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Episode 357: Adam Popescu
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Adam Popescu (@adampopescu) is a Los Angeles-based journalist and writer and he recently wrote about his trip to Congo and the first national park to mine for Bitcoin.
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Shoutout
00:00:01
Speaker
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Introduction to CNF Podcast and Guest
00:00:30
Speaker
You know, Brandon, truth be told, the story beyond the story is more interesting as it usually is.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hey CNFers, it's CNF Pot, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Today's guest is Adam Popescu. He is a Los Angeles-based writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Outside Magazine, among others.
00:01:08
Speaker
He specializes in narratives on power, culture, wildlife, climate, and the dark side of big tech. And that brings us to a recent piece of his that he wrote for MIT Technology Review.
00:01:22
Speaker
Here's the gist. Gorillas, militias, and Bitcoin, why Congo's famous national park is betting big on crypto. In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what the hell crypto has to do with conservation.
00:01:48
Speaker
Right? I'm hooked. If you don't know what Bitcoin is, I don't. Don't ask me. But Adam explains it a
Bitcoin Mining and Conservation in Virunga
00:01:56
Speaker
bit. He talks about the logistics of going abroad and being a foreign correspondent. This is his jam. This guy is a globetrotter.
00:02:06
Speaker
not the Harlem Globetrotter kind. He riffs on his experience interviewing, among others, Hunter Biden and what Adam brings along with him when he's out in the jungle, when he's traveling. If you're in Congo, you're not just going to Walmart if you forgot something.
00:02:26
Speaker
You can learn more about Adam at his website adampapescu.com. That's A-D-A-M-P-O-P-E-S-C-U. He's on Instagram and Twitter at Adampapescu.
00:02:43
Speaker
I deeply admire the kind of work people like Adam do. I get anxiety by heading down to the AMPM for a tall boy. And here's Adam reporting from hostile territories and coming back to tell us about it. I wish I was more like him and people like him. So you're just gonna, you're gonna get a sense of what makes him tick. So without, without, let's just not even wait anymore. Let's just do this. Let's do this. CNFers, here's Adam.
00:03:20
Speaker
coming into these things. I like getting a sense of where the juice is for a writer, reporter, and in your case, you're such a globetrotting journalist. And I want to just get a sense of, for you, where's the juice in this line of work for you? Well, I think you really just said it. A lot of people say that there's no mystery today, that there's no
00:03:47
Speaker
unknown mysterious places because we're so overly connected. But I think it's the exact opposite. We are very connected. We are very aware of each other. But so few of us go outside of those comfort zones and outside of those bubbles. And as a result, we think that we know the world. We think that we know how the people live.
00:04:09
Speaker
I've been very fortunate to report from every continent except for Australia and Antarctica, and I say that not as a show off, but on this trip to Congo, it felt like the first time I've ever really traveled because this place was so
00:04:26
Speaker
beyond stereotype and so inspiring in many ways and so complicated and so challenging. And that's what these stories allow you to do is go see things like this for yourself and examine
Challenges of Foreign Reporting
00:04:37
Speaker
your notions of what you think the world is really like.
00:04:39
Speaker
Given the nature of your body of work and being able to hop around the globe, what are some of the logistics that go into that to be it for the travel and lining up translators? This seems like there's a lot of balls to juggle before you embark on a very ambitious reporting trip.
00:04:59
Speaker
Absolutely. I was wondering if you were going to ask me that because that's something that often goes neglected. I think the logistic parts are, you know, this doesn't just happen overnight. Whenever I'm going anywhere, I usually spend a lot of time trying to do my homework and reading about a place. And sometimes, you know, the best is if you can have
00:05:22
Speaker
and be with locals because they can really provide you with a sense of place and understanding that you don't get from a guy, but you don't get from joining a group, you know what I mean? This trip I went completely by myself. So the logistics of this work many months in the making.
00:05:41
Speaker
in many ways, like I said earlier, that this is felt like the first time traveling. This was also the culmination of years of reporting from challenging places. But this felt like several runs higher, several of it, in terms of difficulty and challenges. And also just nerves. There's no tourism in this location, really, because of unrest. There's very little to any paved roads. There is little infrastructure.
00:06:11
Speaker
There are all the creature comforts that reporters or tourists for that matter or we at home just take for granted. So going into it, I had to be very aware of the challenges and you try to prepare as best you can. So what that means is I took a special training for journalists and for
00:06:36
Speaker
humanitarian workers called heat training, which is hostile environment awareness training. I went to Washington DC and in the several days it was a mix of former military first aid, very basic combat stuff, hand to hand stuff.
00:06:55
Speaker
You get a certification. The idea is to mimic or to provide you with a sense of challenges abroad. Some of them are very basic. Some of them are very intuitive. Others are not. And I'll give you an example.
00:07:10
Speaker
You know, in certain places, you shake someone's hand, look at them in the eye. In certain cultures, that's seen as disrespectful. Certain places, you might wanna be in the front seat of the vehicle when you're traveling. Other places, it might be safer to be in the back seat. Some of them are gender-specific. Some of this, it really helps because the way that I look at it, and everyone has their own philosophy, but the way that I really look at it, it's I'm a guest, whether it's in,
00:07:39
Speaker
East Africa or maybe even East LA, other than Los Angeles. If I'm in a different part of town that I am not a resident, I want to feel like I am following the rules. I don't want to be the ugly American. I don't want to be getting anyone in trouble from my reporting. It's incredibly easy to do that because people feel
00:08:05
Speaker
obligated or they feel the draw of money or whatever to cater to you and sometimes I can get you in trouble or get you in danger. So you try to be as aware as you can. I try to be very low profile and you know you can only that's a that's a push and pull because you stick out you're a foreigner obviously and
00:08:26
Speaker
I'm in a black country, I'm in a white face, a European face. So automatically you stick out. So there's things you can do, but you kind of have to just have situational awareness that it helps to travel abroad and there's certain kind of ways of thinking and ways of acting that can help mitigate these things.
00:08:49
Speaker
But going back to training, months and months of speaking to people who have worked, lived in Congo. I also took several first aid courses. I worked with an insurance company in case something would happen. I had a satellite device that I would do regular check-ins. I was also around, I was the guest of the national park. When I said guest, I mean,
00:09:19
Speaker
I paid to stay there. It wasn't transactional, but, uh, this national park from the national park in the Eastern Congo is a government body and they
Societal and Technological Dynamics in Congo
00:09:31
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provide security. And as much as if I'm traveling with them, they themselves travel in convoys, they're armed. This is what's essentially known as a threat projection. If I can say that in
00:09:45
Speaker
And what I mean by that is that that's not the right phrase, but essentially in a place that's got sectarian violence, militia groups, et cetera, there's two schools of thought. A lot of aid workers
00:10:02
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say that it's better not to be with armed people because perhaps that can be provocative. Sometimes aid workers or other humanitarian organizations, they get targeted if they have the UN logo on their truck or something else. Other places, they're welcomed. In this region, unfortunately, because there is so many different groups and so many different interests and so much both hot and cold, essentially war,
00:10:32
Speaker
the only way to travel for these rangers who are basically a law enforcement body is to do so under armed escort or under armed guards and they would go in groups of maybe two trucks
00:10:50
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six to 12 guys total and armed with like semi-automatic weapons, sometimes heavy weapons. And again, you know, the preparation of this as I'm not around people with weapons usually as a reporter, it can be kind of intimidating. It can be kind of scary for a lot of people. It's very scary.
00:11:18
Speaker
So to go to a place like this, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in a sense. You have to be willing to put a measure of trust in others to protect your safety. One of the ways you do that, or one of the ways I did that was I figure that if you're in a car with six to 12 guys who are heavily armed, if I am a guy on the road who may be a militia member, maybe I'm one guy, maybe I'm two guys, I have an AK-47, if I see 12 guys with an AK,
00:11:48
Speaker
with AKs, maybe with one with a heavier machine gun, I'm not going to mess with them because it's not really a risk that it's probably not a fight to go and win. You know, that sounds really fatalistic. These are kind of the stakes there. And this is what makes a place like Congo or a place like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. These are places that are the highest level, I think, of challenge for a reporter because we're not armed.
00:12:18
Speaker
And we're essentially, for some would say we shouldn't be there. And sometimes you can get in trouble. It's very easy for something to happen. Sometimes it's wrong place, wrong time. At the same time, this is what draws interest. This is another region that's got almost as much displaced people and refugees as Ukraine, but few Westerners know that.
00:12:45
Speaker
It's also a place where we rely on for cobalt and colton, which are extremely vital to the e-battery movement and to the cell phones in our pockets or the computers we're talking with. So it's very hard to, on one side of your brain, to kind of make sense of what's going on. Because you hear narratives from abroad or narratives from afar, and then you step on the ground and
00:13:12
Speaker
It can be jarring. So in these situations, you do your best to speak to as many voices as you can. You do your best to vet things that people tell you, perhaps later on. You do your best to, as you mentioned, translators and whatnot. You do your best to get what you can as a reporter, but don't push certain buttons or go in directions, both physically and literally.
00:13:37
Speaker
that may get someone in trouble after the fact. I had people, what's happened to me in the past months, because I went there last year and for a full year, I'm basically, I'm still reporting the story. So I'm keeping up, I'm reading, I'm in touch with people, people tell me that they're being targeted by militias and they're trying to escape. What should I do? And your heart breaks because maybe someone, maybe somebody helps you with some risk to them. If I'm writing The New York Times,
00:14:07
Speaker
MIT TechReview, these are visible platforms that maybe the locals don't read English, but it's still easy to translate, still kind of easy to see. And I find a militia group, for instance, and they're speaking about this or saying things about the situation there that can make someone a target.
00:14:27
Speaker
You know, you have a responsibility as a reporter. We have a responsibility as an outsider to respect the balance there, not getting one hurt, and do your best to report as accurately as you can, and not really shaking the hornets us, because that's unfortunately this idea of helicoptering in.
00:14:49
Speaker
the media gets a lot of shit about, it's this kind of stuff. And I've gone to places all over the world, some in America, where people say, you know, we've been burned by this place. This reporter said something alive to us. And it's so easy to break the trust, to lose the trust, that that's why it's so valuable. And this place like this was, it is the ultimate challenge, you know, as much as there are threats,
00:15:15
Speaker
both real and existential. There are threats you may not see. There are just challenges in terms of getting there. Challenges in terms of, again, the nerves side. To just do a regular story is hard enough. To do it
00:15:37
Speaker
in a place where there could be a language barrier, there could be cultural barriers that you're not quite aware of, there's an active volcano, there is weather issues nonstop, there is, you can't use a road, there is one thing after another, and that's really hard to do. And that's why a few people go to these kind of places.
00:16:00
Speaker
And you said a moment ago, talking about trust, and given that in a place like the Congo, lots of African countries, there's a lot of colonial trauma. And that can make trust all the more difficult. So for you, as you said, kind of looking white, European,
00:16:22
Speaker
there are going to be those overtones of colonialism and colonial trauma. So how have you navigated that degree of trust in a place like East Africa? Good question. I think you do the best you can. That might sound trite, but going into this story, or as a leader at home, one of the main characters that I use to
00:16:46
Speaker
to basically tell this story is the Belgian park director, Emmanuel Demerod. He's a very fascinating guy, a very complicated guy.
00:16:55
Speaker
and very polarizing, very controversial. Again, obviously this is a place with a Belgian colonial past, Belgian park director, who's in many ways is the symbolically the head of this organization that has this trauma. The question becomes, can we escape trauma? Can we escape the trauma of history?
00:17:20
Speaker
And that's a question that we can't possibly answer in this dialogue. Every single person probably has their own deeply personal feeling about that. I myself have that feeling from my own family history. So what I try
Integrity and Honesty in Journalism
00:17:37
Speaker
to do is I try to bridge divides with my subjects that I'm writing about, people I'm reporting on, no matter who it is. I try to bring my experience
00:17:50
Speaker
as tangential as it might be. But I share myself to try to get someone to share their story because they're doing me an honor, really. Again, for someone to open up doesn't always just happen easily. You have to give up yourself, too, so people feel comfortable. And that doesn't mean transactional money necessarily, but it really means letting someone know your story, letting someone know why you're here,
00:18:18
Speaker
And I'm, you know, as a writer, as a reporter, I'm interested in places that other people perhaps overlook. I'm interested in places that are on the brink for various reasons. And I'm also interested, I'm interested in people. You know, these are very common threads and most people want to feel accepted.
00:18:43
Speaker
They want to feel important. They want to feel like they can provide for their loved ones and to feel honorable in doing so. And some of these people who are unfortunately refugees in East Africa, they have a lot of dignity and they want to feel like they matter. So if you can, if you're aware of that, it can be incredibly helpful to you as a reporter because this is not, I'm not interested in doing the same story everyone else or many have done, which is,
00:19:12
Speaker
This is a continent full of misery, or this is a place full of whatever superlative you want to put in that's basically a negative. If anything, this is a region, a continent that is extremely young, extremely aware. We're all interconnected now. Most people have cell phones and awareness. They might not live the same physical lives as us, but they're exposed to a lot of the same ideas.
00:19:40
Speaker
And the big problem in the developing world, and again, there's a term that some people don't like to use, but I say it in as much as it's underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure and economy, roads, hospitals, things like that. The question is, how do they get a quality of life? How does the rest of the world get a so-called Western quality of life in terms of reliance on government, healthcare,
00:20:05
Speaker
Upward mobility, less corruption. How do you do that without sacrificing the culture, values, ways of life, and in places that are incredibly important to all of us, unfortunately, the environment? It's a very tenuous balance. Again, no real easy answers, and many places have their own story and their own approach to this. But what drew me here was initially
00:20:32
Speaker
There's these hydroelectric power plant projects trying to bring power to a region without it in the hopes that it helps bring stability. By no means is this a zero sum game. It is not like a right or wrong in terms of does it work, does it not? There are things about it that does work. There's things about it unfortunately that doesn't. But this great area, the challenges of bringing projects like this to regions that need them desperately
00:21:02
Speaker
was what drew me here and the fact that we have a Belgian park director who's also a prince who's also survived an assassination attempt here and has sacrificed himself and his family for over several decades these are the the the stakes or the characters or some of which that make it
00:21:22
Speaker
a bit of a head scratcher. So it does have a colonial past. Can this guy be a good guy? Can this project, even if it doesn't serve everyone, not everyone is decided on this is good or this is bad, can that still serve the population writ large? All of these challenging questions that make it fascinating, that make it interesting, that make it worth people's time to read, you hope. And then when you learn other things where, okay,
00:21:49
Speaker
One of the projects this park is doing is a chocolate factory, trying to bring a legal market of cacao, trying to do coffee, chia seeds, trying to do a Bitcoin mine. What is going on here? There's all these things that are extremely counterintuitive, extremely hard to process, admittedly.
00:22:11
Speaker
but make it for very rich storytelling, very high stakes, and ultimately marrying so many big topics and subjects that all of us are interested in.
00:22:24
Speaker
When you talk about a rich, evocative storytelling, when this story or this canvas kind of came on your radar, what was it about this that really
Personal Motivation and Nature Experiences
00:22:37
Speaker
wanted you to sink not only your teeth into it as a reporter and writer, but to get on the plane, to go there and to put yourself at risk for this? I think that first off, I wanted to go. I'll just say that.
00:22:53
Speaker
because we're also overexposed to everything. The level of what impresses us, it has to be higher and higher. So what made me willing to go and deal with all these uncertainties and unknowns, it's not so much bravado or putting your head in the sand or overconfidence or whatever. It's more like that people's attention spans are low.
00:23:22
Speaker
And people are unimpressed by so much because we're all in competition for our time and attention. And we are, at least I'll say many of us in the media are jaded two stories because we've seen it all or think we have. And what I have tried to do or what's been maybe my lane over the past few years is
00:23:47
Speaker
the willingness or the attempt to try to explore a place or person in a way that we don't know. So for example, I already have a curiosity. This is in many ways to be able to go travel or speak to people of high stature is like fulfilling a childhood dream. It's very lucky. There's a lot of sacrifice and there's a lot of, you pay for it in certain ways.
00:24:18
Speaker
but you get to see really how a lot of things tick. And that's just, you really can't put a price on that. It really is so valuable. Sometimes it makes me feel good to know it all. And my fiance kind of gives me a shit about it, but at the same time, it's just, how can you not watch BBC Planet Earth or see an amazing film and not wanna,
00:24:48
Speaker
go to the Arctic, or talk to that filmmaker or artist.
00:24:55
Speaker
we all do, very few of us get to do that. And that's what the big appeal for me is. Yeah. So yeah, for some, especially with nature documentaries and stuff, I guess the sad thing is that people feel a vicarious connection to it and that, you know, based on the quality of televisions and supercomputers in our hands, they're like, well, that this is just as good as the real thing. And, you
High Stakes and Risks in Journalism
00:25:21
Speaker
know, people like you doing the kind of work you do and be like, no, it's not as good as the real thing.
00:25:27
Speaker
Well, you know what it is. I don't know if it's not as good as the real thing. Nothing ever beats sitting down, you know, sitting for yourself, but we're all busy and we all have our own lives and it's expensive and time consuming. So we can't do it. I think the great thing about a good book or a good film or good music is it transports you to a place or a time. It is the best
00:25:54
Speaker
But going back to a little earlier of my interests and why go to places, there's a bit of a push and pull that, again, because we are, have seen so much. And stuff like 10 years ago, like polar bears, snow leopards, even like stunts or whatever you watch online, we kind of like,
00:26:20
Speaker
There is, it seems like there's less mystery. It seems like things have been totally, like things are known quantities. And sometimes to break through that noise or to get an editor's attention or a reader's attention, you gotta just push it on its head and be like, you know, there's a story in the Himalayas where the glaciers are melting and people are building man-made glaciers as a way to mitigate a low-tech solution to a climate
00:26:51
Speaker
Okay, well how does that work? NASA uses a whale called a narwhal to measure glacial depth, to measure how much ice is melting in arctic. These are the kind of stuff I've written about that are just ultimately interesting and what I like to do is marry a evocative
00:27:12
Speaker
place or maybe an animal species because it kind of is a way to hook someone in. In Congo, this is a place known for mountain gorillas. They're beautiful, they're fascinating, but they are ultimately animals and there's people here, millions, who are really suffering. They get no attention. But I try to use the natural world, the curiosity we have of a place or an animal or a thing,
00:27:38
Speaker
as a way to bring you in and then share a counterintuitive thing happening, a counterintuitive figure where it will challenge what you might think of a place with a Belgian colonial past of a region or a subject that you might think you know everything about Hunter Biden, for instance.
00:28:00
Speaker
interviewed him for the New York Times after in the Russia probe. My goal was, you know, we've heard a lot of things about this guy. What's really making him tick? Why did he use drugs and alcohol? You know, what is his plan? What is he going to do if your father becomes president? And the same interest and curiosity or approach I bring to Congo or to the Arctic or to wherever
00:28:29
Speaker
to reveal themselves and to show me you're something that you might not have expected. And ultimately, whether or not that person you support them or not, I want to humanize them and explain their motivations for why they live like they do.
00:28:47
Speaker
And regarding a conversation you have with Hunter Biden, when you did, you know, the heat is obviously pretty hot around him and that family. And so how did you, you know, navigate the access you were able to get and then, you know, have that sit-down conversation? You know, Brandon, truth be told, the story beyond the story is more interesting as it usually is. I am somewhat reticent to
00:29:19
Speaker
The way that I approached it was similar, you know, in terms of what have we not seen about this guy? What is a way in? And this was end of 2019. All the Ukraine and Russia stuff with John Cena every day and on Fox. I had heard that he was in Los Angeles where I live. I had heard that he was pursuing an art career.
00:29:47
Speaker
And I have a good relationship with the culture desk of the New York Times. And I thought, okay, if I can get him to talk about his art, that's the way to really do a profile and share with the three years of who this guy is. And, you know, I called his lawyer, spoke to his lawyer on the phone.
00:30:16
Speaker
explain to what it was and my intentions. And shortly thereafter, next thing you know, I'm gonna fall with him. And then a couple of days later, I'm meeting him in person. And then I'm in his house, you know, you try to build a, I try to be really, and I said a minute ago, joking, I'm not putting all my cards on the table. When I'm with a, if I'm sitting down with you and you're gonna open up to me, I do put my cards on the table. It doesn't mean I'm saying to you, I'm gonna cover it this way. No, I say to you, here's what I'm interested in. We have conversations about these things.
00:30:46
Speaker
There's no rules in terms of off-limit topics. There's something you don't want to talk about. That's your choice as an adult. But there is no deals. There is no, here's the way it's going to be. Here's where we're running it. I have total independence. And that's a difficult line to, that's a difficult balancing act. You try your best.
00:31:10
Speaker
to not alienate somebody, but also to maintain your ability to not feel obligated to have to cover something a certain way or give your source. I mean, you never, there's a lot of basics and unfortunately some folks adhere to them and some others don't, but you try to do right by that person and that means giving the opportunity to share and explain yourself. That doesn't mean I believe everything at face value. I might push back. I'm certainly going to check and verify.
00:31:40
Speaker
but unless someone is really duplicitous with you and lies to you, someone lies to you, you know, you can see in coverage in certain places how reporters go after people because they feel maybe, maybe they have it personally. I try not to make it personal, it shouldn't be personal. Again, I just try to be upfront with somebody, no matter what, this person's, people often
00:32:06
Speaker
take Umbridge to a quill or something or other like that. And that's normal. But you just try to not make mistakes. You try to, that's what makes journalism so goddamn hard. And nonfiction in general is the checking and the verification. And, you know, there was a lot of brouhaha from him and his camp, but ultimately it was a lot of hot air. We were very fair with him.
00:32:35
Speaker
And I think we're incredibly amenable to him, even with numerous challenges during the way. But the final story, I mean, stands on its own. There was no corrections. There was no nothing. We did a great job under incredibly difficult circumstances. And the story came out a week before his father won the presidential, I think it was South Carolina, with Claiborne. And then a week later, we were in lockdown. So the timing is also just, wow,
00:33:05
Speaker
of how it all came down. But this goes back to the kinds of access and experiences you have as a reporter. And by no means is this unique to me. This is, I've heard some of these from your guests talk about this. It's always going to be a no if you don't try it. It doesn't mean you're going to get it.
00:33:30
Speaker
But it's just like the same thing with basketball analogy. You, you, you've got to take shots in order to see if you're going to rate them. So, you know, I mean, can I get to Congo? I don't know if I can actually until let me come. I don't know if we'll get the visa, but let's, let's try and let's see what happens and to be ambitious. It's kind of almost like a dirty word, but I think it's more like stakes are high. It's competitive. And we're all have.
00:34:00
Speaker
Insecurities and we all have a lot of doubt and that's okay. That's normal. But try anyway and do your homework and be real with people. And I think that they're going to be real back and respect that.
00:34:15
Speaker
Have you found, given that something you said earlier about that there is competition, there's also trying to dispel myths that people might have of places?
00:34:31
Speaker
trying to go to a place to just understand it better. Do you find that there is almost this hedonic treadmill aspect of it that you have to keep pushing yourself into more extreme circumstances and ultimately that can, that could threaten your life? Is that something you wrestle with at all? 100%. I don't like when people pretend like threats and the dangers, you know, aren't real. I don't like when people sort of play them down or
00:35:01
Speaker
Don't talk about a toll on maybe your family or your loved ones because they worry. What might be comfortable for me or you? I might not be comfortable with certain things you want to do and vice versa. It can be hard sometimes in a relationship to expect your significant other to be comfortable. And the bar does keep getting higher. I want to go back to Congo. I have other things I'd like to write about there. Is that a good idea? Probably not.
00:35:29
Speaker
It is a risk. I mean, I want to go, a lot of the things I'm interested in, there is a level of danger. And I hate when people say, well, I can go outside of my house and be hit by a car. I mean, yeah, that's true. But that's not, that's a silly analogy because there's certain behavior that is more risky than others. And I try as much as I can to mitigate those risks.
00:35:59
Speaker
But ultimately, we're playing roulette in a sense. And it could be, you know, during COVID, the reporting I did was looking back, very dangerous. You know, they're going to protests and trying to get protesters or police or whoever to comment about what's going on.
00:36:28
Speaker
Identify yourself as a journalist, identify yourself as a journalist for a prominent place that some people respect and some people think is the devil, is dangerous, doing so before getting the vaccine. There is a lot of risk in this and if you don't take it seriously, you can get hurt. I've seen a lot of people get hurt and it makes me feel stupid.
00:36:58
Speaker
for these things or else it's really irresponsible.
00:37:03
Speaker
I heard a while ago, I forget where, but Henry Rollins, the Henry Rollins band, Black Flag, he's a renowned traveler and a spoken word performer these days. And he loves putting himself and going to places that a lot of Americans are afraid to go to and countries that have been, I'll just call them beige countries, you know, that we see in the media. It's just like
Security and Safety in Conflict Zones
00:37:29
Speaker
beige, sand and rubble.
00:37:30
Speaker
And he goes there and he really immerses himself and dispels the myths that these places are, you know, I don't know, just a play languishing in poverty and third world hellscapes. He even said the place that he felt most unsafe was actually the United States.
00:37:51
Speaker
It's the way he was attacked and nearly killed, and he had friends killed. I wonder for you, having been abroad, if maybe the United States is the most dangerous place you've ever been. Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. Look, I mean, I think the United States has real issues. We have real separation between our people here, both ideologically and otherwise, and that is dangerous.
00:38:21
Speaker
So you turn on the tap, whether in almost every city, no matter how poor it is, or in a Flint or Michigan, things like that. We have access to basic services that these places we're talking about do not. So yeah, I mean, I know I've heard this too. I have people who friends who say, I've been to this place and
00:38:49
Speaker
you know, we were fine, but I feel uncomfortable in San Diego. Well, you know, I don't, I don't really believe you tell me the truth. You know, it's, it's not that there, there's an expression called, um, I think it was, it was a war tourism or is it disaster tourism? I'm not familiar with this of people, you know, which, which there is a fine line here. And again,
00:39:16
Speaker
I feel as I'm going to someplace, I'm going someplace professionally and writing about it. And even then there, you know, there's sometimes, you know, the risk is real. Sometimes I feel, you know, I can understand why someone would say, you shouldn't be there, you shouldn't do this. When I was doing this training in Washington DC, a lot of people were getting ready to go to the UK. And they were very nice people.
00:39:42
Speaker
some of them more experienced than others, some of them really scared and some of them not scared. And, um, I don't want to over generalize because I'm going to, but I know I, but I practiced that because, you know, not everybody should be going to certain places. That is how things, unfortunately things will, things happen.
00:40:07
Speaker
And we never know how we're going to react until we're put in that position. I mean, we can all talk the talk or train or whatever. Maybe when something happens and you just don't know what you're going to do. And that's the X factor of this kind of work. And to a degree, you do get kind of addicted. To a degree, it is hard to maybe do more pedestrian normal things
00:40:37
Speaker
Maybe you try your best to be aware of that, but then again, at least I approach it in a way that it's not like just walking around by yourself on the street or hiring three guys with guns. Going to Congo was a very unique experience for me. I've been to other places that have conflict areas.
00:41:05
Speaker
in Ladakh, in northern India, which is on the border of Pakistan and China, you know, in Mexico, other places that are certainly have a narrative. But again, just, you know, you know, maybe go back to Henry Rollins for a second. There's parts of Los Angeles that are dangerous that I wouldn't go to. You know, people from overseas might say, Oh, my God, Americans with their gun violence, you're crazy.
00:41:31
Speaker
And that's true, but if a place is, you know, if there's a neighborhood with a bad block, you don't go to that one. You avoid it. When you're in a region where it has a conflict, I'm not going to it. I'm doing my best to not jump into the fire. You know, sometimes you can see things or observe
00:42:00
Speaker
There's ways to do the reporting sometimes that you don't want to get hurt and you don't want to unnecessarily risk if you can. And a lot of times I feel that reporters want to be in front of the storm or the, sometimes literally you see sometimes these, a hurricane, do you really need to be halfway under water? It's not safe. And that's the expectation as a viewer. We want to see that. We're glued to that. We kind of want to see something go wrong because we've seen,
00:42:33
Speaker
own conversation about voyeurism and media and us as watchers. It's fascinating, but it's also so indicative of our time and how we live. Tying into your Congo piece, there are these Bitcoin mines that are very central to it. And help me understand what Bitcoin is and how you mine it. That to me is still very confusing. Yeah. So I've done a couple
00:43:02
Speaker
podcast recently with people in the Bitcoin world, and we just talked about Bitcoin and none of the other stuff that we're talking about now, so it's on its head, which is funny. Bitcoin is a digital currency that you use heavy computer power to perform algorithms, math problems, to solve for, and you're rewarded with a piece of this digital currency.
00:43:30
Speaker
It has no real value as opposed to what we described to it. That in and of itself is a whole other world of crypto, currency, blockchain. Many people are, the ones who are into it are very into it. It's going to change the world. We'll leave that aside for a second. Bitcoin itself has been criticized for being very heavy on fossil fuels to generate that power. The thing in Congo is there is no power grid in this area.
00:44:01
Speaker
there are hydroelectric power plants that the park has built to try to seed businesses and development infrastructure. In this case, these power plants, or at least one power plant, is powering the Bitcoin operation, meaning no fossil fuels, no carbon footprint, and a green
00:44:26
Speaker
Bitcoin operation. So basically creating power naturally without hurting the environment, funneling that power to these computers, who then recruit a currency and money that is then used to power the park in terms of pay bills in a period when they have very limited income from the pandemic, from
00:44:51
Speaker
the militia warfare from other things like that over the last few years. So that's the basic setup in a lot of the Bitcoin proponents are saying, which in this case is true. They say, aha, Bitcoin for good. This is a green project. This is the power of Bitcoin. And that may well be true. However, Bitcoin could crash tomorrow and it costs money to put this project together.
00:45:18
Speaker
The adherents of the park itself are not fanatics. They see this as a happy accident in some ways that it just so happens in a fortuitous way that they got lucky and that this has worked. That doesn't mean that they're advocating for the complete blockchain revolution where everything is
00:45:44
Speaker
in the cloud or anything is decentralization, whatever that really means. This is a very pragmatic approach to get money to fund the park in a period when they have very little funding. So that's the MIT Tech Review piece follows this story about how the park did this.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, it still baffles me that there are these normal concrete, salt mining, coal mining, like that I get. You go into the ground, it's very invasive, you take it out of the earth, extractive industry, blah, blah, blah. I understand that. But the building of these mega computers doing statistical work to then find this thing that is altogether made up,
00:46:32
Speaker
That's still, to me, I can't get my head around it. Me neither. This goes back to when you asked about how did this all come about. I didn't know this part of the story until I got there. This is not something they were broadcasting. I was interested in the hydroelectric, the renewable energy side. Some of those challenges in and of itself are fascinating. When I got there,
00:46:57
Speaker
hey, we have something to show you. We fly in this plane onto this mountain, which is so steep and land. And there's this imposing cathedral-like power plant, which is run by hydropower and connected to these trailers that have all the computers in them on the middle of the side of this jungly mountain with bush dogs and bugs flying past you and jungle crads on the ground that you try to avoid.
00:47:27
Speaker
Rangers with AK-47s kind of patrolling. And this is what goes back to, whoa, what is going on here? It was a very cinematic quality, very visceral.
00:47:37
Speaker
very counterintuitive because it's high tech in a place without paved roads. They built these roads, they built these dirt roads with hand tools. They modified this mountain with pickaxes. I mean, this is hard work. Even these militia guys who are, your head will peel back when you hear some of these stories. These guys live in the jungle. These guys live in incredibly hard conditions. You almost have, it's hard not to have respect
00:48:07
Speaker
for the population even under these conditions. So yeah, this Bitcoin mine of itself, it could be another model for the so-called developing world, places without power, places without, or obviously you need a river for hydro, but central
00:48:28
Speaker
or there are Bitcoin operations in Kenya and in some other places. The question will be then, will this money go to improve local communities' lives? That's to be determined. Will this help the instability? Again, we don't know. And it's easy to paint with a broad brush.
00:48:53
Speaker
and say this is a good or this is bad, but the reality is it's very hard to determine the implications of this. Some of the parts projects, they allow for public lighting. Maybe there's not thousands of people who have lighting in their house, but if you have
00:49:16
Speaker
So other projects provide clean water. Those are good things. Some of the criticism has been that some of the local communities do not get access to all these resources or they don't always get asked for their input. And those are other questions that are valid questions.
00:49:35
Speaker
that I don't have the answers for. And some of them are hard to answer, who the stakeholders are, how do you give voice to everyone. It's incredibly hard. But again, my objective as a writer is not only to try to create a narrative that's interesting, but as a reporter, you're having a responsibility, I think, to tell a story that others aren't and to try to
00:50:02
Speaker
to give a little bit of spotlight to some of these voiceless people. And given
Practical Challenges in Remote Reporting
00:50:06
Speaker
the nerves that you were talking about earlier, I wonder, how do you sleep when you're abroad? Or how well do you sleep, I should say? That's a good question. On this one, I was so, to be honest with you, I was really wired by the end of the night. I was really wired. So I tried to do a lot of training and exercise to be in good shape.
00:50:31
Speaker
so that you're kind of like your go. I try to build rest days before I start. Maybe I go somewhere in an hotel for myself for two days or something. I'm trying to fight the jet lag. I try to eat really well. I try to exercise because there are days, and this is not just this trip. This is in general. You start at 7 a.m. and you're up working till 9, 10 until you're in the room.
00:51:04
Speaker
I'll talk to dozens of people. Not everyone makes it in the story. And this helps you get a sense of an overall theme, you know? It's not because two people said this and one person said this. It's not really like that. It's like you kind of start hearing narratives that emerge. You start hearing stories and you understand kind of the lay of the land. But it can be hard, you know? Sometimes you kind of unfume.
00:51:31
Speaker
Given that, wherever you may go, it's not like there's a Walmart down the road where you can get batteries or fill in the blank. For you, let's say, when you're on this Congo trip, what was in your pack that you had on you all the time so your notebooks, your records, what are some of the fundamental things that are always in your satchel? You're not even going to believe me. The photo I sent you,
00:52:01
Speaker
I have a sandwich in my pocket. I'm really into gear and stuff like that, but I make sure I have food and water, and I also have a mask in my pocket. In this case, COVID doesn't exist in Congo. Neither does homosexuality or several other things. And I say that, obviously, coming here. But I have a mask because there's so much dust in the road.
00:52:30
Speaker
You know, I have, um, I brought an EpiPen. I brought things, uh, I brought batteries. I brought soccer balls and I gave to the Rangers. I, you know, it's like one thing, it's one thing to, when you just give money, you know, you try, you obviously, I give tips to people who help me. Um, cause that's sometimes people work for that, but I try to, you know, I asked in advance, what can I bring? They told me certain petovismal medicine.
00:53:00
Speaker
that they can't get the local pharmacy. I brought nuts. I brought things that people could use that ultimately also helped me as a reporter because I'm not just expecting to take when I come. I want to provide some value. I'm trying to help. I ask often,
Biases, Perceptions, and Introspection in Journalism
00:53:19
Speaker
what is the story people get wrong? What is the story foreigners come and tell that drives you nuts? And a lot of them have told me that they see things through Western eyes.
00:53:32
Speaker
you know, there's another conversation of who gets to tell what stories and that's very, that's a whole other, like I had a whole episode about that. But, you know, I try to listen is what I can do. I really try to listen to those kinds of concerns and issues. And then again, tell the stories that are not being told and you'll never please everyone. You know, there's always going to be, for instance, Hunter Biden, I had people saying to me,
00:54:02
Speaker
Great job. He's so sweet. He's amazing. He's been through so much, kind of did a great job. Other people say to me, you are a piece of shit, Adam. You're a mouthpiece for this. Like people go to my Amazon page where my book is, it's going to play in about a hundred bucks. Or send me like nasty stuff. And I thought, to be honest with you, we could have been harder on him. So to think that you can't please anybody sometimes. But that said,
00:54:27
Speaker
You try, I try, I'm gonna stop saying you. I try to reflect as accurately as I can what I'm really seeing and the stories people share with me.
00:54:38
Speaker
I want to get a sense of your relationship to mortality, given that you feel the nerves, you know you're going to places that you've even said are scary. And that can reframe life and your own life in particular in a completely different way. So I wonder, just to reiterate the question, what your relationship is to your own mortality.
00:55:03
Speaker
I don't really know how to answer that to tell you the truth because it's going to sound, I don't know. During the pandemic, the last few years, I feel like I've aged a lot. I've matured a lot. In many ways, it's never been more on my mind in terms of time and of being with loved ones and what's important.
00:55:27
Speaker
So it's a very, it's a very loaded question. Right. I'm going to jump in here just for a second. Loaded question. Okay.
00:55:36
Speaker
I really feel the need to maybe explain this if only for myself. I've always been confused by what a loaded question is, but I know by and large that it's typically something you should avoid. So I googled around for a satisfactory explanation, and this is what I found. Many loaded questions are yes, no, that have an assumption built into it that when the person answers the question, they can't do so without appearing guilty.
00:56:03
Speaker
All that said, did I ask Adam a loaded question or merely a question that is heavy? The latter being my intention.
00:56:12
Speaker
Maybe if he says he doesn't consider his own mortality, then he's coming off his cavalier or flippant. And if he says, yes, he's doing so or doing this work, knowing full well the risk he's putting himself and by extension loved ones in. So while it isn't a yes, no question, I guess it is loaded. And I guess that's why Adam is way smarter than I am. Maybe I should have cut this from the conversation altogether.
00:56:34
Speaker
And now I have to rethink how I interview people because I'm guessing I have inadvertently asked a lot of loaded questions over the years. Trying to get a better understanding of a person's why, I guess, is why I'm into that. I don't know. For me, I'm such a chicken shit that going down to the Fred Meyer fills me with anxiety. Adam goes to places where he needs protection from dudes with AK-47s. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I've asked loaded questions in the past and I'm gonna do far better
00:57:05
Speaker
job of making sure I don't do it in the future. Is that cool? Okay, let's finish this up. Let's wrap this up. There's one thing I want to tell you this about the Congo, for instance, in terms of the nerve side and how I kind of dealt with things, the reporting and sometimes when you're really engaged in your way of doing something, whether I'm like in the mountains or whatever, you're so distracted and you're still in the moment that
00:57:33
Speaker
That's what is important. And I was in Little If, finding tiny airplanes over these, flew over some rebel camps. And there was bullet holes in the wing of one of the planes. It's like if you really think about some of these things,
00:58:03
Speaker
They're terrifying. Now, I'm going to tell you something that got out of this truth. I didn't feel nervous on this trip. It took me to go, when I crossed the border, back to Rwanda, and I realized some of the things of my experience, I had high difficulty processing. Was I really in danger? Am I lying to myself? Am I stupid? Is there something wrong with me that I wasn't nervous?
00:58:32
Speaker
You know, that was the kind of stuff that I was kind of dealing with because the timing when I arrived, I arrived on March 23rd, March 23rd, March 23 is the name of the big militia group and 23. And while I was there, they were getting really active. Some of the places I was in in Chiro is a town. That place has been totally overrun by militia.
00:58:55
Speaker
You know, the hydropower plant I saw a close fighter there taking over. They bombed it. There was a whole incident, you know. And during my trip, on the last morning, I could hear showing and it's quite jarring. It's quite like you almost, you're thinking to yourself, what am I hearing? You know, and you're hearing
00:59:19
Speaker
you're hearing some kind of artillery fire and hitting something. And apparently the army was firing on 23. So very tense vibe. And that was the day I was leaving. And I'm with the park and it feels kind of like a movie. It's sort of, it's hard to describe without seeming like you're showing off. But you put, I guess when I talked to my parents about this,
00:59:48
Speaker
Other people close to me, they said, wow, you put a lot of trust into these people you're with. And you kind of do. You do. If you're flying a plane with somebody, if you're flying to San Francisco in a Southwest jet, you're putting trust in the pilot that they know how to do their job. You're putting trust in the engineers and the mechanics. You're not really thinking. That's incredibly dangerous in a lot of ways. We're flying off the ground.
01:00:15
Speaker
But we're not thinking about it that way. We're probably thinking about, I gotta go to this meeting, or hey, I'm going to this, whatever, I see my friend. And there's so many things we kind of place out of our mind that we just think is regular business. And the craziest part of this region is that all this shit that we're talking about, militias, weapons, shelling, that's regular for them.
01:00:40
Speaker
So things to me that were thinking, okay, is this weird? No, it's happening on the mountain. It's the army fires them, they fire back to whatever kind of like, you know, people don't trip about certain things that everybody else would.
01:01:00
Speaker
Okay, the morning I'm leaving, you can hear the showing, I do an interview with Emmanuel, and you can hear in the background, and he says, look, I have to go right now because I have to talk to the general, I have to talk to this person. Because they have to make plans, you know, you act business as usual, but they make a plan of, if this happens, here's how we have to evacuate. We're gonna bring all the planes from here to another base. And we're gonna have
Congo's Cultural and Environmental Richness
01:01:21
Speaker
to take care of these people. And there's a whole kind of, it's a chess in a way that they have, it is hard to process,
01:01:30
Speaker
The next day, I saw some, you know, I went over the border to Rwanda. I could hear the shine, because I was on the other side of the mountain. I could still hear the showing the next day. And I was looking, searching online. You know, there's no stories about it. One of the friends I made there sent me a video of the airfield that I had taken off from less than 24 hours earlier, missiles flying above it. And you could see them just streaking over. And your heart stops, and you think, oh my God, I was just there.
01:02:01
Speaker
And that location and the exact place that I was sleeping were totally evacuated. Less than 24 hours after I left. So I couldn't help thinking to myself.
01:02:13
Speaker
What does that even mean in terms of the timing? Does that mean I'm so lucky? Am I stupid for going? Am I tempting fate? It's very hard to put into words and explain it. And I kind of sought out others who had been in similar situations afterward to try to make sense of it for myself. I don't know if that fully answers your question, but I was just kind of
01:02:41
Speaker
Kind of hard to just, it was so, it was like traveling for the first time. It was just such a, and I'm talking about these dramatic things visually. This is the second largest rainforest in the world, the Congo basin. There is almost more biodiversity here in terms of different species than anywhere. There was incredibly warm, interesting people with a real zest for life.
01:03:10
Speaker
in spite of these challenges, in spite of the fatalism, in many ways probably because of it, and a desire for them, for a lot of people to be respected and be taken seriously and to be given a chance to represent themselves beyond a narrative of the poor suffering African. Because this is a continent that's incredibly young, it's tech savvy, that is going to be a much larger player
01:03:39
Speaker
in terms of the interconnectedness of our world, the way that China in the last 10, 15 years, the middle class there has just traveled and is building businesses. And Africa is so diverse and so much more than this one note of the suffering person must give money to help this. That does exist. But boy, the theory is just,
01:04:09
Speaker
so much more there that is just so fascinating and so unknown to the average American. Yeah, and just one last thing, Adam, I always like digging in for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. It's always kind of a fun way to bring this airliner down for a landing. So I'd extend that to you. What might you recommend to the listeners out there? If they're interested in reading more about Congo, about the geopolitical
01:04:38
Speaker
world earth landscape there, I recommend King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. It's non-fiction, but it's a fantastic look at basically the Belgian colonial past and King Leopold who ruled this place as a private fiefdom in the late 1800s. That's fantastic, but there are some fiction writers from Africa
01:05:04
Speaker
that I wanna mention to you, and I'm looking at my shelf. There's a couple that are, talk about shattering stereotypes that we might think of, again, the suffering, I mean, you know, what was me? No, I mean, this is, I'm gonna name a couple names. There is a guy from Zanzibar named Abdul Razak Gurna. He just won the Nobel Prize. There's a book of his called Paradise that is,
01:05:34
Speaker
Absolutely fabulous. It's it's so These days are like stylists. He's fantastic. He's I think he's over 70 just won the Nobel Prize for fiction and He is All of his books are now being published in English Another one that's that's worth reading is a Kenyan named oe
01:06:00
Speaker
N-G-U-G-I, and his last name is Tiongo. And he's a guy that we probably had oh, more of a debt than we realized because he was one of the first people talking about decolonizing language. And some of his rhetoric there, most of the people who talk about this really heavy topic don't really know where it came from.
01:06:24
Speaker
he's a Kenyan and he writes again about, he wrote in English first after independence and then started writing in the Kikuyu which is one of the languages of Kenya and talked about, you know, can I be an African writer writing in the language
01:06:43
Speaker
of a European,
Book Recommendations and Podcast Conclusion
01:06:45
Speaker
which is, you know, at the time we first said that he went to jail and he was in jail, he wrote in his own language. I think he went full circle and said, well, if I'm African,
01:06:58
Speaker
I'm an African writer. You know, I say this because, you know, English is my first language, but it's not my father's or my mother's. Does that make me less of a American writer, a Jewish writer, if you want to put that, a whatever writer? You know, this is like heavy stuff, but fascinating. And a one or two more that I'll mention from Congo, there is a guy named Inkoli Jean, Inkoli Jean Beaufais,
01:07:27
Speaker
He has a book called Mathematica Congolay that's in French, but he has another one called Congo Inc. And it talks about the, basically it's really about making fun of the bureaucracy of corruption. This is like, you know, literature that is so cutting edge and so modern. And I think, again, one of the benefits of reading is seeing that experience of someone else, how they live.
01:07:56
Speaker
And a lot of this is so goddamn relatable, which makes it just an entertainment medium that is not really old-fashioned or it shouldn't be, and it brings us closer together.
01:08:11
Speaker
Fantastic. That's wonderful, Adam. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for the work and those great recommendations that kind of bust us out of a lot of the well-worn grooves that we tend to read in. I think those will be really valuable. I look forward to linking up to those. Thanks for everything. Thanks for all you do. I'd like to think those might be the first of many conversations we'll have. Thanks for coming on the podcast here and for shining a light on your work. Thank you, Brandon. Thank you for having me.
01:08:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening CNFers and thanks to Adam. If you like this conversation as much as I did, and I did, consider sharing it and tagging me and the show at CNFpod on Twitter or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram. Consider heading to patreon.com slash CNFpod to throw a few bucks into the tip jar. Show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. And as you know, you can always
01:09:06
Speaker
rage against the algorithm with my up to 11 monthly newsletter by heading to bring them air.com Hey for show notes to this in like a billion other episodes So getting resistance from people about pre CP Fontaine subject of the biography I'm writing
01:09:27
Speaker
Many people are saying there's just nothing new to add that hasn't already been said before. You know, what's been said already in books and articles is the record. And I really disagree based on everything that I've read and some of the people have already spoken to, the things I haven't heard or seen before.
01:09:45
Speaker
I've read just about everything and I'm finding new things from people I talk to. I think some people really discount their experiences. Fact is, if all a person remembers is maybe what a fan was yelling beside him as he was watching a race, that matters. It really does.
01:10:04
Speaker
To use a cooking metaphor, that's building layers of flavor, right? That's gumbo, not something, not the micromagic hamburgers of my youth. We're talking, let this thing simmer, and that extra detail, that just makes the scene really pop.
01:10:23
Speaker
and a lot of people are pretty skeptical too you know i've been equated with other hit and run helicopter reporters and i'm just this this vulture you know accused of having biases and an unwillingness to look beyond my preconceived notions i think you guys know me well enough that curiosity is my engine and i oftentimes
01:10:45
Speaker
Especially when I'm reporting, I don't really talk much at all. You know, I'm more there just employing people to keep on talking. I listen, I go there with an open mind and an open notebook. Anyway, this shit ain't easy. I knew that was gonna be the case. I've never reported on a famous person before. And naturally the people who might have shared experiences with reporters in the past, they might have been burned and thus I'm just lumped in with them.
01:11:14
Speaker
There's a lot of lobbying for why you're different than anybody else, which I'm sure they've heard before. I'm sure every other reporter that burned them was just like, well, I'm different. It's a bigger part of this mess than I anticipated. I anticipated some of it, for sure. But I'm just running into a lot of skepticism, resentment, and even resistance.
01:11:38
Speaker
So anyway, that's par for the course I guess and you just gotta keep on going.
01:11:46
Speaker
In the last newsletter, I shared this article from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, about the paperclip trick. You know, you have two cups or bins side by side and you put, say, 50 paperclips in one at the start of your day. The example Clear uses is a salesman who made cold calls or something and every time he made a call, he moved the clip from one cup to the empty cup. The goal by the end of the day was to transfer all the paperclips from the one cup to the next.
01:12:16
Speaker
And at the end of the day, you've made a bunch of calls. You see the evidence of it. I'm not at the heavy phone call stage yet, but I'm in the scouring the newspaper business right now.
01:12:31
Speaker
And so for each new article, I find I move one paperclip over to the cup. By the end of the day, there's about 40 to 50 new ones. And it's very overwhelming. There's just so much. There's a glut of stories and there are some original ones, a lot of repetitive ones. But you got to go through it because sometimes even the repetitive ones, they'll have that one extra little nugget.
01:12:54
Speaker
And you're like, damn it, I've been combing through here, and this one might have the temperature on the track, or others didn't have that. And some might also have the attendance in one, and the others don't. And so all of a sudden, that's the flavor building, flavor layering. But in any case, with this paperclip thing, you realize that at the end of the week, you've got 200 to 250 per week, and you're looking at 1,000 a month,
01:13:22
Speaker
And by, I would say, one to two months, you're probably starting to fully drain the well. There's only so much out there. It takes a while to log the articles. I put them in Dropbox, get the link, put that in the spreadsheet for future fact checkers.
01:13:41
Speaker
Make these articles easily searchable by saying the date, the headline, outlet, byline, the page is on, and in the little notes section if there's any good quote, type in that quote.
01:13:56
Speaker
You know, if Pree actually talked, I color it green. If someone talked about him, I color it yellow. And so that way, at a glance, I'm seeing, okay, there's his voice in an article, and then another one's like, okay, that's someone talking about him, and you know, it's okay. At a glance, I can see that. And then some just have seen, some just have another cast of characters that are worth logging and trying to track them down if they're still alive to talk about him.
01:14:26
Speaker
So as you can imagine, that takes a lot of time. So sometimes even getting to 50 articles by the end of the day is actually it's about it's about the upper limit of what I can do. But the idea being the more effort you put into cataloging things early, the easier it will be when it comes time to write and fact check.
01:14:44
Speaker
And that's been the grind. It's been mildly demoralizing on some fronts. But I had to expect this right. I have to learn not to take to heart that people view me as this vulture there to reinforce the worldview I'm bringing to this book when in fact I'm trying to dispel the worldview that most people have.
01:15:04
Speaker
trying to sandblast the coat of paint off of what we see here and reveal something new. For some people, you're the enemy of the people, right? Because you have a notebook, pencil, recorder, and that's a struggle. And it's hard not to take it personally because that's not who I am. I know that. I think you guys know that. Some other people I've worked with know that. But everyone else is giving you that side eye.
01:15:34
Speaker
You just keep on plugging. You're never gonna win everybody over, but hope is that you can win enough of them over. So that's it, okay? Stay wild, CNFers. If you can't do interviews, see ya.
01:16:00
Speaker
you