Patrick Radden Keefe on page-turning journalism, his own celebrity, and the humanity behind his work

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to some of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And of course, I have with me our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, you're a pretty busy guy. You've got a lot of editing to do of Semaphore. You are hosting events. Do you have time to read books ever?

0:40Ben Smith:You know, honestly, mostly not. I order books. I get review copies. I think about books. I carry books around. I do not read books as much as I would like. Well, this week on the show, we are extremely happy to be engaging with the oldest form of media that there is, that is books, the written word. And that's because we have one of the best people who makes them on our show today. That's Patrick Radden Keefe. He's the author of the new book, London Falling, which is a just absolutely riveting story about a young man who fell to his death in London in 2019. and the fantastic and interesting, fascinating and tragic story behind his death.

1:21It gets into the changing dynamics in the city of London, the rise of this Russian oligarch class. Ben, we both received the press copy of this Tuesday night, and neither of us could put it down. You finished the book. I almost got there in a matter of a few days. What did you think of the book, and why did you want to have Patrick on the show today?

1:41Ben Smith:Patrick, you know, he's on an unbelievable series of hits, from the book about the troubles, Say Nothing, to this incredible book, Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. How many hot magazine writers do you get in the year 2026? He's really doing something special. Yeah, that's right. The New York Times just published a profile of him where they asked if he was the last celebrity journalist, which is either depressing or not, depending on your perspective on our profession. We all know it's you, Max. Yes, I appreciate it. Well, he certainly is one of the last ones who's not standing in front of a camera or their laptop in a microphone producing content.

2:22We have a lot that we want to get to with Patrick Graden-Keefe, so we'll be right back after this.

2:56Ben Smith:Thank you. from Think with Google, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

3:12Ben Smith:Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be with you guys. I wanted to start with sort of why you chose this book, which kept me and Max up on subsequent nights this week. I thought I would dip into it and wind up like staying up till two in the morning. It's an amazing book. dip into Patrick's books. That's not really how it works. You know, they're page turners by necessity. They're quagmires. But, you know, your last two books took on what I think of as almost like capital T topics, like the troubles in Ireland, and then really like the American opioid crisis, like one of the big public policy issues of the era.

3:46Ben Smith:And this one feels in a way like a smaller story, a maybe more personal story. I'm sort of curious how you thought about approaching it, why you chose this one, or maybe you don't buy that premise. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm still reeling from hearing you describe my books as quagmires. But if I could just recover from that, it's a page turner and yet a quagmire. You know, I didn't go into either of those earlier books thinking I'm going to write a book about a capital T topic. I think there are all kinds of policy issues or kind of broader themes of one sort or another that interest me. But in terms of the kind of writing that I like to do, I always need to find some kind of human drama that's my way in.

4:27So, I actually, you know, it's strange because the Sackler book, I didn't think of it as a book about the opioid crisis. I thought of it as a sort of biography of three generations of this American dynasty that happened to play a really critical role in initiating the opioid crisis. And similarly, I say nothing I thought of it as a story about a handful of people kind of against the backdrop of the Troubles. So I guess I would resist it in that sense. But I get the idea that certainly for the person who reads the book, there's a sense that there's kind of some nutritional content they're taking away, which is that they learned about a big topic of interest.

5:00And this one is a little different. I was just very drawn to the sort of particular human story of the idea that there's this family who loses a son and then they learn that their teenage boy had been prior to his death pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. But I will say even there, that kind of tapped into a series of issues that was interesting to me because I had written an essay for The New Yorker, a books piece, kind of back of the book essay for The New Yorker after Russia's invasion of Ukraine about the awkward place where London found itself having rolled out the red carpet for all these dodgy Kremlin-connected billionaires for decades when the invasion happened.

5:39And so I'd sort of been thinking about those things, and I'd written about it in a more discursive way. And so the opportunity to explore some of those themes in the context of a really intimate family story was appealing. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to this story? And in particular, I was listening to another interview that you did promoting the book, where you talked about how you don't find your stories, they find you. But you know, you've been pretty good at picking them over the last few years. Can you explain exactly why you felt this is a story kind of worth pursuing both as a magazine article and then eventually as a book?

6:15Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I'm extremely findable on the internet by design because some of my best sources on any of my projects, truly, I mean, some of the very best sources in my books are people who read an article I wrote in The New Yorker and then cold emailed me, people I would never have known to look for. And so it's important to have people be able to reach me if they need to. But as a consequence, I get a ton of email from strangers and I get pitched a lot. And most of what comes my way isn't for me for one reason or another, in part because the stories that I write for The New Yorker tend to take at a minimum six months, right?

6:53So it's a big commitment to decide that you're going to launch into something like that. in this case, it was just, I was, I was on the set of say nothing, the FX series that we made based on my book. I got to chatting with this guy. I do tend to, uh, talk to strangers. You know, I'm, I will kind of fall into conversation with a stranger. I think that's a, it's good to kind of stay curious and stay in conversation with people. I tend to think the best ideas aren't on the internet. You're probably not going to find them by just sitting there on chat GPT or Google. and we got to chatting and this guy said, I might have a story for you.

7:30There's this family I know. And he started telling me about the family. And actually when I got back to the apartment that night, he told me essentially what I just said. You know, there's a 19 year old boy, he dies. He goes off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames in London. And after his death, his parents find out that he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. That night I Googled Zach Brettler, which is the name of the boy. And there was nothing online to indicate even though he was dead. And I don't know. I don't it's not that I have some sort of laundry list of ingredients that it fit It was literally that he told me and I was so intrigued.

8:01I could feel myself leaning in and wanting to know more And that's usually a good I think I've gotten better over the years At not being so analytical and thinking what are the ingredients of a good story and actually sort of listening to my own attention span Kind of heating the things that I I'm, you know, just naturally drawn to or not But to just go back a second, Patrick, you're unsurprisingly inundated with tips. And I'm sure after the book comes out and a bunch of people read it, you'll just get more people reaching out to you and whatnot. But I mean, how do you just practically sift through all of that?

8:38Do you have an assistant? Have you programmed some bot to do it for you? AI agent? How are you actually sifting through to try to find what your next stories might be in that? Yeah. Among all the tips. I'm so inefficient. I don't have an assistant who does it because I don't think I would trust anyone to – it's such a gut feeling thing that I don't think I would necessarily trust someone to do that, even that first pass. And I'm too technically inept to come up with some AI solution. I try and read everything that comes in, but a lot of the time I'm just reading a few lines. And you sort of generally get the idea.

9:14I think the thing that's hard, the thing that I wrestle with is some stories are inherently complicated. So, I mean, for any of us, right? Like you guys get pitches too. You get a pitch and you open it up and it's 5 ,000 words long. And immediately you feel this kind of sinking feeling and your inclination is. And it's funny because when I talk to young journalists, they'll sometimes send me pitches they want to send to The New Yorker. And I'm always kind of amazed because I'm like, do you get email? Like when you open an email like this, does it just like your heart quicken with excitement? You know, and I think the tricky thing for me is that some of these stories, in a weird way, a story that's going to be a good story in my hands needs a degree of kind of narrative convolution.

9:56And then ideally what happens is that I'm sort of unpicking it and then rearranging it in a way that will be more digestible for a reader. And so that does mean that occasionally I'll get these big, dense emails, and it actually takes me half an hour to get to the point where I'm confident that I can say, no, actually, this isn't for me. Thank you. I've sort of figured out, I think, what you're talking about, and it's not for me. Do you reply to them all? No, I have a little note on my website that says something like, I get a lot of email, and I'm bad at email. So, I mean, no, I rarely do.

10:29Ben Smith:I work with sources a lot, and many of them are kind of professional transactional sources in some sense. people in public life who know the game. But of course, like the pure of heart sources are the best ones. Like the ones who just have a story they want to tell and you're the first journalist they ever called. I mean, it's just inevitably, those are the best stories. Why do you think people do that? Like what prompts, in this case, these grieving parents to decide to open their lives up to you? Yeah, I mean, in this case, there was a lot going on because they had, so Zach, their son dies in late 2019.

10:59And they, in a way that I think they today would tell you was really naive. You know, these are well-off, upper-middle class, sophisticated, well-connected Londoners.

11:12Ben Smith:The mom's a journalist. The mom's a freelance journalist. The dad is in finance. They're white. You know, they live in Maida Vale, which is a really nice neighborhood in West London, highly educated, all the rest. And there's – I mean, you guys will appreciate it. I guess the listeners to this podcast might appreciate this story in a way that others wouldn't. But there was one point where I was talking to them early on and they were talking about how they decided to keep Zach's death quiet, to keep it out of the press. And they said, yeah, we checked in with a friend of ours who does PR. We have this friend, Matthew, Matthew Freud.

11:44But I mean, that sort of gives you an indication of the world in which they live. And they thought that when you call the cops, the cops are going to come and take care. Like if your son, if your teenage son dies in mysterious circumstances, the cops will get to the bottom of it. that turned out in a kind of spectacular way not to be the case. The cops really screwed it up. And so fortuitously, they met me just a few months after the official process had kind of fully run its course. But I guess I would quickly caveat and say, I then had to say to them,

12:16there's part of me that thinks that you're inclined to go public and talk with me because you think that I will sleuth out the answer in a way that the cops couldn't, and I will bring you the accountability that the system didn't afford. And we cannot enter into this with that kind of implicit transaction in your minds, because it would sort of be unfair to both of us. Has that been something that you've said to people in the past? Or is that something also that you've learned? Because, you know, I think back to and I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast, being the media literate people that they are, probably know about your podcast that you did on Wind of Change, where you kind of explored whether the CIA basically wrote that song by, what's the band called again?

13:01Scorpions. The Scorpions. Yes, exactly. Sorry, slightly before my time. Come on. Slightly before my time. I didn't actually know it beforehand, but now I hear it out there. I think we need to reboot this whole podcast here. I know. Sorry, sorry, sorry about it. I'm glad I get to still, you know, pull that card every once in a while. That card, right. You know, it's an amazing exploration of, you know, the song and the CIA and kind of the fall of the Soviet Union. And at the end, I think, you know, you don't get to the bottom of whether or not the CIA had written that song, which I think some people thought, you know, was maybe slightly a letdown.

13:31I'm curious if you draw on that experience or if this is something you've always done jumping into these types of stories. Yeah, I mean, how long you got. I think about this stuff all the time. You know, Daniel Zaleski, who's the editor at The New Yorker I've worked with for 20 years, he has occasionally over the years said when I would bring him ideas, particularly early in my career, he would say, if the story's a mystery, you need to solve the mystery. Like if it's an 8 ,000-word New Yorker piece that's going to take 45 minutes of a person's time, the value proposition is just not one where you can get to the end and say – and like throw your hands up in the air and say, and we'll never know.

14:10Because people get pissed. And I think that that's probably right. And actually part, it's funny you mentioned Wind of Change. Part of the reason I did Wind of Change as a podcast is that I always knew we would land in an inconclusive place. But I thought that for a variety of reasons, a podcast would lend itself. I think that the expectation of a podcast is different on the part of the listener for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, I think is actually because I think we all learned what a narrative podcast was from Serial. And Serial ended in an inconclusive way after I don't know how many hours.

14:39but the other is just that you can be walking the dog or or doing the dishes you're giving less of your mind to to it so that's part of the reason i did window change as a podcast i think the challenge for me is not if you look at sort of two two kind of very different projects my book say nothing was kind of a whodunit about this this murder in 1972 and at the end of the book, I figured out who the murderer was. And it has this kind of very satisfying ending. And I think the challenge for me is that in life, most stories are going to be more like wind of change than say nothing. You often don't get to the bottom of it, or if you do, there are still big unanswered questions.

15:22Ben Smith:So did you ever, after it came out, did you ever get to the bottom of it? Did anybody ever come back to you? So I want to choose my words carefully here. What I will say is a lot of people in the CIA listened to the podcast. And I know that it was widely listened to and discussed by people in the agency. I had various conversations with various people subsequently. And I'm not necessarily in a position to divulge everything that I might have learned. I realize this is very unsatisfying, but it's all I can say. You know, we're going to have to make an 11-powered podcast about this. Exactly. I think I might do season two.

15:58If only so that you can then come after me, you know, when we end on an inconclusive note. I do think part of it, and, you know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, was it came out during COVID and people didn't have anything to do. And so I think that there was a little bit of we're only living for this podcast to figure out if the CIA did this song. Yeah. You know, it's funny. So the numbers on this podcast were crazy, or at least to me, crazy, certainly in comparison to anything I've ever written. And even the feed, I mean, this is all a little inside baseball, but I have this new book that just came out, and I do the audio book.

16:34And we've done this now for a couple of our books, but we took the prologue of the audio book and just put it as a free sample on the Wind of Change feed. And 100 ,000 people listened to it in like six days. on this old feed from, you know, six years ago. But I think that the reason - Someone's going to try to buy that feed, by the way. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I don't know that I actually even control it. I think we sort of, anyway. But I think it was the fact that we released in May 2020. I mean, I think it's a good podcast, but I also think we released in May 2020. Literally, it was the point in the pandemic where people were just realizing that this was not going to be over by Easter.

17:13and I think everybody had already binged The Tiger King. Like, truly, The Tiger King had come out a few weeks earlier and it was that moment where everybody was kind of sick of their spouse and ready for, you know, a distraction. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Patrick, but we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back after this.

17:42Ben Smith:On this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke to Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about how marketers can reach customers in the age of AI. So at this point in the year, we're probably already past reflecting on 2025 and very focused on looking ahead to the rest of 2026. What's on your mind right now? I'm a marketer, and any good marketer starts and ends with their customer, with consumers. So front and center, I'm focused on my customers. So I'm thinking about how they're searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping across Google's platforms and beyond. So what should marketers know and do differently?

18:17Ben Smith:What I'm seeing, Ben, is people who use AI overviews and AI mode in Google are making decisions faster and with more confidence because of those products. That's a remarkable speeding up of the buying process and something that marketers can really take advantage of. To do so, we actually have a whole slew of new ad products, which are really compelling, powered by AI, such as AI Max for Search. It allows you to get the right message to the right person at the right time with a stronger intent signal to actually close that gap that is making people more confident in decisions and your ad more relevant.

18:54Ben Smith:It's actually closing the gap between discovery and decision. That's really powerful. Where can people find out more about this? There's a new guide for marketers on thinkwithgoogle.com all about reaching consumers at the speed of AI. You can check it out at thinkwithgoogle.com. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Ben.

19:21I'm trying to understand, and I think a lot of our audience is also kind of curious about, you know, you see New York Times bestseller. Nobody really knows exactly what that means. I'm curious, like, how many copies of the books do you sell? And also, how big is the printed copy sales versus how many people are listening to your books as audiobooks? I'm not completely on top of the numbers. And the other thing is that the books, some of them have really big foreign markets.

19:48Ben Smith:I should say nobody is going to, like, throw you in a black van if you accidentally disclose sales figures. No, it's not that. The publishing industry people are not nearly as scary as some of the other people you've encountered. Exactly. No, I mean, it varies from book to book. And with Say Nothing, truly, it's like fewer than a million copies in the US, more than a million copies all in. Wow. And with Empire of Pain, less than that, but not by a huge margin. It's interesting, right? Because it's not romantic-y numbers. But people are reading these books and engaging with them. And a lot of this is still fairly new to me, to be honest with you, because my first two books didn't really, you know, my first two books basically sold 10 ,000 copies each and kind of went away.

20:35The second book, The Snakehead, is now finding a new life because people go back to it. But Say Nothing kind of markedly changed the situation for me in terms of the kind of, in terms of, you know, what books mean and what they can be. You've reached a point now where you're the rare celebrity journalist. The New York Times had a had a piece where they interviewed like 70 people, I think, around you. They described you're being interviewed by Sarah Jessica Parker. You are being interviewed by her. You've reached kind of this, you know, rare tier of journalists who actually regular people know.

21:07You posed for J.Crew. You were in an episode of Industry as yourself. I'm curious, how has that actually changed your work? I'm sure it means that you get more tips and more emails and people are more kind of familiar with you, but how has it changed the actual journalism or has it? Well, there's, okay, so a few things. I mean, first of all, on the celebrity journalist thing, it's funny. You know, I thought that Times piece was very generous. I really liked, General Abram, which you did it as a real reporter's reporter, and he kind of, he sort of wrote a profile of me the way I would write a profile of someone else, which I found it a little bit scary, but I appreciated.

21:43The headline, you know, what is it? Like, can a journalist be a celebrity or something? It's just funny. It's one of those kind of trollish headlines where it's like, well, no, obviously. And I didn't go in the comments, but my wife went in the comments of the Times article. She said all of the comments are like, I've never heard of this guy. I literally never heard of this man. So I think we have our answer, right? So sort of celebrity journalist, you know, bit of a contradiction in terms. And then to kind of further tease this out, it has helped my work enormously that there are now people who've read my stuff and that I sometimes call, depending on the story or the universe I'm in, I will call people trying to cultivate a source.

22:20And the person I'm reaching knows who I am and has read my stuff. That's immensely helpful because I don't have to persuade them that I'm rigorous and going to work really hard and so forth. They sort of have the cut of my jib because they can see my work. The J.Crew thing and industry and all that kind of stuff, that I think of as entirely separate. So that's just these kind of fun, weird opportunities fall in my lap. I'm curious. I like to try new things. If it was totally garbage or just some whack thing that I didn't want to be associated with, I wouldn't do it. And in those cases, I was sort of happy to say yes.