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Episode 377: Carlos Barragan
2.4k Plays2 years ago
Carlos Barragan is a journalist and MFA student at the Columbia School of Journalism and his piece for The Atavist is "The Romance Scammer on My Sofa."
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code cnf
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Suds: Athletic Brewing, promo code BRENDANO20
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
ACNFers,
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:01
Speaker
this episode is affiliate sponsored by Liquid IV. And I gotta say, it's a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities, or if you just want to zhuzh up your water. As some of you know, I've been training for the Unsanctioned McKinsey Marathon, which must be postponed. My fitness is not coming around. I'll say just a little more about that in a second. Yeah.
00:00:26
Speaker
Liquid IV is in my bottle. Some tasty stuff. Been a big fan of the lemon lime. Non-GMO. Free from gluten, dairy, and soy so you know your burly vegan digs it. Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything.
00:00:47
Speaker
You order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com and it's an affiliate partnership so Brendan only gets paid if you buy stuff so think about buying some stuff. I like the sound of that. I just stop writing and I go out for a coffee and then I text 10 friends telling them I want to die.
Podcast Focus and Guest Introduction
00:01:20
Speaker
Oh, AC and efforts at CNF Pod, the creative nonfiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Yes. It's that Atavistian time of the month. So, you know, spoiler alerts. Today's guest is none other than Carlos Baragat.
00:01:39
Speaker
Now, I clipped out him pronouncing his name and so when people have names that it might be a little bit challenging for me to pronounce, I just have them say their full names and usually I can do it. This time I wasn't so confident. Spelling is to writing as pronunciation is to audio.
00:01:57
Speaker
Anyway, his piece deals with romance scammers based out of Lagos, Nigeria, a cottage industry that exploits vulnerable, lonely people.
Romance Scamming in Nigeria
00:02:09
Speaker
We've likely all been tapped by a scammer of this nature. Like I'll occasionally get a DM from someone on Twitter or Instagram and then it'll be this either a pirated image or a beautifully rendered AI generated image of like a coquettish Japanese woman
00:02:27
Speaker
Saying how much they love my work and right there. I know we're We're in for a scam. I'm like that's a lie and you know it That's what I think and I just blocked them But for someone who is lonely who wants connection Who might not be armed with the right degree of internet literacy? The sharks can smell that blood
00:02:49
Speaker
and Carlos's mother was a victim of this and it sent Carlos on a hunt to find these what they're called yahoo boys yahoo being uh just yahoo.com yeah so that's the nickname yeah understood good good good okay
Personal Updates and Listener Engagement
00:03:06
Speaker
Make sure you're heading over to brandonmerit.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website and I'll take you to rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com. There you get some bonus stuff, there could be some bonus stuff coming down the pipe. Maybe, probably not, I don't know, maybe. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:03:29
Speaker
As I said in the Liquid IV reading, the Mackenzie marathon that I had originally scheduled for August 5th, which is roughly a month from now, I have to just postpone it. My fitness, I'm not missing workouts, but my fitness just isn't coming along at the pace I'd like.
00:03:47
Speaker
And it could be a disaster. So I'm probably going to have to punt on that for like two months. So if you planned on it, and there was one person who did plan on joining me, if there were more, a rain check is in order and a new date will come down the line. But for that one person, I'll reach out to you and we'll all let you know.
00:04:09
Speaker
Or you can do it. It's up to you. Whatevs. If you dig the show, consider sharing it with your networks so we can grow the pie and get this CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNFer might say shit.
00:04:26
Speaker
i'll give that a shot and speaking of reviews we got a new one and this one is oh man so germane to today's conversation and if you leave a review on the show i always read them when they come in it's a bit of a drought of late so this was wonderful to get this one uh the other day from agave maria underscore
00:04:45
Speaker
Here it is, my favorite writing podcast. I've learned so much from this podcast. Brendan O'Mara is an excellent host who's able to dig into deep conversations about writing craft and practices with his guests. He doesn't shy away from talking about the messy parts of the writing too, the insecurities, the difficulty of making time, and all the other challenges that writers often face.
00:05:08
Speaker
Listening helps me feel like I'm not alone in that struggle and gives me valuable ideas for moving through challenges. And here we go. This is the real part that makes it germane to today. I especially love the Atavist features. Hey, and look forward to my monthly ritual of listening to Omero's conversations with Atavist editors and writers. I hope anyone reading this finds as much joy, solidarity, and learning as I found through listening to the CNF podcast.
00:05:35
Speaker
That's a home run review right there. Thank you agave Maria underscore Amazing stuff so cool And I just love that it we get I get to read that review on the day that I'm putting out another activist interview There's also a patreon.com slash CNF pod if you want to drop a few bucks in the Hat if you glean some value shows free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap I'm wrapping up some of the one-on-ones that I'm doing with some patrons so far of any tier and
00:06:03
Speaker
It's not necessarily gonna be a regular thing, but I threw it out there and a chunk of the Patreon audience took advantage of it. Sometimes all you need to do is talk things out, and that's what we've been doing. Gonna close off that spigot very soon, so get in on it while you can.
00:06:20
Speaker
Lastly, we're going to do a shout out to Athletic Brewing. Best day in non-alcoholic beer out there. And you know, that could be some of the reason why my fitness isn't coming along. Yeah, not a paid plug, but I'm a brand in that not because I'm drinking too much athletic because I'm drinking other things.
00:06:38
Speaker
that do have alcohol in it. I'm a brand ambassador for athletic and I want to celebrate this amazing product. Go to athleticbrewing.com, use my referral link, and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, and you get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money, and they're not officially a sponsor of the podcast. I just get points for swag and beer. Give it a shot. Give it a can.
00:07:04
Speaker
Okay, here we go.
Journalism and Insights from Sayward Darby
00:07:05
Speaker
First, we're going to hear from lead editor, editor in chief, and author of Sisters in Hate, Sayward Darby. Okay, that's how we do it around here. You ready to rock? I said, are you ready to rock?
00:07:32
Speaker
Most recent podcast review towards the end of the review, a nice little review. The person says, I especially love the Adivis features and look forward to my monthly ritual of listening to O'Mara's conversation with Adivis editors and writers. She's the first person, I believe it's a woman, who mentioned the Adivis things in a review. So it's like, oh, I wanted to share that with you as we got going.
00:07:54
Speaker
Oh, that's so nice. Thank you to that reviewer. And I'm glad you enjoy listening to me and Brendan and Jonah and the writers chat with each other.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I've been talking with some of my Patreon folks. I've just been doing some like, you know, one-on-one, like 30-minute calls, just whatever they want to talk about, advice or stuff of that nature. And a couple have brought up the activist ones also. And because they tend to be more journalistically grounded, and we get like the editor-writer side of the table. So I think people are really, really like the, whether they're,
00:08:34
Speaker
reporters or journalists or not, I think they're really gleaning some really cool insights from your side of the table, the more journalism, the heavy nature of the conversation and the pitches and all that. So people I think are really resonating with them. So I'm just so glad we continue to do this.
00:08:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, me, me too. Um, and you know, I think it's important journalism, particularly this kind of journalism is such a collaborative process. And so, you know, really understanding what goes in on all sides, um, is, is illuminating. So, um, yeah, so I'm glad people are enjoying it.
Carlos Baragat's Investigation Journey
00:09:14
Speaker
Thanks people.
00:09:16
Speaker
Carlos' piece here, I believe he grew up in Spain and this piece took him to Nigeria and so a bit of a globetrotter in that sense. So with this particular piece, when it came across your desk, I always like getting a sense of what electricity you felt coming off this pitch and what made you really want to lean into it.
00:09:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that we get a good number of sort of personal essay pitches and almost all of them don't really work for us because they don't necessarily have narrative elements of the kind that we're looking for. And my sort of gold standard, and I think this piece was before we started doing CNF episodes together, but
00:10:08
Speaker
The Gold Standard for me is this piece called Lost in Summerland by Barrett Swanson, where he goes with his brother who believes he can communicate with the dead to the largest gathering of psychics and mediums in the world. And, you know, it's a travel story. I think it was actually in Best American Travel Writing. But, you know, it's in addition to being a travel story, which gives it, you know, a bit of a narrative
00:10:33
Speaker
you know, thrust to begin with, as travel stories do. There are also these personal revelations that happen along the way. And by the time you get to the end, you kind of realize that all along a different question, like the writer was seeking an answer to a different question than he realized he was asking at all. And I felt like Carlos's
00:10:55
Speaker
piece had very similar elements. You know, topics incredibly different. Their vantage in life is very different. Carlos is, you know, just finishing. I think he's just finishing his master's in journalism at Columbia. And so what I was really taken with was this combination of really getting into a subculture that I have obviously heard about. We've all read the headlines about romance scamming and people losing savings.
00:11:25
Speaker
going into debt to give money to people they've never met but believe they're in love with. But he really got behind the curtain and gained the trust of some of these scammers. And so you really got a sense of what this culture is like. And he was very, I think, respectful.
00:11:44
Speaker
and compassionate, also injects it with some humor. And then on top of that, there was this personal element, which was that his mother had been scammed. He really wanted to understand how that had happened. And so, you know, he goes to Nigeria looking for his mom's scammer and then kind of realizes by the end that all along he wasn't totally looking for the scammer. He was actually looking for something else to an answer to a different question than, you know, who is this person that scammed my mom.
00:12:11
Speaker
I mean, to be totally frank, I was like, gosh, I want to read about romance scammers. People want to read about romance scammers. It's just a sort of interesting lens into a phenomenon that's going on right now. And then on top of that, I thought that it had this nice mix of reporting and personal elements. So yeah, so that was kind of the feeling when I got it.
00:12:33
Speaker
Well there's always, I think every single one of us has been spammed by someone, be it email or DMs or people trying to follow us on various social media platforms that have this element of they're fishing, they're trying to
00:12:51
Speaker
in gender, they're trying to get their tentacles into your life somehow. And so when I started reading this, I'm like, oh, wow, this is amazing that he's gonna, like you were saying, get behind the curtain of the people who are actually trying to scam you. And it was just like, I felt, I'm like, all right, at least at this period in my life, I have internet literacy to the point where I can recognize this. But it also terrifies me, because what's gonna happen in like 30 years? Like what's gonna be the scammer du jour at that time, be like,
00:13:21
Speaker
All right, this sounds legit. Here's my bank account. Yeah, yeah. I think it's a totally fair question. And one section of the piece I actually really like is how he quickly, but I think pretty thoroughly, shows the ways that scamming of this variety has evolved and taken on new forms, taken on new targets. And then also, I think there's the section that begins
00:13:50
Speaker
It's like cons, baguette cons, and scamming involves or something like that. Because there are also con artists who are conning the con artists. Like it's just this, you know, kind of fascinating ripple effect that I think he's able to illustrate really nicely. And I do think, you know, he does a really good job of countering the notion of, you know, oh, this would never happen to me. I would never be so quote unquote stupid. I would never be so vulnerable.
00:14:15
Speaker
by way of his mom especially I think you know someone that he loves deeply and who was very candid in in the story and with our fact checker I should say as I understand that she's invited our fact checker to have coffee with her when she's in Madrid next time so um but I think that that's a really nice way of
00:14:34
Speaker
humanizing both sides of the equation, right? The side, because he gets to know some of the scammers that he spends a lot of time with in Nigeria, and he really humanizes their side of the story, but then he humanizes the side of targets, victims, you know, whatever you want to call them. And I think that that's, you know, the real special quality of the story is the humanization that he's able to bring to it.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, and this piece, and I'm glad you brought up the personal essay slant of it, how would this piece, I think this piece could have very well worked had it not been personally driven as well if it was just like Scott Eden doing his investigative stuff on like the gold mines in Peru. I think, granted he injects himself in that towards the end, but it's like, I feel like this piece could have just been like that as well.
00:15:26
Speaker
You know, how might this piece have been different if that was kind of the angle, too? Because to me, I still think it could have worked also. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. You know, I think that the the version and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you're kind of describing is more, you know, inside the world of Nigeria's romance scammers, right? Like peeling back the curtain. You don't peel a curtain. Pulling back the curtain.
00:15:53
Speaker
to really understand who these people are. To me, that's a more traditional feature than it is a narrative because you're probably going to be bouncing around a bit. You're going to get into the statistics of things, the 1.3 billion that romance-giving cost Americans in 2021, which is just an astonishing number.
00:16:12
Speaker
Um, the untold number of scammers there are in Nigeria. I mean, it could... Some people think it might be in the millions. Like, it's, you know, really, um, sort of painting a picture, right, of this phenomenon. And-and I think for out of his purposes, the personal element is really what gives it that narrative thread and that backbone. Like, we-we keep coming back to the question of, you know, who is Carlos looking for? Um, what is he hoping to find?
00:16:42
Speaker
And where is he going to end? What resolution in whatever direction is he going to come to? And so to me, that personal element was the thing that really helped us shape it into an activist narrative as opposed to a more traditional magazine feature.
00:17:00
Speaker
which isn't to say that without the personal element, we couldn't have found a way to make it work for the out of us. But I think some other things would have needed to happen from a narrative standpoint that I'm not sure did happen in the course of the reporting. And so for me, as soon as I read the pitch, and then he actually had a
00:17:19
Speaker
draft more or less written because he'd been working on it for his program at Columbia, you know, really the personal elements stood out to me and I saw how that could be sort of our anchor as we went through it. And, you know, returning to this question of what happened to his mom, why did it happen? And, you know, how his thinking about it changes in the course of this journey.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, I love how the the first person well deployed becomes a very good storytelling device and that works very well here. I think so, too. And, you know, I mean, I generally am a fan of.
00:17:57
Speaker
first person, not for the sake of it, not for the sake of using I in me. But oftentimes I do feel like the sort of prohibition that existed on it for the longest time did a disservice to some stories because putting oneself in it is often a helpful way of seeing things more clearly, more genuinely. And I think that, yeah, Carlos is like unique
00:18:26
Speaker
first person perspective was, I don't know, he kind of becomes the reader's eyes in the story. But at the same time, you know, he, he interrogates himself, like he turns his own lens on himself, which I think, by the end is, is, you know, where where the story sort of lands is that he realizes he needs to turn around and take a look in the mirror and sort of question some of his own questions, if you will. So yeah, I'm glad the first person worked for you.
00:18:52
Speaker
And I always love getting a sense of the editorial challenges that you face as you're trying to shape the piece into its best possible version. So what were any challenges that you encountered here, just on your side of the table, to manifest the best version of Carlos' story?
00:19:11
Speaker
The version he initially sent was long, I think longer than it felt like the story needed to be. And so there was just a lot of trimming and shaping and figuring out what felt essential and what didn't. And then, and I feel like Carlos will be the first to tell you this, English is not his first language. And so this is the first time he's written something of such length and depth.
00:19:34
Speaker
in English. And so, you know, I have no problem with that, obviously. But I think, you know, that's always an interesting challenge as an editor, particularly when it comes to articulating some of that first person stuff, because, you know, you can tell me something that you saw, and, you know, I can, I too can look at it, potentially, you know, I can Google it and be like, Oh, okay, this is what it looks like. I can help you describe it. But getting, you know, somebody to
00:19:59
Speaker
sort of articulate a metaphor or something about their thinking of themselves or whatever, that can take a bit more back and forth just because things can get lost in translation. So there were a couple of points in the piece where we went back and forth a little bit more and it was more of that first-person stuff. And Carlos was great in saying, I would say, I think maybe this is what you're trying to say. And he would say, no, that's actually not what I'm trying to say. And sort of working to get to a point where it worked for him, it worked for me.
00:20:28
Speaker
But, you know, I think I don't know, one of the pleasures of being an editor is being challenged in that way sometimes. So very nice. Well, I want to turn this over to Carlos and we'll have a conversation with him about this piece and his mom and how everything tied together. But as always say, it's always great to get your insights from your side of the table. So thanks for the time as always. Thanks so much, Brendan.
00:20:54
Speaker
pretty rad pretty rad awesome yeah i love that love getting the insights on that side of the table but we're all on the same side of the table you get it um thank you sayward uh now we're we're gonna talk to carlos and this piece it is uh adivis rarely does things that are like personal essay in nature but
00:21:17
Speaker
That's where you get the narrative revelation of this piece. It's a necessary element a necessary device it's gonna be really cool to hear how Carlos processed that and the For lack of a better term the manhunt that he was on to seek a better understanding of his mother
00:21:39
Speaker
this journey. It's a really well done and it's such a cool piece and I'm glad that you're gonna get to hear Carlos talk about this piece for the Atavist right now.
00:21:56
Speaker
story got on your radar because of these romance scammers. One got in touch with your mom. So why don't you just like kind of take us to that moment of how this how you arrived at the story and specifically you know how your mother was initially affected by it.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, in 2015, I was 19 years old. I didn't even know that I was a journalist. I was studying at the university. And my mother, who was a single mother for almost her entire life, was looking for a partner. And she was very frustrated. And I remember when I talked to her and I encouraged her to try Tinder.
00:22:41
Speaker
because she wasn't having any success. And at some point, she was very excited about a guy that she had met on Tinder. And at some point, of course, her sons, my brothers and me, we weren't very excited. We just, I don't know how to put it, but we were like, okay, ma'am, good for you.
00:23:06
Speaker
So we didn't pay any attention at all, which is important to understand why it ended, how it ended. But at some point, my mother kept telling us about this guy, and of course, many red flags. We saw many red flags. And at some point, we
00:23:28
Speaker
we were like, we discovered that this guy was an American soldier based in Afghanistan. Of course, when we knew that this guy was supposed to be in Afghanistan, it raised a lot of questions. So long story short, my mother at some point told us that the guy was gonna send gold bars, like solid gold bars to our house. And at that point,
00:23:57
Speaker
I was like, this is a scam, but how I'm going to prove to my mother that this is a scam. So, after that, I kept thinking and I found a way to prove it to her.
00:24:12
Speaker
For a while, in a couple of days, my mother understood that she was being targeted, that he was a scam. And he was pretty bleak, but only for one or two days, because I don't know, my mother was very resilient. And she understood pretty quickly when I saw to her that the emails weren't coming from Syria or Afghanistan, but they were coming from Lagos.
00:24:37
Speaker
in Nigeria. So I'm gonna fast forward to the minute I decided to write this story, because as a family, we tried to forget about that. Because for my mother, it was very embarrassing. But can you imagine, she had told all her friends and her family members about this guy. And suddenly, people asking about this guy, like, how is Brian?
00:25:05
Speaker
Well, Brian, how funny it is that Brian is not Brian. So after three or four years, I became a journalist and I started working in a newspaper in Spain. And I was a bit obsessed with that story, but I didn't know how to tell it. And I remember that at some point I read in, I think it was the Washington Post, an article about Roman scams and
00:25:32
Speaker
For me, Roman Scams was a personal story, but I never had thought about that as like a global problem. And when I read that story, I understood that there was a whole story behind behind my mother's scam. So at that moment, I started thinking about a way to tell the story and when the pandemic
00:25:55
Speaker
started. My mother was was very, very lonely. And I remember thinking about this story. And that's when I decided that I wanted to know what was going on in Nigeria. So how logistically speaking, how do you start to arrange and get access to to a fixer to someone in Lagos that can let you behind the curtain in this subculture of romance scammers?
00:26:25
Speaker
That's a very good question because at the beginning I was very optimistic. Like I thought that I was going to find my mother's camera. I didn't know what was the scope of the problem. So I started reading other articles and I found that there were a lot of them. There's a very good documentary from the New York Times about
00:26:50
Speaker
something similar that happened in Miami, and the reporter, Jack Nikas, went to Lagos for five days. And I contacted him and I told him my story, and he was very kind. And he gave me the contact of his fixture, but funny enough, the contact that he gave me was from a fixture that they had not hired at the beginning. They were here in the area, and the fixture that they hired
00:27:18
Speaker
didn't work out, and then they met this guy that is now my friend, Buki Yamoseni. And thanks to this guy, I could travel to Nigeria, and he introduced me to all the Yahoo boys. The funny thing, well, now it's funny, but at that moment it wasn't funny, was that when I traveled here to Nigeria, first of all, I met Buki, and Buki introduced me to all the Yahoo boys, in particular to Biggie.
00:27:48
Speaker
who is a Yahoo boy that I quoted in the story. But after 24 hours, Buki was very ill. And he was sleeping at the hotel the whole day. So I was suddenly I was in Lagos with this Yahoo boy who was barely like, yeah, it was he was like 29. And
00:28:13
Speaker
I was a bit like, wow, what's going on? What should I do? But in terms of the story, it was better because I'm not going to say that we became friends. But in a way, Biggie and I, we got very close to each other. And Boogie was sent to the hospital. And suddenly, my new fixer was a Yahoo boy who helped me met all the Yahoo boys and specifically
00:28:38
Speaker
He thinks to that, I happen to see more about his life. He was more human in a way because he was not only a Yahoo boy, but he was a person, he was living with me, he was taking me everywhere, he was sewing me, his conversations. And I think that it was a bit like accidentally, but I met a Yahoo boy and all those through him as well by chance.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah. What was your assumption of what the Yahoo boys would be before you met them? And then once you met them, and especially with Biggie, who was your fixer, essentially, like, how did your assumptions and your impressions of them change over time? At the beginning, I had a few problems picturing them, because if you go to the Internet,
00:29:32
Speaker
There are many articles about Roman scams. There are many victims on the internet telling their stories. Well, not that many because it promotes a lot of same. But what it's really difficult to find is stories about Yahoo boys. And of course, you can find a story that, like,
00:29:53
Speaker
picture them as callous people that are like also subtle and they are very like evil and of course some of them they are but it's more complex than that and at the beginning i was like probably influenced by that that idea
00:30:08
Speaker
but when I met them I was surprised because especially I had this idea of the Nigerian prince which is like a bit of a cliche I had this idea of like whenever you go to twitter or instagram you get messages from scammers who are like it's obviously a scam
00:30:30
Speaker
And what changed in my mind was that I realized these guys, some of them, they were very smart. Something, for example, I'm going to give you an example. I was struck. I was really surprised by the fact that some of them could spend one or two months talking to a victim without asking for money. And that's wild.
00:30:56
Speaker
you know, like how much like how the time and the resources they have to put into the victims. So these guys are guys who are like thinking about this 24 seven, because well, and also the days for for sure, the the like the problem about poverty that if you ask here why they are doing it,
00:31:19
Speaker
it's like poverty is number one reason they give. So probably what changed most was that at the beginning I had this idea about them as being like monolithic like something that that it was like one dimensional and now after reporting and after talking to them I see them as human beings like of course they are doing evil but some of them are
00:31:48
Speaker
more evil than others. Some of them are more pushed by their circumstances and they know that what they are doing is bad. Others are not like in every kind of industry. You can see that, well, of course, they're like more three dimensional characters.
00:32:03
Speaker
What they're really exploiting and what you write about too, and this was just further exacerbated by the pandemic, is just pretty much an epidemic, especially in the United States, of loneliness.
Understanding Loneliness and Vulnerability
00:32:19
Speaker
So what struck you about just the loneliness crisis that we might have in Europe or the United States? And it's something that really affected your mom too at this time.
00:32:33
Speaker
Totally, totally. I had that angle from the beginning because writing this space and thinking about the project, I've realized that writing about loneliness, especially writing about other people's loneliness is really hard.
00:32:48
Speaker
You know, because when a person is lonely or is like living alone, you are not seeing it. And it's not that easy for a lonely person to describe their loneliness. I'm not sure why, but it's hard. Whenever I've talked to all the Roman scam victims, they struggle.
00:33:11
Speaker
It was one of the first questions. Well, it's not the first one of the topics that was raised over and over in my interviews, not only with romance scam victims or their families, but also with Yahoo Boys. And the smartest ones knew what's going on in Europe and in the US, probably in the Western world with loneliness because
00:33:36
Speaker
All of them, they always point out that the thing, like the most important thing, wasn't love or like the most important thing was attention. And it took a while for me to realize that there are so many people. Most of them are older, but not everybody, but so many people around us, they don't talk to anyone.
00:34:02
Speaker
They wake up and they don't have messages. They go to sleep and they don't have messages. They have to talk to nobody. And after a while, yes, receiving, and how was your day, babe? That was how Biggie put it to me, the Yahoo boy. That's very important to some people. And it's something that is wild, because here in Nigeria, seeing all the Western African countries, they always tell me that their concept of loneliness is different.
00:34:33
Speaker
Like I remember talking to a Yahoo boy girl, a girlfriend, and she was very dismissive of the victims because they were like here in Nigeria, for example, when we are lonely, we go to see our brother, our sister, we go to their house, but not in America or in Europe.
00:34:52
Speaker
If you're lonely, you go to the internet and you send money to someone that you've never met. Of course, these are her ways of saying things very bluntly. But it was an issue that he was brought up in every conversation I had because they know what's going on in America and in Europe, and they take advantage of that for sure.
00:35:15
Speaker
What I what was really not chilling might be the wrong word but was when you showed a message that the scammer Brian had sent your mom and you show I think you showed it to Biggie and he read it and was like oh that guy's good and like and then he said of your mom like like she was ready.
00:35:36
Speaker
Yeah, totally, totally. I remember it was with a smart billion who was a biggest friend. And I usually ask all the Yahoo boys about my mother's emails, because I wanted to know what they thought about Brian. I call him Brian. But of course, his name, his real name is not Brian. But I remember that moment. And a smart billion, you have to like, remember that these guys, all they do, well, is like,
00:36:04
Speaker
All they do is talking to other people online. So they know when they are closer to receiving money, because every minute they spend talking to someone who is not going to send them money, they are losing money because they could be talking to other victims. So whenever I asked them how many people have you talked to, they were like hundreds, you know. And when he told me that
00:36:32
Speaker
my mother was ready only by reading a couple of emails because my mother deleted most of the emails and we only had a thread of emails. And I was, you're right that chilling is not the right word, but I was surprised by how close we were. Because another thing that this cameras told me was that
00:37:01
Speaker
Maybe Brian was good, but maybe he should have waited a few weeks more because if he knew that my mother had sons, he knew that at some point my mother would ask her sons. So they have this intricate, complicated way of seeing things. They are very, very,
00:37:27
Speaker
cold-hearted, they calculate everything very well. They also made me see that maybe my mother's camera rusted a bit and if he would have waited a bit more, maybe he would have got money. But yeah, it was quite a moment when the guy was like, this guy is good, your mother was ready.
00:37:51
Speaker
And for the writing of the piece, how important was it for you to use the personal through line of you and your mom through this piece that kind of carries the reader through it as a device? Yeah, totally. I've also thought a lot about this. One, probably in terms of their reporting, the story would have been completely different because these people,
00:38:19
Speaker
Like they were hard, like it was difficult to talk to them because for them it was like, why am I going to talk to you if you're going to like do an expose? And in the end, my business is going to be like threatened. So the idea that I was a son of a victim, weirdly enough, strangely enough for the scammers, they were like, yeah, I understand you.
00:38:46
Speaker
So also because they were like my age or something similar, I'm 27. And they could relate to that. So I think that the reporting made the writing like personal as well. And another thing that it was important was to tell the reader
00:39:06
Speaker
that I had something like this happen to me and to my mother because I wanted to humanize the scammers but I also wanted to tell readers and specifically the victims. My mother was a victim so I wanted to find a balance between both worlds
00:39:27
Speaker
which is always difficult. And I thought that doing it like with the first person was the only way to to find that balance. And also another thing that it was important. I did this on my own without almost like at the beginning, I didn't have any resources. So what I wanted to tell the reader was this is my story. This is not the story of every Yahoo boy or this is not the story of every Roman scam victim.
00:39:57
Speaker
I wanted to be humble in that sense. And I think that sometimes the first person in writing conveys that message very well. And that was my goal. Yeah. I love in the there's a moment in the book that's really a book in the in your art article that's really touching. And, you know, my parents split up when I was 12 and I more or less was
00:40:23
Speaker
I had a very much older sibling, so she was kind of out of the house. So I was kind of, essentially it was just like me and my mom. And I similarly kind of kept myself just entertained. You know, as you roll, like to keep myself company, I made up stories and I also spent countless hours in front of my PlayStation pausing between games or levels to look out the window and wonder if the world outside was getting away from me. I don't remember feeling particularly sad, just empty, like a shoe box without shoes in it.
00:40:52
Speaker
And I just found that really touching and actually really relatable. And I don't know, maybe you can just put us in your shoes a little bit in that moment of just what it was like for you as a kid, you know, when your parents split up.
00:41:08
Speaker
because I come from, I was a journalist, and at the beginning it was a bit hard to write something personal. But when I was thinking about the piece, I think that it was important to tell the reader that I also have my own conception of loneliness. Probably everybody does, because I think that everybody goes through a period of loneliness in their life. But when you're a kid and your parents go through a divorce,
00:41:38
Speaker
my perception or my thinking about it is that you get older very quickly because you see things that other kids do not see. So that distance between you and the other kids that are your age makes you probably more lonely. And as I say, it wasn't something that I thought about it like
00:42:06
Speaker
Oh, I'm so miserable. But it was the distance between me and the people around me that kept surprising me. And I just thought like I thought a lot about it.
00:42:21
Speaker
And, you know, when you are 12, when you are 13, you don't have the distance to know that it's happening to a lot of people. You just have your little story. Yeah, you are, you are like the main character of your story. So I remember thinking about that a lot, quite a lot.
00:42:40
Speaker
and probably being a bit dramatic about it. Yeah, I remember that I couldn't sleep. For example, like I was alone at home because maybe my mother wasn't at home and I couldn't sleep. And I kept thinking about what it was to be alone. And I kept thinking if all the boys or girls were alone too.
00:43:01
Speaker
Yeah, and towards the end of the piece, you write that it wasn't necessarily about finding out who scammed your mom. It was about trying to bridge the gap between your sense of your mom and her sense of herself. And how did that gap narrow throughout the process of reporting this piece and writing this piece?
00:43:27
Speaker
At the beginning, I was thinking about this as the perfect narrative arc, even if I didn't find him. Well, no, I wanted to find him because I imagine this perfect narrative arc where it was too tight, too perfect. And for the story, I thought that that was it. And also because I thought I had this idea in my mind that if I met Brian,
00:43:55
Speaker
he would tell me something about my mother that I didn't know because I mean I'm sure that this happens to everybody when they look at their parents and they get older and suddenly they are taking care of their parents in a way and they look at them and they think there are so many things I don't know about you even if even though we like we spend so many hours together and
00:44:23
Speaker
probably that distance between my mother and me was, I, this, a line about, like a line from Philip Blopid, he told me once, you know, like parents before being parents, they were human beings. And I love that quote, because I find it very relatable in the sense that,
00:44:48
Speaker
Of course, my mother had her own thoughts, her own fears. There were so many things that I didn't see or I didn't think when I was a kid that I don't know what's going on in her mind. And of course, after the story, I don't think that now I know more, but probably I'm more aware that that distance sometimes is impossible to,
00:45:16
Speaker
a race but if you are more aware of that distance maybe you can be closer to the people that you love.
00:45:27
Speaker
That leads to my next question, which was, how did this personal journey of this kind of expiration, how did this change your relationship with your mother, or at least maybe change your understanding of your mother?
00:45:49
Speaker
Well, first of all, I have to acknowledge and thank her for being brave because if she had told me, look, I don't want my name on the story. I don't want you to tell the story. It's so embarrassing. I wouldn't have told the story, of course. So my mother from the beginning, she was
00:46:11
Speaker
excited, elated, because I was writing the story. And her main motivation was that she kept telling me and my brothers, I wasn't scammed because of my sons. But if you had not been there, probably I would have been scammed. I would have sent money. And I'm sure that it's happening to so many women.
00:46:35
Speaker
My mother believes that it's only happening to women, but it's happening to men as well. But her point was, let's try to help those women who are more lonely than I am. And from the very beginning, she was eager that I was telling her story. I would say that as my personal journey, from the beginning, I had a very close relationship with my mother.
00:46:59
Speaker
but probably now I'm more aware of the things that she did for us, for me and my brothers. When you look at all the people, when you look at your parents, especially if they are divorced, when you look at a single parent, there are so many things that you didn't see, the efforts they made, the struggles they went through.
00:47:25
Speaker
that you kind of forget, at least in the case of my mother, taking care of us, working hard and paying for our education and for everything sometimes meant not going out, not meeting other people. And that's something that before writing this story,
00:47:46
Speaker
I thought, I didn't think. So probably I'm more aware of my mother's efforts to raise us. And so far as the sitting down to write this piece and get your head around everything with your research and your reporting, what is your practice in any idiosyncratic routines that you adhere by so you can get into the right headspace to start writing?
00:48:15
Speaker
Well, first of all, I need to have a beginning. I struggle a lot writing a piece if I don't have like an image, like an initial image where I can start like the piece. It doesn't matter if after that I change the beginning a bit, but I keep reading the piece every time I'm writing it. So at some point I need to have a beginning very advanced in a way.
00:48:43
Speaker
then with this piece, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna tell the truth. I struggle a lot with the structure because it was a difficult piece to write in the sense that there are so many different angles and so many different voices that sometimes I struggled a bit. But I have to say that, and this might sound counterintuitive,
00:49:09
Speaker
I'm a bit weird, but I'm a Spanish writer and this is the first like long piece that I've ever written in English. But in some way I think, of course it was the heart, but in some way I think that was an advantage because when you have less tools, you know what you can do and you know what you can't do. So in that sense, the writing came easier.
00:49:38
Speaker
Um, and probably I always had this idea that probably the piece was something like a coming of age book. Uh, I hate that expression. I don't know what I said it. Uh, but I, I always had this idea that, that the, the, because I didn't find the guy, the, the, there had to be some kind of moral evolution to, to the character.
00:50:07
Speaker
to who was me. But of course, it couldn't be something very obvious, because then if it's too tight, too perfect, the reader will notice. And I usually hate that as well. So it was like building the structure was this difficult, like building this kind of building where
00:50:32
Speaker
you have to do one thing without doing it. It might sound weird, but yeah, I was always trying to build that moral evolution of the character without being too present.
00:50:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, without it being tied up nicely where you get to confront the scammer who, you know, scans your mom, it's like the journey then becomes more internal. And the revelation is discoveries you and a greater understanding that you have, you know, with your mother. And I think that is its own payoff in the end.
Reflections on Storytelling and Writing Challenges
00:51:14
Speaker
Totally. And I've also thought a lot about it.
00:51:19
Speaker
What would have done if I had met Brian? I don't think that peace would have changed at all, because when you talk to these scammers, and for them, look, they call their victims clients. So probably my mother for Brian was another client. And at some point, I learned that Brian was
00:51:48
Speaker
anyone that was doing the scam. So even in Nigeria when I was here, when I was there, I realized that talking to the scammers, in a way I was talking to Brian because they were telling me something probably very similar to what Brian would have told me. And also there was a point where I kept thinking, if these gal boys are like masterminds,
00:52:17
Speaker
then I can understand why it happened to my mother, you know? Of course, after two or three days talking to them, I realized that some of them were smart. Some of them were a bit callous. But I also realized that what they were doing wasn't anything special. Sometimes speaking like what they were saying was riddled with cliches and
00:52:46
Speaker
what I realized was that I could learn more from my mother about this than from them and in that way yeah totally it was like an internal kind of trip and but I had to come here to understand that which at the beginning when I was writing this
00:53:05
Speaker
I was a bit frustrated because I didn't want to say I had to go all the way to Nigeria to understand my mother's loneliness. I think it was part of the process. And I think that, as you said before, because of that trip, because I saw what the Yahoo boys are doing, because I met all the victims. And this is important because as a reporter and a writer,
00:53:30
Speaker
It's weird. You feel like you find easier to report on other people that you don't know than to do reporting inside your own family, probably because you are more prone to just them. And when I saw other victims' loneliness, when I saw their problems, when I saw their broken dreams, then it became easier for me to understand what my mother had gone through, that it was a very universal experience.
00:54:00
Speaker
So, yeah, in that sense, it took a while for me to understand that the trip for that internal, like the real trip, it was necessary for that internal trip that you are mentioning. What would you say your relationship is to loneliness these days? Oh, that's a good question. That's a good question.
00:54:25
Speaker
I don't know what you think, but when you were lonely or where you were alone as a child, you have a different relationship to loneliness in the sense that I'm quite chill with it now. Like I need to be alone sometimes. I know that it's important to differentiate between being alone and being lonely, but it's not something that I worry about.
00:54:54
Speaker
But I've also realized, talking to my mother and other victims, that loneliness is mostly a transition or a period of your life that something happened to you. It's important to highlight that
00:55:13
Speaker
Almost every Roman scan victim have gone through some sort of trauma. I've talked a lot with friends about this piece and about loneliness. And I think that everybody, or almost everybody, go through a period of loneliness in their life. And now I'm not in one of them, fortunately. But I think that, yeah,
00:55:44
Speaker
probably everybody goes through them and it's hard to, well, I'm thinking about a quote, I can't remember what the quote was and who said it, but it was something like, I think it was Olivia Lang when she wrote about New York and loneliness. It was a quote from the book and it said something like, when people go through a
00:56:11
Speaker
period of loneliness. After that, they want to forget about their loneliness and they don't remember it. And if you think about it, whenever someone tells you that she or he, like they are lonely, it raises like an immediate suspicion on the person that is saying that. So I wonder why that is. When you're stuck
00:56:38
Speaker
writing a piece and maybe you experience that with this one. Who did you confide in and how do you talk through any problem you have with synthesizing a piece when you feel stuck?
00:56:57
Speaker
Well, first I try to avoid telling what I'm writing to many people. Sometimes I failed and I become this person who is always talking about the same thing. So something that I hate. First of all, I try to avoid, like, first of all, I try to read it out loud and to try to see where the problem is. And then,
00:57:25
Speaker
Probably because of the English language I mentioned before, I keep thinking about images. And I think that that's very helpful for the reader, especially for the beginning, but for the every beginning of a different section. And at some point, if I'm still stuck, I served my problems with writing colleagues or maybe reporters that are also eager to help.
00:57:53
Speaker
but at some point I found and I've learned in this process that you have to do it yourself you know or maybe when you are in the editing process that improves but it's wild how you're writing something you're stuck on it on a piece and then you go out for a walk or you go out for a run
00:58:17
Speaker
maybe you just stop writing for a few days and then the solution comes up. So I think that's my answer. If I have a problem in terms of the structure that I can't resolve, I just stop writing and I go out for a coffee and then I text 10 friends telling them I want to die.
00:58:45
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you there. When you're sitting down to writer, are you much of an outliner when you're thinking about structure? That's a good question. Am I an outliner?
00:59:00
Speaker
Yeah, I need to print the article. I need to see it on paper so I can see where the problem is. But also I try to, again, think in images. So probably I divide the different sections in images. So probably, yeah, I do that.
00:59:27
Speaker
Yeah. And and when you're you know some reporters they really love you know the research and reporting phase some like the writing. You know for you where do you feel most like alive and engaged in the process.
00:59:41
Speaker
Okay, probably this sounds exactly safe because I've heard so many writers talking about this. But for me, I mean, it's true when you have written the piece and you are editing and you have like 90% of the piece and you see like the light at the end of the tunnel, that's for me the best part. Reporting is also quite good, quite funny, like quite fun as well.
01:00:04
Speaker
The other day I went to see a book presentation by Patrick Radenkieff, a writer that I really admire. Yeah, he's great. He was saying something very interesting, that whenever he's interviewing a person, when he's doing research,
01:00:26
Speaker
He's also thinking in terms of the writing. Probably that's my favorite part as well. I know that I have to get better because sometimes it's really hard to ask questions and at the same time think in terms of the narrative.
01:00:40
Speaker
But, for example, when I'm out in a car in Legos, or where, for example, when I'm with a YouTube priest in the outskirts of Legos, and I'm asking him questions, I also try to picture that scene in terms of the narrative.
01:00:59
Speaker
And for me, that's the most fun part of writing the story because it's like building a puzzle. So it's quite fun. Then, of course, the hardest part is just sit and write because you have the pieces of the puzzle that you have no idea how to do it.
01:01:24
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's that's the challenge, too. Early on, like almost trying to see the shape of a piece inside your head as you're reporting it. It's a fine balance because you're like, I want to just let the reporting tell me what the story is going to be. But also you have to kind of think, oh, what is the shape of this or what is it I'm really trying to say? And that can also shape your reporting. So it's like one.
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, like one is very passive, but important. But the other is a bit more pointed, if that makes any sense. Oh, totally. I agree 100 percent with you. Because at the beginning, and also with this story, for example, like I was doing interviews and, for example, we I had an apartment in mainland Lagos and people like, for example, Yahoo Boys came to the apartment and the interviews went great. But in terms of the narrative,
01:02:19
Speaker
I realized that it was very, I was stuck in the apartment and there was no movement. And this is important, but at the same time, if you are thinking too much about the narrative, you are in a way closing the door for all the stories. It's a contradiction in itself, but sometimes when I get relaxed in an interview, when I am like,
01:02:43
Speaker
okay, I'm not going to think about anything else. I'm just going to go with the interviewee, like whatever he or she wants to tell me. And sometimes they take you to incredible places. Like they tell you stories that are wild. And if I have the feeling that if you are too busy thinking in terms of the narrative, you don't get good answers because your questions are
01:03:10
Speaker
too tight, too perfect. You don't realize that the questions that you bring are just like an idea that you had before meeting this guy. So I totally hear you. I think that it's hard to find a balance.
01:03:30
Speaker
you have to think about both at the same time, which is, yeah, really, really hard. And you mentioned Patrick Radden Keefe. I wonder who else might be writers and journalists, narrative journalists who you deeply admire and whose work that you want to emulate and imitate and become ideally. I mean, Patrick Radden Keefe for me is kind of like my idol.
01:03:57
Speaker
Uh, every, every book that he's written is like. Amazing. Um, probably I'm trying to strike a balance. Uh, here we go. Trying to compare myself to Patrick Raddenkiff and Emmanuel Carrer. I, I really liked the first Emmanuel Carrer, the French writer, um, because he combined, uh, the first person with reporting and,
01:04:24
Speaker
But I'm talking about the first M&O career, his first books, because there's something very liberating about the idea of writing from the first person, especially if you don't have the New Yorker resources, for example, where you can spend six months reporting on something. It's very liberating because it's a way to say, this is my story, and probably there are others as well.
01:04:49
Speaker
And I really like, for example, I don't know what's the English title of the manual career first book or the most famous book. I don't remember. I think it's the adversary. I don't know if you have read it, but it emulates true blood. I call blood, sorry. But career was very dismissive of Capote because
01:05:18
Speaker
in a way, the beginning of Emman Alcaro's book, that in Long Story Short, his book is about a guy who pretended to be someone else. No, who pretended to, well, to have a job. And after 15 or 20 years, I don't remember, his family was going to uncover all of it. His family was going to discover it. And when he was going to be discovered, like when he was, like,
01:05:45
Speaker
people were going to know that he was a fraud. He killed his family and he tried to kill himself.
01:05:51
Speaker
he didn't and Eman O'Carrer started talking to him while he was in prison but my point is that that book starts with the day that this guy killed his family I was doing something like with my kids and I think that that's very powerful and very liberating as well and I aspire to strike that balance but there is another writer that I really like
01:06:18
Speaker
Actually, I've read only one book. I read this book like two weeks ago, but I'm completely, you know, when you read a book and you are like, this is the best book I've ever read, probably because it's the last book that you read. But it's called, it's called Ghost of the Tsunami by Richard George Farie. It was published probably five years ago.
01:06:42
Speaker
And he's a British reporter that lived in Japan for so many years. And the book is about the tragedy of the 2011 tsunami. But he tells the story of an elephant in a specific village that suffered the greatest loss. And he does it in a way that is very compelling and very human. And you can see him through the piece.
01:07:13
Speaker
But what I really loved was that I kept thinking, how did you do it? You know, like in terms of the reporting, how did you do it? And to go back to Patrick Roddenkir, he also said something that is true, that whenever you start doing this, you don't read a nonfiction book ever the same. Because if the book is so good,
01:07:40
Speaker
you keep asking yourself, how this person do it? How did you get this info from them? Because in terms of the writing and the reporting, that relationship is very difficult to achieve. So in a way, I'm probably telling you my idols, my literary idols, but at the same time, reading the books is a problem because I keep thinking,
01:08:11
Speaker
the hell are they doing this? Well that's the curse of becoming a writer is that reading in it in and of itself is never the same because you you start reading as a writer and you start trying to decode it so some of the magic goes away
01:08:29
Speaker
because you're like, how are they doing this? I need to do that. I want to try this. And instead of just like instead of just like surrendering to how good it is, you're like trying to figure it out. And in a way, it kind of ruins reading in a way. Yeah, totally in a way. But at the same time, that's the way.
01:08:47
Speaker
you can learn how to do it because I remember one advice like from a one professor. She told me, if you want to write this story, go to the places where they are publishing these kind of stories right now, print their stories and start dividing the story into blocks, into different sections. Try to think how the writer thought, like how the writer dropped at this story. Try to think like them.
01:09:17
Speaker
And it ruins the story, but you learn a lot from taking the pieces that your favorite writers have written and thinking how they solve the problems that you are having, right? Like, for example, how I'm going to solve this problem that I have here with this transition or how I'm going to solve the problem of
01:09:42
Speaker
what happens if I bring this character too soon and then it disappears and how I'm going to help the reader understand or help the reader
01:09:52
Speaker
Remember this person later on in the text, you know, there are so many tricks that you can learn from reading these people that it's wild. And there are things that I'm saying right now that I want to do after this interview, because I think there are much more things that I can learn from reading Patrick Radd and Q.
01:10:13
Speaker
than what I thought so yeah if you take a piece from or like a book from your favorite writer and you start like thinking in terms of the structure thinking in terms of the style thinking in terms of each paragraph what like what's the goal of each paragraph you might get crazy but in the in the well like getting crazy you will learn a lot
01:10:37
Speaker
from it. Oh, I love that. Well, Carlos, I like to end these conversations by asking the guest, you in this case, a recommendation for the listeners out there. And that can just be anything you're excited about, a TV show, a book, or a brand of socks that you really like. So I'll leave that up to you. What would you recommend for the listeners out there?
01:11:00
Speaker
Oh, well, I thought about that book, The Ghosts of the Tsunami, but I'm going to recommend a different one. And as a Spaniard, I'm going to recommend a book called The Fortune of a Revel by journalist and writer Arturo Barrea. He was a writer in the 20th century during the civil war in Spain. And he wrote a trilogy called The Fortune of a Revel that is probably
01:11:30
Speaker
my favorite book of all times. I gave it to a few people in the, like, maybe in the last few years. And I'm quite obsessed with it because I think that in the three books, one of them is about his upbringing in Madrid in the 1920s, you know, like a poor neighborhood. The second one is about a war that happened in Morocco later on. And the third one is about the Civil War.
01:11:59
Speaker
And Arturo Barrea was in the side of the Republicans. He had to go to London because of the dictatorship, and he died there. He died in the exile.
01:12:15
Speaker
And within this book, you are like, you are, you learn so much about writing, but also about, about living. And he has a quote that is amazing. I don't remember the particular quote in English, but I'm going to destroy the quote. I'm sorry, Arturo Barreo's relatives, but it's something like to write truthfully, to write like with truth, you really have to live truthfully.
01:12:41
Speaker
And I think that's beautiful. And I try to remember every day that if you really want to write truthfully, you have to try to live first, to have experiences, to know more about people, to be more a human being. And I hope that we writers remember that every time we try writing.
01:13:04
Speaker
Well, that's amazing. That's a great place. That's a great place to end our conversation. That's really insightful and really brilliant. I think I'm going to be chewing on that one for the rest of the day. So Carlos, thank you so much for this piece that you did for the Atavis. And of course, thanks for coming on the show to Talk Shop. This was really fun. Thank you for having me. I'll keep listening to the conversations with future Atavis writers.
01:13:33
Speaker
Fantastic. Thanks to Carlos. Thanks to Sayward. Amazing piece for the Adivus. We did it. We got through June. Tomorrow's my birthday. July 1st, Canada Day. Number 43.
01:13:49
Speaker
Oh, don't forget to rage against the algorithm with me over at Substack. I've pulled way back on Instagram and Twitter. I just check Twitter like I check email these days. I barely put anything there. Having more fun with Substack even though the audience isn't quote unquote as big. Using notes instead of tweeting and then
01:14:11
Speaker
really try leaning into the newsletter aspect of it. It's more fun. I think it's a little more pure, at least right now. Who knows what's going to happen? Rage against the algorithm.substack.com.
01:14:26
Speaker
So sometimes I wonder what the fascination is with wanting to know artists, and in our case, primarily writers, routines. It's this creative voyeurism. And I can't get my head around why we care, but we really do. On some level, we're insecure, I think. And if we listen to how Andre Debussy III or Joyce Carol Oates or Roxanne Gay, how they grease the gears to write,
01:14:50
Speaker
Well, maybe we can, you know, one click shop or add to cart and use some trial and error to strengthen our own practice.
01:15:00
Speaker
You know, sometimes I think that might just be a means of procrastinating, you know, of putting off doing the work. You know, if I just try this new thing, then maybe this is gonna be the thing that does it here. I've grown less concerned with other people's routines. I used to be obsessed about it, and I still sometimes ask about it. You know, I used to love when Tim Ferriss would ask his guest that, but then I just kind of outgrew that. Outgrew that podcast a long time ago.
01:15:29
Speaker
I wonder how many people have outgrown this one.
01:15:32
Speaker
That's a riff for another day about outgrowing a podcast and a guest, a guest, an interviewer. I am thinking out loud, so I'm going to stop doing that. All I'm saying is, all I care about is whether you do have a practice, something repeatable. And that gets me to a great quote I pulled from Easy Strength Omnibook by Dan John, a revered strength coach.
01:16:01
Speaker
He writes at one point, if it isn't sustainable, repeatable, and doable, I don't do it. That's the thing with writing. Be it an essay, a book, routine. If it isn't sustainable, repeatable, and doable, you won't do it. The ethos of easy strength is not really to feel the burn. Do the same thing every day, very low sets, very low reps. When weight feels light, add weight. If it doesn't feel white, stay the same or maybe take some off.
01:16:29
Speaker
The idea is to never miss a rep and never miss a workout. Over time, you slowly get stronger. You might not get chiseled. Who knows? That's for Instagram. But you get stronger. You might be useful. You might be someone who can actually help a friend lift his canoe up onto the top of his van. That makes you useful and a good neighbor.
01:16:52
Speaker
Slowly is the problem. People don't necessarily have the patience for slowly and I get it. But slowly is, wait for it, sustainable, repeatable, and doable. We're attracted to marathon writing sessions or 1500 words a day for a month. Feels good for like two and a half days. Then you hit the wall and suddenly you're trying to squeeze water out of granite and variably you give up.
01:17:19
Speaker
I understand nobody can write every day. I understand that binge writing is a thing. You know, you find it in your schedule and you do it. You know, that's no judgment. But I'd rather see you never get, you know, quote-unquote, sore and start just by writing, I don't know, a hundred words a day.
01:17:37
Speaker
Maybe five to 10 minutes and cut it off. When that feels too light, add weight. Maybe up the word count a little bit. Maybe one day, you're feeling good. You're just in the flow and to stop would be more painful than to keep going. So you go boom and man, you just spit out 2,000 words. It's seductive to hammer and crush, be it in the gym or in art. And it makes for great social media content.
01:18:07
Speaker
But that becomes in and of itself performative and that's gross. And you're better than that. I know you are. Sustainable, repeatable, doable. Love that baby. So stay wild, see you in Evers. And if you can do, interview safe.