EP.273 - PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

Adam talks with American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe about his book London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/London-Falling-Audiobook/B0FHKVW29X?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp, the challenges presented by parenting adolescents, the seductive power of movies like The Wolf Of Wall Street and Patrick's own efforts to resist the glamorising effect of TV and film during production of the TV adaptation of his book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Say Nothing, and Adam's own ludicrous taste of the criminal life in his early adolescence. There's also chat about why David Byrne's live show was the best live music show Adam has ever seen and whether it's OK to stand up at a seated music show. Conversation recorded face-to-face in Bath on 7 May, 2026 LONDON FALLING https://www.waterstones.com/book/london-falling/patrick-radden-keefe/9781035056279 by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2026 (Waterstones) CLARIFICATION RE. STATINS vs GLP-1s Responding to Adam's comments about statins at the end of the conversation with Patrick, this was sent in by Dr Mit Shah, MBBS BSc (Hons) PhD, Consultant Cardiologist in Preventive Cardiology, Harefield Hospital: I’m a consultant cardiologist specialising in lipid disorders and preventive cardiology. While both GLP-1 drugs and statins can reduce cardiovascular risk, they work through very different mechanisms and treat different underlying problems. Statins are specifically used to lower LDL cholesterol, whereas GLP-1 drugs mainly work through the blood glucose and weight-loss pathway, with only modest effects on cholesterol. Statins have become somewhat unfairly maligned through widespread misinformation and exaggerated claims about side effects, despite very strong clinical evidence for benefit. In fact, researchers have even performed randomised trials demonstrating a significant “nocebo effect”, where patients experience expected side effects even when taking placebo tablets due to their preconceived expectations and worries. Daily, I see patients with severe (sometimes genetic) cholesterol disorders who have a critical need for statin therapy, but who are understandably hesitant because of what they’ve heard online. I worry that the idea that GLP-1s could simply replace statins may unintentionally add to that confusion. SUBMIT QUESTIONS FOR Q&A EPISODE: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Thanks to Diggory Waite and Claire Broughton at Hattrick and Séamus Murphy Mitchell for production support. Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ SPONSOR: SAILY 🌎 Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code buxton at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/ https://saily.com/alexandsiggebuxton ⛵ PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY BRIEFING FILM AND TALK WITH ADAM BUXTON & PATRICK BARKHAM https://norwichartscentre.co.uk/event/green-shoots-presents-peoples-emergency-briefing/ @ Norwich Arts Centre, 28 June, 2026ADAM BUXTON BAND https://www.eventim.co.uk/artist/the-adam-buxton-band/#calendar-start=2026-06 @ Hoxton Hall, London, 23 & 24 June, 2026 (Eventim) BUG BOWIE SPECIAL https://lightroom.uk/whats-on/bowie-nights-adam-buxton-presents-bug-bowie-special/ @ The Lightroom, London, 17 June, 2-4 July, 2026 (Lightroom) ADAM BUXTON PODCAST LIVE WITH MAWAAN RIZWAAN https://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/adam-buxton-podcast-cf/ @ Roundhouse, London, 5 April, 2026 (Roundhouse) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buckston. I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buckston here, back in the Norfolk countryside. After shows with the band in Manchester and Leicester last week. And now it's summer, shaping up to be, as I speak, the hottest May Day bank holiday on record, according to the BBC News website. Rosie is here with me, hot dog. We're taking a walk before it gets too sweltering in the afternoon. Put some ice cubes in her water bowl back home. Got the fan set up for the sofa where she likes to rest. Hired a dog-adjacent DJ to lay down some dog bangers.

• 1:16Adam Buxton?

  You know, some snoop, Lil Bow Wow, Three Dog Night, The Beagles. Later on, we'll be serving Dog Tales. It's like a kids' podcast that you've tuned into. Look, Rosie, we're going a different way today because we're heading down to the river. Ho, ho. I mean, it's more like a stream, but might be nice today. Go down there, do some paddling. What do you think, Doglegs? Please don't patronise me just because it's hot. Apologise. We haven't been down here for a while. We used to come down here now and then when it got hot, when the children were little. It's not totally idyllic.

• 1:58Adam Buxton?

  It's a bit marshy, but there's a lot of amazing birds around here.

• 2:06Adam Buxton?

  Rosie, I'm just gonna sit here. Maybe I'll take my shoes and socks off. Oh, man. Going all into this.

• 2:18Adam Buxton?

  All right, quick paddle. Oh, it's so muddy. Your feet just sort of sink in.

• 2:28Adam Buxton?

  It's a bit nicer further out.

• 2:32Adam Buxton?

  Oh yeah, there you go. That's more stony in a nice way. Oh, it's nice and cool. Yeah, here comes Rosie.

• 2:49Adam Buxton?

  All right, I better do my intro. This is a serious podcast.

• 3:01Adam Buxton?

  All right, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 273. This one features a conversation with returning podcast guest Patrick Radden Keefe, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of six books up to this point, including 2018's Say Nothing, which chronicled the histories of the troubles in Northern Ireland via the story of the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 dragged from her Belfast home by the IRA, with other pivotal characters, including the young IRA operatives Dolores and Marion Price, IRA commander Brendan Hughes and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

• 3:45Adam Buxton?

  I spoke to Patrick about that book in episode 168 of this podcast back in 2021. And a couple of years later, production began on a TV adaptation of Say Nothing for the FX channel, on which Patrick served as executive producer. During that first podcast, we also spoke about Empire of Pain, published in 2021, in which Patrick told the story of the Sackler family and the pharmaceutical business that made them rich, in part by creating and aggressively marketing the opioid painkiller Oxycontin in the late 1990s, believed to be the main driver of the devastating crisis of opioid-related addiction and death that still grips many parts of the US.

• 4:32Adam Buxton?

  Today's episode was recorded in early May this year, twenty twenty six, in the beautiful city of Bath, England, where Patrick was in town to do a live event. And the night before we met, I had played a show with the Adam Buxton Band. So we took advantage of being in the same place to sit down in a meeting room in town for a chat, this time mainly about Patrick's book, London Falling, which was published in April this year. London Falling began life as a long-form article for The New Yorker in twenty twenty four, entitled A Teen's Fatal Plunge Into The London Underworld.

• 5:14Adam Buxton?

  And it focused on the tragic death of teenager Zach Bretler in twenty nineteen as a key to unlock a hidden world. In her review of London Falling for Slate magazine, US critic Laura Miller says, Keefe finds in the death of one teenager both a private loss and a parable of the decay of a once great city. A fair chunk of my conversation with Patrick was about the theme of being a parent that runs through the book, as Zach's mother and father tried to establish what had happened to their son in the wake of his mysterious death. But we begin with Patrick explaining how he first came across the story and explaining a bit about it. I'll be back at the end with a bit more waffle, but right now with Patrick Radden Keefe. Here we go.

• 6:40Adam Buxton?

  I really enjoyed the book.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 6:41Adam Buxton?

  I really did. It stuck with me. There's so much to think about and so much to digest. So many levels that it's operating on. I noticed that the title changed from the proof that I got at the beginning of the year.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I mean, the working title for a long time was The Oligarch's Son. And then it changed at a certain point. Because I felt what this book is missing is a clash pun.

• 7:06Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 7:08Adam Buxton?

  That's right. It never even occurred to me that it was a clash pun.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:11Adam Buxton?

  I'm such a thickie.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny because with my book, Say Nothing, to this day, anytime I go out and do a reading or something, somebody will tell me how much they loved my book, Say Anything. And I have to kind of gently remind them that Say Anything was the romantic comedy from nineteen eighty-eight, nineteen eighty-nine.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  With John Cusack and Ione Sky.

• 7:33Adam Buxton?

  That's right.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  And so with this one already, people are talking about having read London Calling.

• 7:39Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  You know, you want to be sort of adjacent to a hugely famous cultural touchstone.

• 7:45Adam Buxton?

  Sure. But the longer title now is?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth.

• 7:56Adam Buxton?

  Correct. So where did the whole thing start?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I was in twenty twenty-three that summer. I was living in London with my family, producing this television series, Say Nothing, based on my book. And I was on set one day. We had dressed up this office building in London to look like Scotland Yard in nineteen seventy-three because we were recreating the bombing of the Old Bailey, which is a big moment in Say Nothing. And there was a guy who kind of plopped down in the seat next to me, just killing time. He was a visitor to the set that day and we got to chatting. And he worked out what I do, that I write these kind of long investigative pieces for The New Yorker. And he said, I might have a story for you.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And what he said was, there's a family here in London who I'm very close with. And in 2019, they had a tragedy. So this is 2023 when he and I are talking. And he said in 2019, they lost their son. His name was Zach. He was 19 years old. He died in quite mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames and died in the 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, Zach had been leading a secret double life. And as a teenager, he had been moving around adult London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  And so that was what this guy said to me that day. And he had basically said that much. And I knew if the family will tell me their story, I'm in, I'm game. This is one for me. And it kind of grew from there. And at that point, it wasn't a story that had been really covered in the press, was it? No, to a point where I got back to the apartment that night and I Googled, because I'd gotten the name Zach Brettler, death, river, all these different combinations of things, trying to find something. And there was no record of the death on the internet at all. I mean, it was one of these strange things where Zach was a teenager. And so there were these kind of ghostly traces of him online,

• 10:10Speaker 01

  but it looked like he was still alive, like he had a Strava account for bike rides and things. But it seemed there was no indication that he was dead. And so there was nothing in the press. There was no record of this anywhere. And so what was your first move then to get in touch with his parents? So I asked this guy who had told me the story if he would introduce us. And he arranged a meeting. He came to, we met near the British Museum at a coffee shop. We sat outside, it was a warm summer day. We sort of met on the basis that it was all off the record. They weren't sure that they wanted to go public with this story. And we can talk more about this, but I mean, the, this was a very complicated and intense relationship that I have had and still have with this family.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  But, you know, on the front end, they were quite private people. They had been very deliberate about not wanting the story to be in the press. For a variety of reasons, they were starting to reconsider that. And so it was kind of fortuitous that we met when we did. And in that first meeting, I didn't even take out a notebook and they just talked for about two hours. It all kind of came tumbling out. I think they'd been quite isolated and so it may have felt cathartic to have somebody come and just sort of say, tell me the whole thing. So they did, but they were telling me in a way where the premise was that I couldn't necessarily do anything with it. Mm hmm. They sort of went off to think about it. I kind of made my pitch to them.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And then we met again about a week later at a bar in Soho. And at the end of another very long conversation, they said, okay, we think we're ready to do this. What had changed their mind? I think a few things. I mean, I think they did some due diligence on me and I've been doing this long enough now that, you know, there's no real mystery. You can Google articles I've written and reviews of my books and kind of get a sense of how I work. And so I think that they had had one fear, which was fear of a kind of sensationalistic, kind of slightly maybe prurient, Daily Mail style coverage of their teenage son and his life.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And I think I was able to persuade them that I would be kind of more sober and sensitive in how I handled it. I think some of it is that they were hugely pissed off at the Metropolitan Police, who they felt had really bungled the investigation into Zach's death. And so they both, I think, thought that there were a few more miles to go in terms of this investigation, that it had been inadequately investigated by the authorities. And they were quite resentful of the implication that the authorities were making, that this was actually just a conventional suicide, that their son had just chosen to end his own life and that there wasn't anything more exotic or nefarious going on. And then I think the third thing, which is more subtle, is that a very strange aspect

• 13:02Speaker 01

  of what I do for a living is that I'm often going and meeting people and asking them to tell me about the most awful thing that's ever happened to them. And I try to be kind of sensitive when I do that, and I think I'm quite a good listener. And the Brettlers were typical of a certain kind of person who I've encountered in these situations, where you've had this awful tragedy, this awful traumatic experience, you're quite obsessed with it, you think about it a lot, but you reach a point where you feel as though the people in your life are kind of sick of hearing about it. Like, you're sort of emotionally intelligent enough to see that your family members and your friends can

• 13:39Speaker 01

  only spend so much time poring over the details years after the fact. Then I come along, and I have all the time in the world. You know, you want to talk for five hours, we'll talk for five hours. You want to have some variation on the conversation we had yesterday, I'll do it again. And I think there was a kind of emotional catharsis for them in some of those conversations, but it was also very important for me to remind. Like, sometimes we'd have a long conversation at the end, Rochelle would kind of let out a sigh and say, "Ha, that was like a good therapy session." And I would say, "Yes, yes, but it wasn't therapy, because eventually, I'm gonna go off and write. And when I write, I won't be writing for you. And in fact, there will be things in the book that make you uncomfortable,

• 14:22Speaker 01

  and there may be things in the book that you'd prefer not be in the book." And if I were ever in a situation in which I felt I was writing the book just for you, or that you had a kind of de facto editorial control of the book, in the sense that you could sort of pick and choose what I get to include, that would be a malpractice on my part. You know, I can't do that. And then, there's a sort of added dimension, which is that, in a kind of frog and the scorpion sort of way, I am who I am. Like, if I investigate, I dig. If you invite me into your life, I'm gonna start rooting around a bit. And in this case, there are a bunch of family secrets, some of which have nothing to do with Zach, that came up along the way. So first, you write the

• 15:06Adam Buxton?

  Story up for The New Yorker. In 2024, that comes out.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:11Adam Buxton?

  And what then made you think, okay, there's a book in this?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I started to think even before I had finished the piece for a variety of reasons. I mean, it turned into a story in my mind very much about reinvention. And I thought that there was something quite thematically rich and interesting about the idea that adolescence, for any adolescent, is a story of reinvention. You kind of break away from your parents, you become the person that you're going to be. And this was all happening against the backdrop of a city that was rapidly transforming. That Zach Brethler's born in 2000 and he dies in 2019. And you could argue that London had reinvented itself during that time. That the city he dies in is actually quite a bit different from the city that he was born in.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And that also resonated with me because I lived in London at the time when he was born.

• 16:03Adam Buxton?

  Really? How long did you live in London?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  A year.

• 16:05Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2000 to 2001.

• 16:08Adam Buxton?

  What were you doing then?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  As a grad student at the LSE. And I was digging into the family histories of the various characters. So on the night Zach dies, he's in this apartment with these two older men. And I was very focused on the kind of immediate story of this mystery of this kid's death. And, you know, were these guys responsible for his death? But then, as I tracked back and looked at their family histories, in each of those family histories, there are these stories about people coming to England from other countries, other places, and reinventing themselves against the kind of stage, the backdrop of this stage of this great cosmopolitan city of London. And, you know, the New Yorker articles I read are long.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  And generally speaking, when I get to the end of one of them, I feel as though I have said everything that it is humanly possible to say on this subject. And there have basically been four occasions in 20 years where I got to the end and I felt like, oh, no, there's more. And in this case, I could kind of squint and see the book. I should say, it wasn't clear to me that the parents would be ready to take that longer. Journey, to use a hackneyed word with me. So I was telling them by the time I was finishing the article, listen, I think there's a book here, but I won't write the book unless you're in it for the long haul and you won't know if you are until you've read the article. And so it was all a bit TBD until the article had come out and they'd read it and they'd thought about it. And then they said, okay, yes, we're willing to kind of go the whole distance.

• 17:33Adam Buxton?

  And were they thinking that you might turn up some new information and get more closure for them in the way that, you know, Say Nothing, for example, you are fairly categorical about solving a mystery and you name a person at the end that was responsible for the kind of inciting act of Jean McConville's murder?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this was a slightly tricky one because I think, absolutely, I think that was part of what they were hoping. But I think I've gotten more careful about this over the years. And, you know, I think that as a journalist, you can sometimes employ the whole sort of emotional and rhetorical arsenal of trying to persuade people to talk with you. And the tricky thing for me is because I work on these long projects that take months and months and months, you know, sometimes you're in a situation where you can convince someone on the day and then down the road a ways, they start to have misgivings. And I want to be careful whenever I can to avoid that. And so what that meant

• 18:39Speaker 01

  with the brothers was that I was actually, from the outset, when they were still deciding whether or not to talk to me, I said to them explicitly, don't say yes because you think that if you do, I'll crack the case. That can't be the transaction that you have in your minds because it's true that Say Nothing ended that way and that I identified this person who pulled the trigger in 1972. But that's also the kind of thing that, you know, if you're a journalist, like if you're lucky, that happens once in a career. And so I'd be kidding them if I, and kidding myself, frankly, if we sort of carried on with the expectation that that's going to happen anytime.

• 19:18Adam Buxton?

  Patrick Raddenkeev turns up. He's cracked another case.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  There we go. Yeah, Pat Keefe, boy detective. Like occasionally I encounter people who clearly that's sort of the idea they have in their heads. And it's funny, you would think that it would be helpful for me, but it's quite unhelpful. It's a good thing I have to push against.

• 19:34Adam Buxton?

  You're just sort of exploring all the themes. I mean, there are, as I said, there's so many themes there. And what was the thing that really fascinated you the most about it initially?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I had written an article for The New Yorker already, an essay, which I wrote just following the invasion of Ukraine. I wrote an essay in The New Yorker. The title was Please Stay For Tea, or maybe Stay For Tea. It was about the warm welcome that London had extended to Russian oligarchs and the awkwardness for Britain in realizing kind of belatedly after the invasion that all of these Putin cronies were dug in very comfortably in London, in the real estate market, in the schools, in the economy. And when I heard the story, the big thing that I was thinking is what is it about London

• 20:30Speaker 01

  in 2018, 2019 that would make a boy from a pretty well-off family, you know, a kid with every opportunity ahead of him, he really could have done anything. What does it say about this place that when he thinks about who he wants to be, he wants to be the son of a Russian oligarch? Like, what does it say about the values of the place? And so that on the front end was what was interesting to me and the mystery and the intrigue and all the rest of it. And then as I got into it, I became intrigued by some of the history of London and the family histories of these people. And there's a whole gangster aspect to this story and the massive failings of the police.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  But then in a weird way, in a way that kind of took me by surprise, it turned into a book in part about parenting, you know, I'm a parent myself. And so that was an aspect of it that I maybe didn't quite see coming on the front end.

• 21:25Adam Buxton?

  And did that trip you up, do you think? I mean, I read an interview with you in New York Times, where they talked about the fact that you had therapy at a certain point while you were working on the book. Is that right?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:37Adam Buxton?

  And they described it as you not rebooting one day in a way that you normally would, you Talked about yourself as being quite optimistic and you're able to write about all these very dark subjects and encounter and interact with people who've had terrible experiences, but you are able to retain some level of detachment that enables you to carry on and not be dragged down by it. But is it right to say that you did feel that you were getting a bit dragged down by this story? Or was it just things that were happening in your life anyway?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It's sort of, I mean, it's a couple of things. My superpower is I have a sort of dispositional springiness, a kind of elasticity where no matter how bad one day is, the next day I usually kind of bounce out of bed feeling as though I can face the day with a certain amount of optimism. And there were a few things going on. I mean, some of it was actually just more generic. I was, you know, I was shedding liberal tears. I was a little undone by the reelection of Donald J. Trump. And I think I was sort of experiencing a specific existential quandary that a lot of journalists have in recent months, which is you ask yourself,

• 22:54Speaker 01

  really, what's the point of any of this? You know, there's the old expression, sunlight is a great disinfectant. What happens when sunlight doesn't disinfect? What happens when you expose the thing and it persists? And in fact, a worse thing happens the next day. And then nobody's talking about the bad thing that you exposed because in fact, something much worse has happened. And it's kind of one fresh hell after another. So I was wrestling with that. And then there was an added dimension which related to the book, which is that I have two adolescent sons, now 13 and 16, wonderful kids, but, you know, knuckleheads in the way that adolescents are. And I had spent two years talking, you know, nearly

• 23:35Speaker 01

  every day, talking or texting virtually every day with a couple who lost their adolescent son and who had spent an inordinate amount of time kind of thinking through, were there things we could have done differently? Was there some exit that we missed? And in a way, kind of torturing themselves with these types of questions.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And I think the tricky thing is that it's hard enough to parent an adolescent. And I was kind of overlaying this level of sort of catastrophic thinking. And my wife, at a certain point, said it's sort of, it's not fair to them that you're dealing with the kind of totally standard, just bog standard ups and downs of adolescence. And, you know, you have a father who's tearing his hair up because everything, you know, seems as though it could be the first few steps on the road to destruction, right?

• 24:37Adam Buxton?

  But that's the thing about the story is that it, for a parent, it throws all the worries and anxieties you have as a parent into relief via this extreme outcome, which, you know, so many of the red flags at the beginning of Zach's life in his early teenage years seem like red flags in retrospect, but they're very ordinary parts of being a teenager, especially a teenage boy.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:03Adam Buxton?

  Like, he got into movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and War Dogs that came out in the early 2010s. I mean, The Wolf of Wall Street's a weird film anyway. Even in quite a hagiographic Martin Scorsese documentary that I watched recently, which was great, it occupies a strange position in his filmography because even at the time, people were saying, this is a weird film that really fairly directly glamorizes the life of this guy, Jason Belfort, who was mainly a douchebag.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah.

• 25:38Adam Buxton?

  And yet, all the trappings of his life and his struggles to acquire wealth at any cost are straightforwardly glamorized in that film, you know? Even though, you know, you're supposed to be like, well, obviously, he was a bad guy and there's a certain amount of him at the end, you know, humbled.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Getting his comeuppance.

• 25:58Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I will say in fairness to Scorsese, I think that it is the nature of film and television. You know, Roger Ebert said, it's an empathy machine, right? You watch an attractive actor with beautiful lighting. And hair and makeup and wardrobe and all the rest of it. And you're kind of powerless, right? Like, it's just, it's very, very difficult not to identify with them on some level. And that's like highly thistle material, culturally speaking, in a way that is much more radioactive than what you can do on the page. And in some ways, I wrestled with this when we made our television version of my book, Say Nothing, where one of the big things that I fixated on when I was writing that book was that

• 26:45Speaker 01

  there were a whole series of ways in which I wanted to do something that was different from the kind of standard literature of the troubles. And there was something that I picked up on, which is that for the young people who joined the IRA when they were in their late teens and early twenties in the early 1970s, they were doing it out of a sense that they were living in occupied land, that there was a history of injustice. There was a kind of political zeal that motivated them, but also it was romantic and it was glamorous. And they all had pictures of Che Guevara on the wall. And there was a sense that it was sexy and they were young and they had a kind of sense of esprit de corps.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And it felt really important for me to convey that these were not just kind of cold eyed, like dialecticians who were joylessly pursuing what they thought was a righteous cause. These were young people who were getting kind of sucked into a very exciting experience on the front end. And the challenge for me in the book was how do you show the romance without romanticizing it yourself? And the answer was you show the hangover, you show the costs. You're constantly remembering that most of these people, most of the characters in that book are going to die broken, addicted, traumatized, and never able to quite overcome what they experienced as young people.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So then we make the series and, you know, the imperative is the same. But the problem is that the glamour end of the equation. Is just suddenly off the charts. It's so much more intense. You know, it's like, it's one thing for me to say Doller's Price was an attractive young woman, you know, with flashing blue eyes or what have you. It's quite another when she comes striding around the corner in slow motion with a, you know, leather duster on. Yeah. And I will say in our defense, and I'm very happy with the way the series came out, but I was also a little bit of a cop in the production because I was constantly trying to keep those things sort of in equilibrium. The horror is quite vivid as well.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So the first thing you see in the series is the abduction of Jean McConville, this widowed mother of ten in 1972. And it's pretty horrifying when you read it on the page in the book. It's much more horrifying when you see it on the screen. I mean, that's the one kind of saving grace is that I think, I think you can show in a very visceral way, the horror of war and violence on the screen.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  What were you like when you were a teenage boy? Were you interested in anything edgy? I mean, not edgy like Zach was, but I had a kind of a slightly strange childhood in the sense that I grew up in a big urban neighborhood in Boston. And I went to school about 10 minutes away at a very posh suburban New England prep school. So not totally different from Zach's school? Uh, no, not totally different. No, you're right. It was a little bit different in the sense that I was growing up in a different era. And so there were some tremendously wealthy people that I went to school with, but it was the 1990s in a period when, it's so funny now. I mean, you and I are probably sort of roughly the same generation. And it's amazing how antique this sounds now, but.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  When I was in high school, like the worst thing you could do was sell out, right? I mean, the whole notion of selling out as a sort of cultural trope just seems totally alien to young people today. But at the time, I think the richest kids in the school would have gone to great lengths to obscure the fact that they were the richest kids in the school. Like, if they were going skiing in Aspen, they weren't going to come back and tell you about it, you know?

• 30:47Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Whereas for Zach was quite different. I think he was exposed to all these people who they sort of led with the bling. But I was very into hip hop. We didn't call it hip hop back then, it was rap. And this was sort of early on, this is kind of pre Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre and his solo career. But what I mean is it was before it was conventional for like middle-class white kids to listen to hip hop. And, you know, loved Public Enemy, loved Slick Rick, loved KRS-One.

• 31:15Adam Buxton?

  But you weren't changing the way you spoke and dressed and...

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Well... Where I'm going with this is, these questions of like, you know, what does it mean for me to like, wear a Raiders cap? Or whatever the little signifier at the time would have been.

• 31:28Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Those questions were very much on my mind, and I was sort of probing that line.

• 31:32Adam Buxton?

  Gang colors.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that kind of thing. I mean, it wasn't, you know, not that far, but you're not far off. It was like on that continuum, right? So I guess that I can sort of relate to Zach in the sense that I think that when you are 13, 14, 15 years old, questions of identity, cultural and otherwise, it's all very plastic, it's all very fluid.

• 31:51Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Everybody's kind of putting on masks and taking them off and figuring out, who am I going to be?

• 31:55Adam Buxton?

  That's right. The old prefrontal cortex is busy developing.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  It's funny, when I moved to England, I moved here right after college because I got a fellowship to come here. And a bunch of us who'd gotten, these Americans who got the fellowships to come to the UK for grad school, we all took the flight together. And I recently talked to a guy who's an old friend of mine, but who knew me then, and he recalled something I had completely deleted from my memory, which is that, I'm embarrassed even to say this, I was desperate to, I wanted to write for The New Yorker since I was really young, since I was in high school. And I was already pitching by the time I was in college with no success.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  This guy reminded me that on that flight, as everybody gets on and everybody's, yeah, everybody's in their early twenties, they've just graduated from college, they're going off to England. And I pulled out my laptop and was writing something very intently. And he said, you know, what are you writing? And I said, I'm working on an article. Now, you know, this article was not assigned, it was never published. I don't even remember what it would have been about. I shudder at how pretentious it was that everybody else is having a good time and I self seriously, you know, whip out the old laptop and announce to everyone that I'm Ernest Hemingway or whatever. I mean, but, but that's, that's a very Zach thing. And I feel as though that's, I think that's something that we all do

• 33:22Speaker 01

  to lesser and greater degrees, right? Is to kind of pretend to be for a moment, the person who when we close our eyes, we hope will become.

• 33:29Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, especially as a teenager. I mean, I remember reading the book reminded me, I was thinking, God, I wasn't like that. I didn't even know people like Zach. But then I thought, oh, hang on, I was like that. At least for a short period.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  How so?

• 33:43Adam Buxton?

  Well, I had a memory of, it was something that I hadn't thought about for a while. I did actually write about it in a book, but then I sort of shelved it and thought, well, I never have to think about that again. But when I was quite little, like 10, 11, I went through a phase of getting icing sugar and laying out strips of cling film and pouring mounds of icing sugar onto the cling film and then wrapping it up into packets. And then I got my dad's briefcase and I put them all in the briefcase.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  [laughing]

• 34:12Adam Buxton?

  And then I remember being in the kitchen and getting a sharp knife and stabbing one of the packets with the knife, getting a little bit of the ice.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Did you take a little sample?

• 34:22Adam Buxton?

  Sure I did, yeah. Just, you know, touched it to my gums. Did all that because I'd seen it on telly.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. You've been watching Martin Scorsese movies.

• 34:33Adam Buxton?

  I thought, yeah, I'll have a go at that. That seems like a good thing to do. And it definitely made me feel like, this is cool. I mean, this is pretty cool. I've got some packets of drugs and I probably didn't even know what they were, what the packets were. I was just like, well, this is what they look like. Maybe it is icing sugar. It's a really good icing, very pure Tate and Lyle.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And you could, you could step on it a bit before, before, uh, before selling it on the street. Yeah.

• 35:02Adam Buxton?

  So I did that. And then when I was a little older, I used to carry around various bits and pieces of kind of contraband, like I had a lock knife that I got in Paris. And I would just carry that around because I'd heard of other people having flick knives.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:18Adam Buxton?

  And I thought, well, because it wasn't a very good lock knife and I could actually flick it open. I thought, well, that's kind of a flick knife. And then my dad was a journalist. He wrote for the Sunday Telegraph and he had a press pass. And it was an old press pass and I took his photo out and put my like a photo in and sort of faked up the signature so that it went over the photo. And I carried that around just in case.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:42Adam Buxton?

  Just in case I ever needed to blag my way in somewhere as a 14 year old boy often does.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 35:49Adam Buxton?

  But so I had all these things, little accoutrement like that. I got busted coming back from holiday. One time they looked through my bags and they found the lock knife. That wasn't very good. Luckily I didn't have any packets.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  I was gonna say probably better than the packets.

• 36:02Adam Buxton?

  Icing sugar.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I swear, just taste it.

• 36:08Adam Buxton?

  But, um, you know, of course there is a dimension to that where if that had happened as a young, well spoken white boy. Probably, yeah, probably would have gone fine. But there were, there were all those kind of little fantasy

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 36:23Adam Buxton?

  things that I went through. And I did certainly have a fascination with that world and thought about what it might be like. And I was at a similar kind of school, I suppose, public school in central London.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:33Adam Buxton?

  There were lots of other kids there from very wealthy families and some sons of oligarchs and even arms dealers. And, you know, you would be very curious about their lives and some of them threw parties and it was really quite exciting to go and

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:50Adam Buxton?

  see what their lives were like and see what their houses were like. It was very seductive, but I think me and my friends always felt instinctively wary of the people. People on the extreme ends of that.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Why?

• 37:04Adam Buxton?

  Because this might be a kind of retrospective reinterpretation of how I felt, but it felt like it wasn't a happy world. Like, we had one friend who was part of a supermarket family, who was a really lovely guy who I'm still friends with now. And he was sweet and his family were very loving and, you know, they had this extraordinary life, but it was a good scene around there. You would go there and everyone was getting on and they were happy and it was kind of arty. But then there were other families there where you would go around and the parents were spectral presences if they were there at all.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:39Adam Buxton?

  The son was obviously acting out in various ways, would behave in kind of an extreme way, fairly often would be sort of a little sadistic sometimes and very unhappy and morose other times. It just felt like this is not a good scene.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. In the case of Zach, the thing that's weird is that these older guys that he ended up hanging out with. I mean, to me, it sounds like the kind of not good scene end of the spectrum, but I I don't know that he necessarily felt that way. I mean, obviously, this whole story is about this one kid Zach pushing it to an extreme that a lot of people don't.

• 38:12Adam Buxton?

  Some of the comments I saw underneath the original New Yorker version of the story of your.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I don't think I've ever looked. Are there comments?

• 38:20Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 38:22Adam Buxton?

  I mean, they're positive. Uh, maybe that maybe it wasn't under the New Yorker. Maybe I was looking at it on Reddit. Anyway, one.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Oh, even worse. Okay, I'm great. I'm just, if you see me holding the table, that's why I'm embracing myself.

• 38:34Adam Buxton?

  It's fine, it's fine. But they were just interesting, the way that people were responding to the story. One here from someone who talks about Zach's parents and says the lack of insight into Zach's life is baffling to me, especially as their other actions suggest they weren't entirely disinterested. The drug test, psychologist, they're referring to something that happened after Zach became violent one day when he was in his late teens and he ended up kind of throttling his mother in an argument. And after that, they took him to see a therapist. Anyway, the comment continues, he was the sixth former for most of the gallivanting. How would you not investigate a sudden flush of money?

• 39:16Adam Buxton?

  That's another moment when Zach shows his dad a bank statement or what appears to be a bank statement on his iPad. And he's got eight hundred and fifty grand in there.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:25Adam Buxton?

  Turns out to be fake. But at that point, they think it's real and they're like, what's this? And he's saying it's absolutely real. The other thing he did was at one point when he was fifteen, turn up in a limousine.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Limousine, yeah.

• 39:37Adam Buxton?

  That he had used his own pocket money.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Money for, yeah.

• 39:40Adam Buxton?

  To pay for. Comment concludes, I suppose it didn't stand out in the area of London where they lived. And I hesitate to point fingers. Anyway, the implication is like, how could they have missed all these red flags? And there's a few comments like that from people sort of going, what were the parents doing?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I think some people encounter this story and they say, oh, this is actually quite a simple story. It's a story about these bad parents who were checked out.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And should have been more attentive to what was going on with their son. You know, personally, I don't necessarily feel that way. And it's funny because I've now, the book's been out for a month now and I've talked to loads of people who've read it. Who are parents have a rather different feeling, which is that you recognize that

• 40:27Speaker 01

  there is a thing that happens in adolescence where your child ceases to be this piece of clay that you can kind of mold to your liking. And they start to become who they're going to be. And some of that is you, some of that is a reaction against you, some of that is your spouse or your partner. Some of that is other stuff altogether, weird stimuli that you don't control and you may not even see or understand. And how to deal with that, I think, is just exquisitely difficult. And so in the case of Zach's parents, I don't think they were checked out. As you know, you read they, you know, there was a drug test that they surreptitiously gave him.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  There was a, they actually at a certain point installed a hidden camera in the, inside their flat to see what was going on. They're quite suspicious of what was going on with him. They could feel him becoming someone who seemed strange to them.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  And also hostile to them, you know, I mean, he clearly had a lot of anger in that moment, you know, throttling Rochelle. So there was actually quite a lot that they did do. And it's funny, because if there's a moment where I had trouble connecting and I thought, oh, it would be different for me, it's the bank statement moment. Because just the magnitude of 850,000 pounds.

• 41:49Adam Buxton?

  What would you have done in that moment?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I mean, it's, I probably, well, let me tell you what Matthew did. So Matthew was

• 41:58Adam Buxton?

  This is Zach's dad?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, was shocked by this. He questioned whether or not the bank statement was real, but it looked very real. It was an account that he had originally set up for Zach.

• 42:08Adam Buxton?

  And this is Zach aged 17-ish?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Eighteen, eighteen. Now, it must be said, at this point, Zach is, he's still in school, but he's basically made it clear that he doesn't really want to pursue a kind of conventional university life. He wants to go right into business and indeed is already doing business deals. And so there are a range of different businesses. He's supposedly doing oil and gas deals. He's got these friends who he's doing a deal involving the importation of cars. There's a real estate thing where he told his parents he got a finder's fee because he'd heard about how there was an apartment that had become available in One Hyde Park, this very fancy development that he was kind of obsessed with in Knightsbridge. And he told them that there was a woman who worked for Chelsea Football Club, who

• 42:53Speaker 01

  had ended up, you know, he had kind of let it be known, he had gotten word to her that this apartment was available and he ended up getting a finder's fee. He said that he was working with this guy Akbar Chamji, this sort of playboy jet setting businessman who lived in Mayfair, you know, in fact, lived on Mount Street, which is a very fancy street in a very fancy neighborhood, had an office on Barclay Square, an extremely posh kind of quadrangle in Mayfair. And

• 43:20Adam Buxton?

  How had they met?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  They had met through a guy named Mark Foley, who actually worked for Chelsea Football Club, who met Zach. And I think that Mark Foley, I ended up interviewing him, I think he was patient zero. I think he was the first person Zach tried this line on where they met. And Mark Foley said, oh, I work for Chelsea Football Club, which would have been really interesting to Zach, because at the time, Chelsea Football Club was owned by Roman Abramovich. And Zach had a thing about Russian oligarchs and all the things that kind of came with that. At a party or? Yeah, it was a party. They just randomly met. And Zach said, oh, well, I'm actually from a wealthy Russian family. My father is a billionaire. I am kind of his right hand. I'm helping him make investments.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  And to this day, I've always thought of Zach as like a bit like a stand up comic. Where he's sort of trying stuff out. You know, he's like living his life, but then he's always retelling his life with elaborations. For effect and he's looking at your face. He's sort of reading your reactions. He's seeing what amuses you and what attracts you and maybe what you don't believe. And there are all these stories about him telling stories to his friends, the other teenagers, and them saying, you're full of shit. I don't believe it. And I think what happened in this case is that he meets this guy. He tries out this line. Uncertain whether it's going to work or not. And then this guy, this grown up Mark Foley, really somebody who should be able to see through it.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Somebody who knows real Russian oligarchs buys it. And Mark Foley says, oh, it's interesting. You're looking to make investments. I have a friend, this guy Akbar Shamji, who has a real estate deal. He's trying to get off the ground in Lisbon. He's looking for investors. Maybe I could put you together. So he connects Zach with this guy Akbar. But where I'm going with this is Zach's parents know about his friendship with Akbar. They know that he's doing deals with Akbar. They've looked Akbar up. Akbar's on LinkedIn. Akbar has a wife, Daniela Karnut, who has this very fancy brand Safia that makes these elegant gowns for famous women. You know, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama and various other women,

• 45:34Speaker 01

  members of the royal family who wear her gowns. Zach shows his mother the Safia website. So Akbar seems like a kind of fixture in the real world. At a certain point, one of the projects that Zach has going with Akbar is a skincare line. These sort of CBD infused skincare products. There are these samples that arrive at the family flat and sit there in the living room. You know, these real, these things you could touch, these tangible artifacts of the stories that Zach is telling. There's a guy who's a friend of Matthew's who happens to be in the skincare business. He had a cosmetics company. He sold it to Unilever. And Matthew and Zach talk about this and Zach says, do you think he would meet with us?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  That guy meets with Zach and Akbar and kind of hears their pitch. And he doesn't end up investing in the company, but he advises them. And he kind of reports back that, you know, they seem pretty credible, actually. This all seems real. So at the point where Zach tells his father, I have 850,000 pounds in my account. On the one hand, it's like a jaw dropping crazy detail. On the other hand, maybe there's some basis for this. And then I think part of it with Matthew is it's two things. It's that he wants to believe it. Like his kid is not going to kind of pursue the conventional track. He's going to do this other thing. And you kind of want to think that he's going to make it work the way some other people have. You know, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was 19, right?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  It's not unheard of. And then the final thing is, I think for Matthew and Michelle, there was a sense that we don't want to challenge him. Like if he's lying, he's lying because he wants to impress us. And if that's what's going on, if our 18 year old somehow has kind of worked in his mind that he should like gin up this fake bank statement to make us feel like he's a success. We don't know what would happen if we said what his teenage friends said, which is Zach, you're full of shit. I mean, you never stop making those calculations as a parent, do you? Like you're constantly thinking, okay, is it time to intervene now? Is it, what is worth getting involved with?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  What is worth doing a bit of benign neglect on? Yeah. This, I mean, I talked to a friend of mine recently who was recounting a night when her son told her that he was going to go and, you know, see friends nearby and stay at their place for the evening. And she used Find My iPhone to see where he was going. And she watched him go all the way down into South London, into some, you know, kind of warehouse or something. And he was there until about three in the morning. And the dilemma for her was he had clearly forgotten that she had the Find My iPhone thing. Yeah. Or wasn't aware of it. And the challenge was, do you call him on lying?

• 48:25Adam Buxton?

  And reveal yourself.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  And reveal yourself and make him feel surveilled. Or do you allow him to kind of continue in the illusion that he has privacy? And that in fact, he is free to lie to you the way kids always have to their parents, you know?

• 48:38Adam Buxton?

  What's your policy on that? Are you surveilling your kids?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm, I'm literally, I'm, I'm cautious to say anything. In the event that word would get back to my children. But we do have Find My iPhone installed on.

• 48:52Adam Buxton?

  But are they, they're aware of it. I think that's our policy in our houses. They know that they're being surveilled. Some of them have opted out. But it's a big fraught topic in our houses to what degree to, should they be surveilled and?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  But this is, but the truth is, this is, this is, you know, any parent, any marriage in this moment. These are the types of questions that you're grappling with. And, and I think my frustration with the read of this, and again, I should say. You know, the book's been out for a month and, and a lot of people have read it and. It's a pretty small minority of readers who kind of come out of this and say, I blame the parents.

• 49:30Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  I think if you're raising a kid today, all these sort of types of questions. And we haven't even really talked about kind of phones and algorithms and social media, which were a factor with Zach. What I tell my kids, and I wonder if even this is the right thing to tell them. Is like, I have no idea what I'm doing here. I'm kind of making this up as we go along. The world is changing. Technology is changing. The nature of childhood is changing. Our phones, I think, have radically rewritten the way we engage with each other. We, you know, exist in the kind of polity. We read, we process information, and that's changing me and not just you. Like I have my own dilemmas in terms of my relationship with my devices and social media and algorithms and all the rest of it.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And so I, I'm kind of, again, in a way that I might end up looking back on and feeling was a mistake. I try to be pretty transparent with my kids and saying, work with me here. This shit ain't easy. We are figuring it out day by day.

• 50:30Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. What things do you think you might look back on and think were a mistake? How else would you have played it?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Well, what I mean is that it's actually the framing of it where I have a very, very close relationship with my parents. They're in their eighties. They were great parents to me and still are. I feel hugely lucky for that, but my parents didn't show a ton of weakness. There wasn't a lot of them saying, you know what? I don't know how to be a parent right now.

• 50:58Adam Buxton?

  Okay, got you.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  And I think if they had, and in those moments where I would sort of suddenly get a glimpse of the chink in the armor, those were quite destabilizing for me when I was young. And so when I say I'll look back and regret it, I wonder whether my own children might eventually say to me, you didn't have to tell us all that.

• 51:15Adam Buxton?

  I lost all respect for you that day.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny, this is a weird analogy, but I have, um, I've always done some screenwriting on the side, and so I work in Hollywood a little bit. And I remember talking to a friend of mine who's a very experienced, very successful screenwriter at some point, and telling him that I will often send in a draft of a script and I'll say, here's the draft, I really, you know, I have big misgivings and I'm pretty sure I screwed up the third act and so on and so forth. And him getting, um, kind of impatient with me and saying, no, no, no, you don't understand. You're a surgeon and like the loved one is laid out on the table and the family is gathered around. Even if you don't know what you're doing, the last thing you tell the family is, I don't know what I'm doing. You know, it's, you can have those private doubts, but they're not for everybody.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  And in fact, it's hugely counterproductive to be transparent in all things in that way. So that's what I mean with my kids.

• 52:06Adam Buxton?

  Okay, yeah, but there's pros and cons because I think that my parenting style is to some degree a reaction against the way that I was brought up. My parents sound quite similar to yours in that respect. Happy family, I love them very much, but there was a certain, I don't know if this is the case with yours, but for me, there was a certain distance and formality that I didn't necessarily want to carry across to my relationship with my kids. I wanted it to be closer. And I, as an adult, regretted how formal and distant everything was and how. I didn't know more about the problems that they were going through. I wish I had known.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 52:40Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I do, because it eventually split them up, you know?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:43Adam Buxton?

  And I felt like that had worse repercussions than just knowing about it or talking about it at the time would have done. But I appreciate that wasn't really in there, that wasn't in their skill set to be able to sit down and have those honest conversations. They felt that it was imperative, they should tough it out and not burden us with the problems that they were going through.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  So there was a sense that they were sparing you?

• 53:07Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, oh yeah, definitely.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:09Adam Buxton?

  But, you know, and it's not as if I'm telling my kids every single thing that stresses me out or every problem that me and my wife have.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:17Adam Buxton?

  But I'm also quite keen not to lie to them and to be straight with them when it is a problem that is going to affect them and when it would be useful for them to understand why I'm moping about or, you know what I mean?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:30Adam Buxton?

  Rather than being a bit mystified by it or a bit flummoxed by it. But, you know, I just think there's pros and cons to both approaches, aren't there?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  It's not a science, right? Like thi- this is the thing and you don't know. And and the truth is, you could have two different kids and parent them in exactly the same way and they're gonna go off in two different directions. My wife will accuse me gently. She'll essentially say, yes, I understand this is your worldview, but you realize that isn't it rather convenient that your worldview just translates into total complacency, right? That you just, you kind of give a kind of existentialist shrug and you sort of say, you know, les jeux sont faits, what can I do? You know, I'm, how could I possibly be an active parent? They're gonna do what they're gonna do, they're gonna be what they're gonna be. I mean, I guess she might suggest that that's just laziness on my part, masquerading as a theory of parenthood, but.

• 54:17Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 54:19Adam Buxton?

  That's something that I struggle with as well. That's a characteristic of a centrist dad, I believe. Are you familiar with that phrase?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:26Adam Buxton?

  Centrist dad as a, as a term of. Light abuse for someone like me. Someone accused me of being a centrist dad the other day and then I looked up a definition. It was like, holy shit, that is exactly what I'm like.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  So what is it?

• 54:38Adam Buxton?

  It's someone who struggles to be reasonable and see both sides. And it's said at one point, centrist dads often listen to podcasts like the Blind Boy podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:51Adam Buxton?

  It's really good. And I think he would be a bit annoyed by that implication as well. I don't think he's a total centrist blind boy. Anyway, and also they like books by people like Malcolm Gladwell. Guilty. I've certainly enjoyed a bit of Gladwell in the past. So it was a fairly withering portrait of someone who is going through life wringing his hands and not wanting to pick a side because you're so aware of the, you know, the fact that it could so easily turn out another way. And every single decision you make, especially as a parent, you're kind of haunted by what the repercussions might be, how things could have played out differently. And that comes through so clearly. And the

• 55:36Adam Buxton?

  struggle that Zach's parents have and the way that they are haunted by how things could have turned out is very painful. You're still in contact with them, right?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 55:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Are they keeping track of everything, of the press, the reviews of your appearances talking about the book? Are they seeing, are they engaged with it in that way?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Rochelle is very online, you know, she follows lots of stuff on Instagram and so she'll see, she'll send me things, she'll, she'll see things. I think it has been validating for them to have the book out in the world in a number of ways. One is that, we haven't really talked about it, but this story is in part about how badly the investigation into Zach's death was cocked up by the Metropolitan Police.

• 56:17Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  They never concluded anything definitive about the death, but they always had a kind of tendency to say, could have been a suicide. It could just be that you're sort of in denial here and your son just killed himself. And Matthew and Rochelle really firmly believed that he didn't.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I've written about parents in denial before. I've written quite a lot about parental denial as a subject. And if I thought that this was actually a story about a boy who committed suicide and his parents who just couldn't emotionally accept that their son had committed suicide, I 100% would have written that story. But I think they were right to doubt the suicide hypothesis. And the Met just kind of didn't do his job.

• 57:03Adam Buxton?

  Why not, do you think? Is that, I mean, there's some sense in which it feels like they don't want to ruffle feathers of members of the community who are important for London's ongoing sense of prosperity. And is that the case?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I think it is, but not in a direct way. I don't think there was a kind of conspiracy here where some phone call was made and people were told to scuttle the case. I think it's more, and I tell this whole longer story in the book about the arrival of the Russian oligarchs in the early aughts, and then not long after they arrive, you start getting these people who just start dying randomly in London. You know, they fall off of buildings and they fall in front of tube trains and they fall out of windows. And there's a tendency on the part of the cops to always say, looks like a suicide, looks like an accident, to an almost comical extreme. Like, there's a guy I describe in the book who dies from 24 stab wounds from two different knives. And the police say, clearly a suicide.

• 58:02Adam Buxton?

  Why? Because it's just they haven't got the time, they haven't got the funding, or because?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  No, I think in that case, there's a kind of learned behavior where there's a sense that, you know, the Metropolitan Police have been, have had decades of cutbacks. It is an institution that just in a kind of plain old incompetence way is not really fit to purpose. And then on top of that, you kind of layer on international intrigue where, in some cases with the Russians, it's like you have a highly sophisticated foreign intelligence service assassinating people on British soil. There's a, you know, not, maybe not totally unreasonable sense on the part of the local bobbies that this is kind of above their pay grade and they're not going to be able to get to the bottom of it. There was a retired

• 58:51Speaker 01

  detective who I interviewed who said to me defensively, You know, the job of the police is not to be Sherlock Holmes. It's not to solve mysteries. It's to investigate cases that can be charged and prosecuted. And if you're describing a fact pattern that is so exotic that it doesn't fit into one of the kind of conventional boxes in an over, you know, kind of overstretched, resource-deprived, big bureaucracy, there's a tendency to just say, okay, let's move on to the next thing that we can charge.

• 59:23Adam Buxton?

  Hey, hello, here again. Just to say, this final section of conversation with Patrick that you're about to hear came from me asking what he was working on next and whether he had plans to make more podcasts like his series Wind of Change from 2020, which I really enjoyed. It explored the possibility that the 1990 power ballad Wind of Change by German band The Scorpions was made in collaboration with the CIA as a propaganda exercise designed to consolidate public enthusiasm for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anyway, that was Wind of Change. And this is what Patrick had to say about what he's up to next.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  I'm making a new one, in the very early stages of a new podcast.

• 1:00:07Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, good one.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  That's fun, yeah.

• 1:00:09Adam Buxton?

  What's that about?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  It's sort of, it's still early stages. It's about music, which my last one was as well.

• 1:00:14Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And I think it's gonna be four parts about music. There's no intrigue, there's no spying, there's no murder.

• 1:00:23Adam Buxton?

  What aspect of music are you talking about?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't even wanna get into it. Yeah, it's like, it's about...

• 1:00:28Adam Buxton?

  It's about the Beatles, isn't it?

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is about sort of songwriting and how music is created, where it comes from.

• 1:00:36Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 1:00:37Adam Buxton?

  Did you ever read David Byrne's book about that?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  You know, I haven't, but it is on my, I have a big stack of things that I need to read for this, and that's one of them. He's really smart.

• 1:00:45Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah. Have you seen his shows, his live shows?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  I haven't, I want to.

• 1:00:49Adam Buxton?

  Oh, it's pretty good.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  You know, you see him, though, downtown Manhattan, riding his bike around.

• 1:00:54Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Just exciting.

• 1:00:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, these people walk among us or ride among us.

• 1:00:58Adam Buxton?

  His live show I saw earlier this year, and it's the best thing I've ever seen.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:01:02Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. I don't go to that many music shows, but the last few that I've been to in fairly largish venues, you know, 3,000, 4,000 size capacity venues.

• 1:01:13Adam Buxton?

  I've just thought like, why is the sound not that great? Like, I can't really hear. And they'll have a string section on stage or everything, but everything's so sort of overdriven and muddy. It sounds like, and I'm like, this isn't what it's supposed to be like, is it? Anyway, David Byrne's show, everything was like crystal clear.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:01:31Adam Buxton?

  He can still sing really well, but he's got a load of backing vocalist. So it's a, it's a bit like a almost like a theater show.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Adam Buxton?

  It's that level of clarity and production and staging and costumes and visual accompaniment. There's all these big screens with clever bits of visuals that go along with each song.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Adam Buxton?

  He chats in between and he's a very easygoing.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  The good repartee.

• 1:01:58Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Adam Buxton?

  And also, the other thing that was great about it was that because he chats in between the songs, it means that people don't stand up the whole time. So if you go and see him in a seated venue, that's the thing I keep forgetting. You go and you sit down for this show, you've paid a lot of money for your ticket, and then two songs in, some twat stands up in front of you because he's determined to groove around to his favorite song.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Adam Buxton?

  And then he forces.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  While holding his phone in the air.

• 1:02:27Adam Buxton?

  Exactly. And then he forces his mate to stand up.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  And everybody does.

• 1:02:30Adam Buxton?

  Everybody has to stand up because they can't see. And then that's it. You're standing up even though you've paid for your nice comfy seat. But because David Byrne did these long sort of monologues.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  People would sit. He's encouraging them.

• 1:02:42Adam Buxton?

  They'd realize.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  It's funny because, because there's a whole thing, when I was working on my earlier podcast, Wouldn't Have Changed, there's a whole kind of running thing about, um, that in Russia, even at rock concerts, everybody would sit as if they were at the balshoi. And I had forgotten this, but I was reminded, I think, that Billy Joel went on tour in Russia in around nineteen ninety. And apparently just like, got super pissed off because Billy was out there, you know, giving them the best that he had.

• 1:03:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  And they were all sitting down, like, nobody was on their feet. And it hadn't been explained to him that this is an aspect of the concert going culture of Russia. So you, my friend, would be a, you know, candidate for concerts in Russia. Yeah.

• 1:03:22Adam Buxton?

  I know. I mean, now I have played shows with my own band. Just as I speak to you, I was playing here in Bath last night at the Comedia. And it's still very new to me. And I've only played four, five shows at this point.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:03:37Adam Buxton?

  On this small tour that I'm on. And there was three seated venues, two standing venues, and the standing audience is way better.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:03:45Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  So this is one of those situations where like when I'm a driver, I hate pedestrians and don't understand why they would behave the way they do. And when I'm a pedestrian, I hate drivers. And I don't understand. You're a bit like that, but with the seating and standing thing, when you're attending the concert, you want everybody to sit.

• 1:04:00Adam Buxton?

  If it's a seated venue, sit down. Don't stand up.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. It's a question for their physical chairs.

• 1:04:06Adam Buxton?

  So some venues, it's you're supposed to stand. There's no chairs.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Adam Buxton?

  And there are chairs for people who can't stand or don't want to stand. That's the ideal is there's a few bonquets at the back or whatever.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Optionality.

• 1:04:18Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  I'm encouraged to hear that the sound was okay at David Byrne because before you got to that, I was wondering if maybe the problem was you.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  That's the strangest thing. In recent years, the sound is always so muddy.

• 1:04:30Adam Buxton?

  Honestly, that is.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Concerts have changed. This is the only explanation.

• 1:04:33Adam Buxton?

  And what is it with all these out of focus bands?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, this is my wife last night was we were, um, because we have jet lag, we were taking our melatonin and she was trying to read the tiny print on the melatonin bottle and talking about how impossible it is and how irresponsible, you know, for anybody to write anything this small.

• 1:04:49Adam Buxton?

  I'm with her.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I did wonder, though.

• 1:04:53Adam Buxton?

  It really does feel that way. I know. I looked at the first book I wrote in 2020 that came out then, and I saw the paperback the other day. I was like, oh, God, I can't actually.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Who's this for?

• 1:05:03Adam Buxton?

  Read that. Like the hardback, the print is way bigger. And this time I stick.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Have you used readers, those ones you can buy just in the bookshop by the?

• 1:05:10Adam Buxton?

  No, I just spend like tons of money on.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  So you can get these readers.

• 1:05:14Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Which is.

• 1:05:15Adam Buxton?

  Glasses, this is.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  No, they're glasses. They call them readers. And this is all, I'm describing something that everybody knows about, but to me, it hit me with the force of revelation. They're like, um, magnifying glasses, but with, you know, glasses frames and you buy them for just like 10, 15 pounds. They sell them on the racks, like by the counter or whatever. They magnify and you can get like 1.0 or 1.5 or 2.0 or 2.5. And the thing that's crazy is originally I was actually in a restaurant. I couldn't read the menu. And my friend said, oh, you should try my readers. And I said, oh, well, I would never require such a thing. And then I put them on and suddenly I could read the menu. And then I went and I got 1.0 because I figured I need the lowest, you know, I need the lowest dose here, lowest magnification. But boy, it's a slippery slope.

• 1:06:00Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I'm up to two already.

• 1:06:04Adam Buxton?

  But then do you get headaches?

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  No, it's brilliant. I mean, the thing that what gives you a headache is when you then look up and look around at anything that's not the page right in front of you. But um, it's literally a magnifying glass. It just, you know, it's great. It's like these great big letters, you know?

• 1:06:19Adam Buxton?

  No, I'm definitely heading in that direction. I mean, you would think that we're entering the phase technologically where those things are going to be sorted, aren't they? Like, aren't we going to get implants and?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, it's a GLP-1 world, right?

• 1:06:34Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  There's any, you know, we're counting on science. Science is going to save us.

• 1:06:38Adam Buxton?

  Have people encouraged you to have a bit of GLP-1, even though you're not necessarily overweight? They're so good for lots of other things as well.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, what else are they good for?

• 1:06:48Adam Buxton?

  Well, you could take them instead of a statin.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  What's a statin?

• 1:06:51Adam Buxton?

  A statin reduces your risk of heart attack.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:06:55Adam Buxton?

  If you've got high blood pressure, you would be prescribed a statin and that will reduce your risk of stroke and heart attack.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Sounds good to me.

• 1:07:04Adam Buxton?

  Hello, Dr. Buckles here. Now, I got a message from a real doctor, Dr. Mitch Shah, after I originally uploaded this podcast, who thought it was worth clarifying what myself and Patrick were talking about from a medical point of view. Dr. Shah says, I'm a consultant cardiologist specializing in lipid disorders and preventative cardiology. While both GLP-1 drugs and statins can reduce cardiovascular risk, they work through very different mechanisms and treat different underlying problems. Statins are specifically used to lower LDL cholesterol, whereas GLP-1 drugs mainly work through the blood glucose and weight loss pathway with only modest effects on cholesterol. Statins have become somewhat unfairly maligned through

• 1:07:47Adam Buxton?

  widespread misinformation and exaggerated claims about side effects. He goes on to say, daily I see patients with severe, sometimes genetic, cholesterol disorders who have a critical need for statin therapy, but who are understandably hesitant because of what they've heard online. I worry that the idea that GLP-1s could simply replace statins may unintentionally add to that confusion. You can read the whole of what Dr. Shah said, there's only a little bit more, in the description of this episode, and I apologize for adding to any confusion there. Thank you very much for the clarification, Dr. Shah. Now, back

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  End of my conversation with Patrick.

• 1:08:27Adam Buxton?

  God blimey, I mean, you must be younger than me. I can't believe you haven't heard of Statins yet.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  No, I have, I'm forty nine.

• 1:08:34Adam Buxton?

  Oh, you're a young man.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Am I? How old are you?

• 1:08:36Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, fifty seven.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay. Well, you're looking well.

• 1:08:39Adam Buxton?

  Thank you.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Didn't I say earlier that we were roughly the same age?

• 1:08:42Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  And here you are, a generation older than me.

• 1:08:44Adam Buxton?

  Well, I was thinking, maybe he is, but he looks a lot better than I do.

• 1:08:57Adam Buxton?

  Wait. Continue.

• 1:09:08Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, Podcats. That was Patrick Radden Keefe, talking to me there in Bath. Earlier this month, May, twenty twenty six. I'm very grateful to Patrick and his team for making the time and arranging that conversation. As you heard, I really thought that book was fascinating. He's such a good writer, Patrick Radden Keefe, if you're not familiar with his stuff. I guess I would start with Say Nothing, perhaps, which serves as an excellent overview of the troubles in Northern Ireland, but frequently reads like a thriller. No wonder people wanted to adapt it for TV. Empire of Pain, also very good. His book Rogues.

• 1:09:53Adam Buxton?

  Collection of profiles of various problematic male figures is also excellent. So how are you doing, Podcats? I hope you're able to enjoy this hot weather rather than be tortured by it. Try and find a way to chill, take a chill pill, put some chill out music on, have some children. Actually, don't do that. That's the worst way to chill. In my experience, it's very unchilled. Rosie's enjoying the water.

• 1:10:28Adam Buxton?

  And it's nice out here.

• 1:10:32Adam Buxton?

  In a few weeks, towards the end of June, as well as playing a couple of shows with the Adam Buxton Band in Hoxton Hall London,

• 1:10:42Adam Buxton?

  link in the description, do come along if you haven't seen the band yet, that's gonna be fun. I will also be putting out an episode of this podcast in which I answer questions about the podcast, or anything else you might want to ask me, which thereafter, I hope will be something we do as a bonus for Patreon members on a regular basis. But the initial Q and A episode will be available on the main feed, and you'll find the address to send in questions in the description of today's episode. You'll also find a link to an event that you will particularly enjoy if you are a fan, as I am, of the band The Fall, legendary post-punk outfit led by the late Mark E. Smith. I've been listening to and enjoying The Fall

• 1:11:28Adam Buxton?

  since I was at art school in the early 1990s. And maybe the first album I got of theirs was Shiftwork, and then sort of went from there, really, which is a bit of an unusual way into the band. People sometimes seem dismayed when I tell them that. And weirdly, I never really went back to listen to the early stuff, which is considered by a lot of Fall fans to be the real classic material, Slates and Live at the Witch Trials,

• 1:12:03Adam Buxton?

  early albums like that. Instead, I kind of stuck with them putting out new stuff through the 90s and on into the 2000s. And there was always a lot to enjoy there, so I never really made the trip backwards. But I have started to do that more and more in recent years. And that stepped up a notch after listening to the audiobook of The Big Midweek by maybe the longest-serving member of The Fall, bass player Steve Hanley. And Olivia Tjakarski writes the book with him and it's really excellent. I may have mentioned it before. It's narrated by Stuart Lee and if you like music, especially kind

• 1:12:42Adam Buxton?

  of classic seventies kind of art rock, Bowie, Mott the Hoopla, Iggy Pop, that kind of thing. That's where Steve Hanley's tastes start and then evolve into the world of punk and then the formation of the Fall and his tenure in that band and the ups and downs of being in a band with Marky Smith, who was a difficult character. So yeah, that book really reinvigorated my relationship with the Fall and made me go backwards and explore more and I bought a few more books. And actually Paul Hanley, Steve's brother, who does the Oh Brother podcast about the Fall, on which I appeared last year, reached out recently to ask if

• 1:13:25Adam Buxton?

  I might be able to do a video about one of my favourite Fall songs for an upcoming event celebrating the, what is it, 50th anniversary of the Fall? I guess it must be. Anyway, I completely failed to make a video. I was on tour with the band and finishing my series Success Pod, which is out next month, I think, on Audible. But I felt bad about it. I would have loved to have contributed something. I'd love to do a more involved episode about the Fall at some point in the future if I could find some, some ex-members would be up for doing some reminiscing one more time. Anyway, I wanted to mention the event, which

• 1:14:07Adam Buxton?

  is called the Fall Futures and Past. It's happening on the weekend of Friday, June the 5th through to Sunday, June the 7th, 5:30pm to 10pm on those days. There's live music, including a performance from a one-off supergroup called Lost in Music, featuring ex-Fall members with guest vocals by B.C. Camlight. There is a premiere of a film that I would really like to see, the Dave Bush tapes, never-before-seen digitised tour footage, shot by Fall member Dave Bush during their 1993 and 1994 USA tours. Yes, please. There's special performances that weekend, a reading of Marky Smith's play Hey Luciani, directed

• 1:14:51Adam Buxton?

  by Graham Duff. There's also live discussions and sets by long-time Fall producer Grant Showbiz.

• 1:14:59Adam Buxton?

  It's also Literature and Talks, special festival book launch for the aforementioned Fall member Paul Hanley and Darren Eastleigh's book Das Grupa on the Wall. That book explores the history of the Fall in relation to the historic Band on the Wall venue in Manchester. There's also walking tours, guided Fall-themed walking tours of Manchester hosted by Funky Si, aka Fall drummer Simon Wolstencroft. Si does a podcast and he's going to be joined by his co-host Jackie O'Malley. And there's exhibitions and DJ sets from poet musician Simon Armitage and ex-Fall members Mark Riley and Craig Scanlon. I can't make it that weekend because my son's having a birthday party and I have

• 1:15:44Adam Buxton?

  to decorate the barn and guard against catastrophe, but I would have loved to have gone. The Fall: Past and Futures, check it out, link in the description. All right, that's it for this week. Thank you so much to Digory Wait for editing on this episode, to Claire Broughton at Hatrick and Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support. Thanks to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork. Thanks to everyone at Acast for all their help liaising with my sponsors, but thanks most of all goes to you, you listened right to the end. Thank you very much. Come on, let's, let's wade out into the water, you, me and Rosie. Rose? Doglegs? Do you want to do one more wade?

• 1:16:37Adam Buxton?

  Oh, come on, into the mud. Let's do a bit of muddy foley for you.

• 1:16:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, boy. Crunchy mud.

• 1:16:57Adam Buxton?

  Oh, it's nice. I'm here, hey. Good to see you. Oh, you're hot. Hope you're covered in factor fifty. Until next time, we share the same sonic space. Please go carefully.

• 1:17:15Adam Buxton?

  And in case it means anything, please bear in mind that I love you. Bye.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe. Gimme like and smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fan when me bums up. Gimme like and smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fan when me bums up. Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe. Gimme like and smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fan when me bums up. Gimme like and smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fan when me bums up. Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Gimme like and smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fan when me bums up.