescents. They're close in age. You know, their age gap is not dissimilar to that of Zac and his big brother, Joe. My boys are athletic. They're competitive. You know, there are ways in which I resonate with the story of the. And I think that one thing that's sort of important to take into consideration when you think about this broader question that you're getting at is that after Zac died in 2019, initially, his parents didn't know he was dead. He was just missing. Then, eventually, they discovered that he had been found, dead on the foreshore of the Thames next to Vauxhall Bridge. And, they kept it very quiet at that time. They you know, there was no public obituary. There was a funeral, which was which was, a lot of people went to. But

00:12:52 Andrew Keen: Which you described very well.

00:12:56 Patrick Radden Keefe: It's a scene in the book. Yeah. Because, I mean, I talked to multiple people who were there, and I had, the beautiful eulogy that Matthew delivered, for Zac, which I quote in the book. But, but it wasn't in the press. You know, when I first heard this story, I Googled any number of combinations of words trying to find some record of Zac's death, and this is nearly four years after his death. And there wasn't anything there. That had been a pretty deliberate choice by the family to keep it quiet, but there were sort of interesting consequences there. And one of them was that I think that when the police you know, part of this is a story about the, I think, pretty colossal failure of the Metropolitan Police in investigating. And I think that because it wasn't a big tabloid story with daily updates, there wasn't the same pressure, external pressure that there would have been on the authorities to get to the bottom of it and do something, make arrests, bring charges, do their jobs. And, I also think that the there was a slightly weird dynamic between the Brettlers and the police where the police would sort of insist that it would be unreasonable to ask them to do anything more. That, like, this was this is just the way these investigations work. And, I think Matthew and Rochelle felt a little bit gaslit through the course of that process. And so one benefit of kind of airing the story out and going public as bracing and weird and exposing an experience as that is, is that suddenly there's lots of eyes on this, not just the Brettlers and the police. And generally speaking, I would say most people who read the book or who read the New Yorker article tend to have a lot of sympathy for the Brettlers and say they were pretty poorly done by, and the police should have done better. And so I think that there is, you know, there are obviously always upsides and downsides to going public with a private story. But one is that I think that there's been a kind of a little bit of a sort of record setting function in which you're setting the record straight, that, you know, this family and indeed Zac himself were poorly served by the authorities.

00:15:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. There was no, there is no Sherlock Holmes in this particular story. I don't know what the opposite of Sherlock Holmes is, Inspector Plod. You said earlier, Patrick, that truth always wills out. Do you think and this seems a wonderful description. It captures the book, all the themes in the book, because the central character who tragically dies, Zac Brettler, is a fantasist, a teenager, remarkable teenage fan sister on many levels who became involved with some serious criminals of one kind or another. Does the truth will out in the way you present the book? I mean, the way you shape the narrative, there's no certainty. You're not a policeman. The book is not a court of law. But you suggest that, you come about as close as you can to explain his death. Does the truth will out in this book?

00:16:20 Patrick Radden Keefe: I think it does. I mean, I think in broad strokes, it does. The you know, Zac Brettler ends up in an apartment, and there are three people in the apartment that night, four earlier in the evening. And, he goes off the balcony, and I don't believe that he committed suicide, but I also don't believe he was murdered in a conventional sense. I think there's a third option, which I guess was a bit exotic for the taste of the police, which was, that he jumped to save his life because he thought if he was going to stay in the apartment, he might die. And I'm I'm not I'm not spoiling anything for readers. I mean, this is the kind of, theory that Rochelle and Matthew came to themselves fairly early on, and I think that they're right. And I've I've kind of gone through and done my own investigation, and I come out roughly where they do. And there are a lot of details in this story that remain ambiguous. The analogy that I use in the book is that it's like an impressionist painting. If you're if you're if you get your nose right up close to an impressionist painting, it's very confusing. It's just kind of a jumble of strokes. But if you back up, the whole thing kinda comes into focus, and I think that's what happened with Zac's death. And I should say to your to your earlier point about, you know, the book reading like a novel. I think a lot about the use of narrative when you're telling a true story. And, I think there are some people who, in a story like this, want a very neat resolution. Like, you say there's no Sherlock Holmes. Okay. So if you remember, the end of every Sherlock Holmes story, Sherlock Holmes kind of walks on stage. It's sort of it's after the fact. And he and Watson are in the drawing room, on Baker Street. And he, he sort of walks Watson through the whole story, and he explains every single detail. All those little clues and red herrings and mysteries, he explains every single one. And, you know, that doesn't actually work in real life. The truth, I think, often does come out, but it's also true that we're stuck with stubborn mysteries, ambiguities, things that you can never get to the bottom of. I employ a lot of the tools of fiction when I write true stories. But one thing that I kinda stubbornly refuse to do is impose a kind of narrative clarity at the end of a story that the facts won't bear. Like, I feel as though it would be sort of both a disservice to the reader and the truth, but also in a strange way to the Brettlers. If I tried to kind of wrap everything up and tie it up with a neat bow for the sake of the reader who wants to feel a sense of kind of perfect conclusiveness at the end of the book. You know? This is a nonfiction book. If that's the kind of read you want, I would steer you to the fiction aisle.

00:19:33 Andrew Keen: Do you think you're a little bit kind to Zac Brettler? I mean, tragic figure, of course, a young boy who died, but a very privileged boy. Most kids who grow up in London, even the London of the early twenty first century, don't end up telling lots of lies about themselves.

00:19:53 Patrick Radden Keefe: How do you mean kind?

00:19:55 Andrew Keen: Over sympathetic.

00:19:58 Patrick Radden Keefe: Well, I mean, I think that the, I am sympathetic, to Zac in all sorts of ways. I mean, I feel as though the, I've written about worse people than Zac, with a good deal of sympathy. I mean, people who've done worse things. I think part of my job as a writer is to be clear eyed about the people that I write about, but also I'm not I'm not, you know, I'm not a pastor delivering a sermon about good and evil. I'm I'm sort of not in that business, and I, I wanna really understand people in a kinda warts and all way. And I find it's often the case for me as a writer that means being open minded and trying to sort of understand them and understand how they got to the place where they are. And that was true when I wrote about El Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa drug cartel. It was true when I wrote about members of the Irish Republican army. It's true when I wrote about the Sackler family. And in the case of Zac, the thing that I would stress is that the book lays out in extravagant detail Zac's lies and the ways in which, you know, Zac did some bad things, the ways in which he was hurtful to his parents. I mean, there's there's a scene in the book where Zac throttles his mother. And so I guess I sort of question words like kind and sympathetic in the sense that as a journalist, my job is to, really understand people as best I can and not to edit the record of what I present in the interest of kind of smoothing over rough edges or sort of thinking about people's feelings or posterity. And, there will be some people who read the book and find Zac very unsympathetic or who find him very privileged, which, I mean, I sort of make the point explicitly a number of times in the book that it was ironic that Zac felt poor and wanted to be richer given that he was from a family that was very comfortable, quite well off. But, like, the reason that I mean, it's different for you because you know the family. But the reason that most people know those things is because they're in the book. So, I don't I don't you know, to me, if I had thought that Zac was just like a bad seed from the beginning, and that was all there was to say about it, I probably wouldn't have cared enough to write a book.

00:22:48 Andrew Keen: I think for me reading it as a parent, the thing that broke my heart from the Brettlers point of view about Zac was the shame he had about his own parents, who, as you know, where they were and the way you present it. And he probably wouldn't deny this either if he was around it. They were very good, very clearly, very loving parents, perhaps a little too loving, especially the mother. But this shame of lying about your parents, of not embracing them, of not telling the truth about your family.

00:23:21 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. To me, that's that's just some of that I mean, Zac is sort of very extreme in every way. He's a very extreme, slightly sui generis, story, but in one respect. But in another respect, that's just adolescence. I mean, you know, my kids are mortified by me.

00:23:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But they don't lie. They don't deny your existence.

00:23:47 Patrick Radden Keefe: No. But Zac always had a very fluid relationship with the truth. I mean, this is a kid who lied about all kinds of things. You know? And, I guess the other thing I would say is I think that the I do think that Zac was growing up at a very specific time and place. And so, you know, he's born in 2000. He grows up on social media. He's part of a generation of kids who I think have been raised to really I mean, it's ironic. Their parents haven't raised them this way, but just inescapably because of what the world is. I think they have a very tenuous sense of what the future will hold. You know, you've heard the stories. Right? Like, employment the employment picture even prior to AI, the employment picture wasn't looking great for them. The likelihood that they're gonna be able to own their own homes, particularly in a city like London. And I think of Matthew and Rochelle as emblematic of a kind of older way of approaching life in which a certain form of a social contract held where you could work hard, save money, squirrel a little away, live a life that hopefully would be comfortable but not wildly extravagant, and ultimately, you know, have a have a comfortable retirement, own your own home, two homes in their case. And, you know, you get to travel. There are there's a kind of input output ratio that is fairly explicable. Right? You may start with certain structural advantages, but then you work really hard, and then you'll and then good things will kinda come out the other end for you in life. And I think that there are a lot of young people, Zac, of exactly Zac's generation who have grown up in an environment in which they feel as though that kind of syllogism is, like, broken down. And, it might not work out for them. They could put in all those years of work and, you know, still be living with their parents and working some entry level job that's always poised to be eliminated by AI. And I think that one thing that's happened in the culture is that a lot of people, particularly young men, have taken a kind of all or nothing view, which is essentially alright. Well, so the kind of live a modest life in which you work and save, that's for suckers. And what you need to do is, like, push all your chips into the middle of the table and just, you know, bet big. And if you have to lie and cheat a little bit here and there, that's the way to do it because, you know, the only way to get ahead is ultimately through the kind of moonshot move. And I think that was Zac. And I think that Zac's and I and I think that in that either you know, he took it to an extreme inventing the alter ego, but I think a lot of young people feel that way, which is why they're all out there. You know? They're they're you have Internet gambling. You have people betting in prediction markets. You have crypto. This manifests in all kinds of different ways for young people. And I think that for a lot of those people, there is a kind of rejection of the generation that came before in the old ways, and I think that manifested with Zac. Again, he's a very extreme case in terms of what he did with it, but I think that the kind of the impulses behind that, I actually think are much more widespread. And I'm coming to you know, you and I are having this conversation after I've I've gotten back from eight weeks of book tour. And a lot of what I've been doing is talking to parents who recognize the dynamics that Matthew and Rochelle experienced with Zac. They've had you know, their cases have not ended as tragically, but they feel as though in some form, they can relate to that parenting experience.

00:27:36 Andrew Keen: And in a way, maybe these kids are right. I mean, when you're talking about AI and young men stretching the truth, I can think of last couple of weeks, Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire, certainly someone who stretched the truth, or Sam Altman, slippery Sam, an expert in inventing things, who's become a millionaire, about a billionaire, multibillionaire. So in a way, I guess it just reflects the economic or culture eco cultural economic reality of our age.

00:28:08 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I to me, this is this is the most it's funny because I didn't even really get into this in the book because I wanted to steer clear of I didn't wanna sort of I didn't want the book to tip into to easy commentary. But I think that if you know, Zac Brettler was 16 years old when Trump was elected. And, yeah, you look you look at Elon Musk, and, frankly, you look at the fact that a lot of that the paper, you know, the money on paper that Elon is now worth is a function of young bros, you know, taking their money out of crypto and putting it into, you know, kind of buying in on Elon because they're fans. I mean, it's like it's I think a lot of it is frankly kinda dumb money. I think that if Zac at 16, 17, 18 looked around, he wasn't crazy to think that a certain kind of fake it till you make it bluster might actually be the way to get ahead these days. I mean, it's, you know, it doesn't doesn't work for everybody, but if you can achieve escape velocity as some of these people do, you know, that's that's sort of it's like the that's the way to beat the house.

00:29:38 Andrew Keen: But I wonder if anything, Patrick, has really changed that dramatically. I grew up in the England of the '8 of no. I was gonna say the eighteen seventies. It seems like the eighteen seventies, the nineteen seventies. And I wouldn't say I ever came across a Zac Brettler, but those kind of entrepreneurial kids who didn't do well at school, who went to Mill Hill, We were always warned that if we were bad, we would go to Mill Hill because that was the school that all the bad boys, all the stupid boys went to. And often, those boys turned out to be very successful entrepreneurs, and some of us went to fancy universities and didn't make a great deal of money. So has anything really changed that dramatically? Certainly, I'm not sure if you mentioned missus Thatcher, but her shadow, in some ways, hangs over your narrative.

00:30:26 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I do. I certainly get into to Thatcher and the Thatcher years, and I, you know, I, if you're reading the book closely, you'll see that the, you know, the first big invasion is not actually the Russians in the in the naughties. It's the Americans, in 1987 with the deregulation of banking. They're they're they're the ones who kinda sweep into London and change it in the first instance. Yeah. I you know, obviously, the, there is a sense in which a kind of speculative, morally unscrupulous economic hustler is an archetype as old as time. You know, I quote Mark Twain at the end of the book. I you know, the these characters have been around. I do think that it is pretty turbocharged in the present moment, in part because of social media. I think that, you know, if you are somebody who whose proclivities, tend in that direction that social media has a has a immensely powerful, quite scary ability, identify you and kind of algorithmically pull you deeper into your own fixations. And in part because of Donald Trump and people like him. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson. You know? There are these people who are basically kinda bluffing their way through. And I think there's a sense in which and, again, social media, I think, comes into this, but in which kind of everybody's sort of concocting a personality, and you sort of concoct a personality. And if you really commit to it, and you just sort of bluff your way through, at the at this point, there's nowhere you can't go. Like, if you and I had this conversation, fifteen years ago, I would have told you, well, you can probably go a long way, but, like, you couldn't become the president of The United States twice if you had that kind of personality type. Like, at a certain point, you'd need to deliver the goods. You couldn't just you couldn't be somebody who was just like a manifestly fake person with fake achievements. You can't you know, it's like you can you can fake you can fake some people some of the time, but you couldn't actually win elective office at the highest levels. And, you know, I was wrong.

00:33:10 Andrew Keen: So the truth doesn't always will out the other

00:33:13 Patrick Radden Keefe: I suppose not. Yeah.

00:33:14 Andrew Keen: The other, shall we say, the other main character in the book is the city itself. You begin with this wonderful description of the Thames historically and then in a contemporary sense. And one gets the sense in a way, Patrick, that if London was a person or a reader, of course, it's not, and it read your book, it wouldn't be bored because you're a wonderful writer, but it would it might think to itself, well, I've read this before, and I'll read it again. Do you think that anything much has changed in London? There was I don't know if you read this. It was an excellent, piece. I do not sure if I'm not sure if you know the Financial Times columnist, Janan Ganesh. He's a good writer. He wrote this just at the time your book came out. It was the return of Londonophobia, in which he says both the left and the right are united by their hostility and horror at London, which is a historic thing. This has happened before in London, and this is what I think this is Ganesh's point. This is what gives London its vitality. It's what's so great about London. How do you think London would read your book?

00:34:23 Patrick Radden Keefe: Wait. Define this.

00:34:26 Andrew Keen: Well, the story of a young man who lies to all these criminals, Russian oligarchs of one kind or another, too much money, too much fantasy, too many expensive restaurants, and tempside apartments.

00:34:43 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I don't it's funny that I did read that piece.

00:34:47 Andrew Keen: Did you think it was written in part as a reaction to your book?

00:34:51 Patrick Radden Keefe: The thought crossed my mind, though it didn't mention the book.

00:34:56 Andrew Keen: And it would have been generous in its own way. I mean, clearly, he's a smart reader.

00:35:00 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. I mean, I don't, I get I get bored of a certain strain of cultural commentary that says I'm bored of whatever it is that somebody's saying. You know, this sort of this notion that kind of nothing is new under the sun is, you know, I think people with newspaper columns, I suppose, have to, they have to write one of those from time to time. But the, I don't you know, on the one hand, yes. It's like it's a tourism. Right? Like, yes. Of course. It has you know, it has always been this way. London is a place where, London is a place that people come to from elsewhere. It's a place that people bring their wealth to. It's a place that wealthy people come to. Has London been sort of susceptible to the kind of corruption of that? Yes. Has there been moral panic about the city? Yes. So, like, all of that, I think, is quite true. You know, of course, all of that is in the book as well. Right? Like, I talk about the fact that Mill Hill was located where it was because the fear was that London was such a corrupting influence that if

00:36:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Before this show, I went to the Mill Hill website, and the first word that came up is integrity.

00:36:17 Patrick Radden Keefe: I love that. Which,

00:36:18 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure everyone who goes to Mill Hill's lacking integrity, but certainly Zac Brettler did.

00:36:24 Patrick Radden Keefe: So, and also, I mean, I think that part of what in terms of, you know, the kind of notion of London as a thrilling place, Yeah. I mean, I talk at great length about Zac's grandfathers who both survived the holocaust, both arrived in London as teenagers, and kind of reinvented themselves on the stage of this great global city. So, you know, I don't it's it's to the degree that column was trying to sort of suggest that anybody, you know, has, like, historical amnesia and is kind of trying to claim that any of this is entirely profoundly new. I think that would be a bit of a straw man in terms of my book in the sense that, of core I mean, part of what the book does is it looks at all of this history. I in terms of how London would read the book, I'll tell you, I was sort of I wrote a book about the troubles. And, when the book came out, it was not reviewed in any of the major English newspapers, with two exceptions, but for kind of funny reasons. The book was published by Harper Collins, and it was reviewed in the times and the Sunday times, which were owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owned Harper Collins. But I remember being surprised in a way that maybe I shouldn't have been that when, you know, I had written a big story in the New Yorker. The book was published on both sides of the Atlantic. But that there was clearly a kind of a discomfort at, you know, the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, none of these papers reviewed the book at all, the Telegraph. And there was a kind of unease. And it was only later when the book became you know, it won the Orwell Prize. It became a bestseller, and eventually, these places came around and were more kind of generous in terms of paying attention to it. I had sort of thought that might happen with this with this book. Not that people would totally ignore it, but I thought the antibodies would get up because I'm an interloper. I'm not from London. I'm not English. I'm American. I'm writing in Trump's America, which, you know, could plausibly be accused of having a little corruption problem itself. I had been anticipating, frankly, a lot of reviews that would say, oh, here's how he got it wrong. What does this guy really know? And I've been quite stunned by the reaction to the book. We you know, where there were a couple of those types of reviews, but by and large, the reviews have been really good. And it's you know, we're we're something like ten weeks out from publication. And as we speak, the book is number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list and has been, I think, for seven or eight weeks straight. And, I think that must mean that there's something in that people were feeling about London that the book is tapping into. So I you know, London, the city can't read the book, but people in London are reading it in large numbers. And, I'm I'm sort of I'm I'm both encouraged as a writer and sort of discouraged as somebody who loves London that, they seem to find the kind of somewhat grim picture that the book paints plausible.

00:40:05 Andrew Keen: Final question, Patrick. You've been very generous with your time. I was just actually in London last week, with a friend of mine who makes movies, and, I know she's making a movie about Murdoch and his impact on truth and lies in British culture. I know the your book or she told me at least that your book is being turned into a television series. Mhmm. How do you feel about that? Are you sometimes a little possessive on books? I mean, it's in a way your story. Of course, it's the Brettlers' story as well. But are you a little nervous that they might vulgarize what you're trying to do? It's a sophisticated book, and television series aren't always as sophisticated as

00:40:49 Patrick Radden Keefe: Writers might lie. Well, I mean, the hope is to make a sophisticated series. I yeah. Possess possessive would not be the word, but I do feel a kind of custodial responsibility. I was very involved in the television drama based on my book, Say Nothing, and I was very pleased with how it came together. But it just Yeah.

00:41:06 Andrew Keen: It did very well. It's still on Hulu.

00:41:09 Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah. It took five years of, you know, of work. I mean, it took as long to make the show as it did to write the book. In this case, I had gone to the and said, I don't need to actually sell the dramatic rights to this at all. We can just leave it well enough alone. I'll only do this, you know, with your blessing and, with your involvement, ideally. And they are involved. And, you know, five different production companies had to kind of audition for them over Zoom. We ended up with A24 and a company called Brightstar, and, they're terrific. And I think we're all gonna work together to you know, the aim is to make something that is very sophisticated and sensitive and does justice to this story and to this family. And so, you know, that's that's not something you can just kind of put on autopilot and assume will happen. But, but I think if we're all kind of dedicated and conscientious about it, that's, that's the outcome we're hoping for.

00:42:12 Andrew Keen: Well, Patrick Radden Keefe, another best selling book, London Falling, very intriguing book, very moving and profound in its own way. Thank you so much for your generous time, and congratulations on the success of the book.

00:42:26 Patrick Radden Keefe: It was great to chat with you again. Thank you.