Summary
Overview
Dax Shepard and Monica Padman interview Patrick Radden Keefe, an award-winning investigative journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker, about his new book 'London Falling,' which explores the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zach Brettler in a luxury London apartment. The conversation delves into Keefe's fascinating career path from law school to journalism, the story of a teenager who pretended to be a Russian oligarch's son, and the transformation of London into a playground for extreme wealth.
Patrick Radden Keefe's Journey from Law School to The New Yorker
Patrick shares his unconventional path to becoming a New Yorker staff writer, including growing up in Dorchester, Boston, attending Yale Law School despite wanting to be a writer, and pitching The New Yorker for six years before finally getting published. His parents, including his philosophy professor mother and urban planner father who worked with Dukakis, fostered a household of intellectual curiosity that shaped his career.
- Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Boston, in a Victorian house his parents bought for less than $40,000 in 1979
- His mother was a philosophy professor specializing in the philosophy of psychiatry, while his father worked in urban planning for Dukakis
- Patrick attended Columbia for history, then Cambridge and London School of Economics, before going to Yale Law School
- He wanted to write for The New Yorker since high school and started pitching them in college, keeping his first rejection letter from 1998 framed
- Patrick borrowed $10,000 from a Wall Street law firm but never started the job, finally getting his first New Yorker pitch accepted in October 2005
- He became a full-time New Yorker staff writer in 2012 after six years of freelancing
" If you're good at it, it gives you a kind of daily dose of humility because no matter how successful you've been or how old you are, how long you've been doing it, most of your job is getting rejected. "
" The thing that I take from her that is, you know, maybe a quality of a philosophy professor is that she's just the most skeptical person. Any idea, any argument, she always wants to kind of look at it and turn it around. "
The Pentagon and the Office Space Reality
Patrick spent a year at the Pentagon's Office of the Secretary of Defense on a fellowship between 2010 and 2011. Expecting an august, impressive institution, he was shocked to discover it operated more like the movie Office Space, filled with middle managers protecting their rice bowls and dealing with petty workplace concerns rather than focusing on national security.
- Patrick worked at the Pentagon from 2010 to 2011 as pure anthropology, knowing it wasn't his career
- He expected the Pentagon to look like Seven Days in May but found it was more like The Office
- The Pentagon was overstuffed with people doing redundant work, everyone protecting their little territory
" I sort of thought that the whole thing would be this big august. Yeah, impressive. Yeah, and in fact, it was just more middle managers than you've ever seen in your life. "
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