Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 363: Eric Pape
1.2k Plays2 years ago
Eric Pape (@ericpape) is a freelance journalist and journalism instructor. In this conversation, Eric talks about his piece for The Atavist Magazine. We also hear from editor-in-chief of The Atavist Seyward Darby.
Social: @CNFPod
Substack: rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Promotions
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and efforts, it's that Atavistian time of the month. There are some pseudo-spoilers in this conversation, so be forewarned that if you listen to this before you read the story, you will be spoiled. Is that how it is? I don't know. Head to magazine.atavist.com to subscribe and read the treasure trove of narrative journalism put forth by Savor Darby and Jonah Ogles.
00:00:27
Speaker
Also, shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. It's not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product.
Conspiracy Theories and Tragic Events
00:00:37
Speaker
If you head to athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, you get a nice little discount on your first order. Try the Athletic Light or Free Wave, my personal favorite right now. It's like you're in a house and you open a door and you're like, oh my God, look at this room. What is this? It's an indoor pool. I have no idea.
00:00:57
Speaker
I feel great doing this story because not for professional reasons, for human reasons.
00:01:19
Speaker
Eric Pape, at Eric Pape on Twitter, is here to talk about his out of his peace that delves into conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers and self-help gurus. It's man.
00:01:35
Speaker
and a man's mental descent that erupts into tragedy and dismay. I'm always impressed and downright intimidated by how people like Eric Pape stick the landing on these types of stories. I can't read these things without thinking how I'd fuck them up if I had the same assignment. Because in the end, this show is all about me seeing efforts.
Newsletter Transition to Substack
00:01:56
Speaker
Well, no it isn't. Hey, my Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter
00:02:00
Speaker
will now be delivered by Substack. I'm moving from MailChimp to Substack as MailChimp. They went rogue. They went rogue and I'm unhappy. Rage against the algorithm.substack.com. Keep an eye out for that and subscribe if you haven't already. It's a micro essay by me, a little collage I do.
00:02:20
Speaker
and a list of 11 recommendations, including books, articles, products, I don't know, that should enrich your life and help you rage against the algorithm. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. We also have a few new patrons over at Patreon.
Patreon Support Appreciation
00:02:37
Speaker
You can go to patreon.com slash cnfpod, and I want to give them a shout out. So thanks to Kay Brady Costigan, Jeremy Norton, Charlie Hunt, and Bonnie Heilman.
00:02:47
Speaker
two from March, two from February. Thank you everyone for the support and for several of you that continue to support the show. Long time patrons with your time and of course a few bucks every single month. Helps with the operations. Keeps the one little light bulb in the office on and that's all we can ask for.
00:03:07
Speaker
All right, stay tuned to the end of the show for my parting
Editing Challenges and Story Focus
00:03:11
Speaker
shot. But first, we're going to hear from Sayward Darby, the editor-in-chief of the Adivus. And also, if you didn't know, she's the author of Sisters in Hate. So let's get on with this. Let's talk to Sayward as we tease out Arab Pape's piece. All right?
00:03:37
Speaker
So for you as an editor, when you start seeing a lot of those kind of threads, what's the challenge for you to corral them so everything still moves forward? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think that this is a devastating story on kind of every possible level. And when Eric brought it to me, one of the things I was really struck by is how so many
00:04:01
Speaker
forces and currents that are shaping our present reality just, you know, as a civilization, as a culture came to bear on this one narrative about what happened to this little boy and ultimately, you know, his dad too. And so it feels like one of these stories that is on the one hand very intimate, but on the other hand speaks to just a far greater sort of crisis in which we find ourselves.
00:04:28
Speaker
And there were a lot of threads, rabbit holes to go down, which I know Eric, he's been reporting this for quite a while. And I know he's gone down quite a few rabbit holes. And one of the things we talked about and worked on
00:04:44
Speaker
was in figuring out how to bring some of these weirder, for lack of a better word, threads together, was remembering that there's always another story to tell. So you could almost take each of these rabbit holes, each of these unusual aspects of the story. So a self-help group that some people call a cult, or the anti-vax advocacy space. And you could report
00:05:11
Speaker
just that and write a story about it. And so one of the things Eric and I talked about was he inevitably was going to gather more information about everything in the story than was going to need to be on the page as it pertained to this particular story. And so, you know, I think there's probably a lot on the cutting room floor. There's probably stuff that never even made it into the piece, but I have to imagine, and maybe Eric.
00:05:34
Speaker
spoke to this in his own conversation with you, I have to imagine that there's going to be fodder for other stories, other reporting. And I think it's really special in a way when a story can do that, right? Where you kind of feel like you are almost reporting many stories at once.
00:05:52
Speaker
Then in the editing process, it's my job as an editor to say, this is a really interesting detail. I do think that including it kind of takes us off the path of the main narrative, but I am emphasizing to you that it is an interesting detail and there might be space for it in another story. So that was really my role in figuring out how to shape these aspects of the story was to say what feels
00:06:19
Speaker
essential or illuminating in a way that really enhances the story and what feels interesting, but not necessarily, you know, something that we feel like keeps this story on the track we want to keep it on. And it's definitely, I know I said this before in interviews, but it's an art, not a science. But there were definitely, particularly with regard to
00:06:43
Speaker
this self-help group Access Consciousness, which comes up in the piece for quite a while. There were many moments where I said to Eric, this is really interesting stuff. You're finding really interesting stuff.
Leslie Hu's Story and Societal Disinformation
00:06:57
Speaker
You could write a whole piece about all of this and just this, but throwing all those details onto the page just because we have them and just because they're interesting doesn't necessarily serve the story about this, about what happened to this little boy.
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah, this was a devastating piece to work on emotionally, but I think too, as an editor, there's always something interesting when you have so many different threads, yes, but also it's almost sort of surprise doors, right? It's like you're in a house and you open a door and you're like, oh my God, look at this room, what is this? It's an indoor pool, I had no idea. And that's kind of what this story felt like, lots of surprises behind doors.
00:07:40
Speaker
At the heart of it is this incredibly traumatic, tragic event that, when I was reading, it totally caught me off guard. Total gut punch. Something I've rarely experienced in even reading activist pieces. Sometimes you can feel what's coming right down the line. And it's no less dramatic or engaging or entertaining in some cases to read. But in this case, I just didn't see that.
00:08:08
Speaker
coming and It just gets to I think Eric's skill to shape the story like that and I imagine you had a hand in just really teasing that out as long as possible until we were finally like hitting the gut with you know the You know the the tragedy at the at the heart of it really
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. And we never want to be gimmicky about surprises in a story. And I think in this case, we were really taking the mom, Leslie Hu, as our guide, right? She was the person through whom we experience her ex-husband's
00:08:53
Speaker
you know, decline into real paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, you know, obsession with sort of anti-vax ideology. We watch her struggle to navigate that, to protect her child amidst that to navigate
00:09:10
Speaker
a family law landscape that is very hesitant to take a parent out of a child's life unless absolutely necessary. And I think that one of the things that is interesting about Leslie, and I think a lot of people in the world are like this, you want to believe in the
00:09:29
Speaker
best version of someone, right? Even when, time and time again, they are proving that that best version is actually far less good, possibly not good at all, you know, maybe the best version of someone is still a pretty crappy version, but still believing that they ultimately will not do the worst possible thing, right? And I think that you see her
00:09:53
Speaker
throughout the story grappling with that, that sort of instinct. And I think she was truly caught off guard. I think that this was just unbelievable to her. I think it still is unbelievable to her what happened. And I think that we wanted readers to have that same experience.
00:10:15
Speaker
Because I think, too, it points to here, we live in this world in which there is a lot of disinformation, a lot of lies, a lot of fear, and a lot of what feels like simmering forces of violence. And yet, we wake up every day, or at least I do, hoping that the world's going to hold it together.
00:10:43
Speaker
for another day. And I think that, you know, Leslie was doing the same thing with regard to her own life. And by the end of things, you know, she was building a new life. She had gotten a divorce and she had a partner and, you know, was building a life that she was so much happier with. And, you know, then this terrible thing happens. Her being caught off guard was just really something caught off guard is putting it way too lightly. I mean, being, you know, shocked by a terrible thing happening.
00:11:12
Speaker
We've really wanted readers to feel that, too, to kind of go on this journey with her and with her son. With such traumatic or tragic events that happen to people, and then there are people like us who are drawn to the narrative guts of stories, even if they are traumatic and might be hard for people to relive. But it's kind of what we do as journalists to tease out and write these kind of stories.
00:11:40
Speaker
in a compelling entertaining way but it's still at the heart of it can feel a little kind of like icky that you might be in some way profiting off of someone else's tragedy and you know as an editor and a reporter yourself when you've encountered this kind of cross-section of wanting to tell that story but also feeling icky about possibly
00:12:00
Speaker
capitalizing on that. How have you learned to navigate that, like pitching yourself that you're not some maybe drive-by reporter and you're looking to tell a rich story that maybe celebrates them in a certain way and doesn't take advantage of them? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I think that at the out of this, and I say this to writers and even to sources sometimes, we really do operate from a principle of
00:12:30
Speaker
Do no harm.
00:12:32
Speaker
And what I mean by that, obviously if you're doing an investigative piece and exposing wrongdoing by certain people and by exposing that, you are in some way upending their livelihood or whatever it may be. That's not the type of harm I'm talking about, right? That's justice. Even if the person for whom justice is being served disagrees.
00:13:02
Speaker
And when I say do no harm, I mean when you're dealing with sources of stories who are being open with you, when you're dealing with subject matter that can be painful,
00:13:15
Speaker
for sources, even potentially for readers, how do you approach that with this mindset of, I am here to tell the most accurate, fairest, most compelling story I can, but compelling never trumps
00:13:33
Speaker
never trumps a person's well-being if that person is, you know, not someone who you are trying to hold accountable in some way. And so, you know, just because you have a really juicy, for lack of a better word, detail, doesn't mean you have to include it in the story if it's going to be, you know, harmful in some way, upsetting in some way, you know, to a...
00:14:00
Speaker
uh a source and I think that uh you know in this case I was not you know part of the conversation when Eric and Leslie first started communicating because he had already interviewed her extensively when when he reached out and pitched this story but I think that they had built a rapport he had really
00:14:18
Speaker
gotten her to trust him, trust that he was going to do right by this story. She is also very much, and I think this will come through in the piece, she is very much on a mission to have this story told because she thinks it's important. And she thinks there are a variety of actors and institutions that should be held accountable for everything that happened.
00:14:42
Speaker
And I think that that, you know, is an important energy that she brought to the reporting process because she really wants the story out there. That being said, by way of example, like recently, Eric, in a later in the process interview, somebody said something that's third hand information, you know, ultimately we
00:15:01
Speaker
I don't think included it in the story, but it was the kind of thing where when he shared it with me, we both immediately said we would never put this in the story without talking to Leslie about it first. There's no desire to put a detail in that would surprise someone like a Leslie, like a source, a subject who we know to be
00:15:23
Speaker
traumatized we know to be vulnerable in one way or another and so you know i think eric strikes exactly the right tone in this piece i'm actually struck i've read it now so many times but every time i do i'm really struck by how it manages to be
00:15:39
Speaker
very measured and very mature while at the same time absolutely ripping your heart out. That comes with having a lot of experience. And it comes with having said, I'm going to invest a lot of time, a lot of resources into my relationship with the main subject, but also with the subject matter. So yeah, there's no precise rubric for how we do this. Each story is different.
00:16:08
Speaker
But there have been more times than I can count in the process of being an editor where I'm sitting with information, I'm sitting with a question, potentially talking about it with a writer or a source and making
Ethics in Storytelling
00:16:20
Speaker
a judgment call where we say, does this detail feel or does this way of
00:16:27
Speaker
framing things feel right. Like, what does my gut tell me? And we would never not put something in a story that was essential or illuminating in some way. We would never not put it in if we felt like it really needed to be in there. But especially when you're dealing with narrative writing of this variety, so often you get details that are maybe
00:16:53
Speaker
you know, great from a descriptive standpoint, great from a quote standpoint, but, you know, is it necessary? And I think, you know, this doesn't happen every story. It certainly, you know, in this story, even, you know, there were only a few moments where we kind of had these types of conversations, but it's definitely something when we're dealing with particularly difficult stories, stories about trauma that we're always thinking about.
00:17:24
Speaker
Very nice. Well, I'm going to kick this conversation over to Eric and I've already spoken to him and it's going to be a, you know, really, really fruitful conversation about a lot of these threads that you and I have just kind of teased out for it. So as always say, you know, thanks for covering up the time and we'll, we'll do this again soon. Thanks for coming on. Sounds good.
00:17:47
Speaker
Okay, well now it's time for Eric Pape. He's a journalist and journalism instructor at the University of Southern California. Some people have called his work emotional journalism, which is pretty spot on, especially for this piece. You can visit ericpape.journalportfolio.com for links to his extensive body of work. His site says he's a journalist, writer, editor, analyst, media trainer, professor, and graphic novelist.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, he's a bit of a mensch if I'm using that word correctly. So pretty great chat about writing and reporting on sensitive topics with traumatized people. Hey, let's do this. Let's get after it. All right. Here's Eric.
Investigating Vaccine Skepticism
00:18:32
Speaker
Well, I came upon the story. I was looking for a story in the vaccine space to try to understand, and this was from very early on in the pandemic. I got a grant from the McGraw Business Fellowship and then subsequently another one from the Charles
00:18:50
Speaker
Rapoli Investigative Fund and I was looking for the story that I thought would sort of cut through on the issue that would cut through in ways that surprisingly the actual pandemic was not cutting through. I think a lot of people very reasonably assumed early on in the pandemic that
00:19:10
Speaker
that people who were concerned about vaccines and the old school anti-vax movement would upon seeing the scale of the pandemic kind of shift and change. And I do know some people who did, people who, they weren't anti-vaxxers per se, but they were very vaccine skeptical. And some of them very quickly became open to the idea of a vaccine for COVID-19.
00:19:35
Speaker
Anyways, I was looking around in this space to see what cut through and more and more I was finding that things weren't cutting through, that thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people dying didn't change some people's minds about vaccines. And over time, we've only seen more doubt rise in the minds of many people as the pandemic has faded from the daily lives of many people.
00:20:02
Speaker
So while I was looking for that and looking for something that felt like it would really add something to the discussion and the dialogue, I learned of this story of Leslie Hugh and her ex-husband, Steven O'Loughlin, and it had immediately cut to the core into something that happened in the days after the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and in some ways seemed like it logically intertwined with it.
00:20:28
Speaker
And the story went so far beyond issues of vaccines. It goes into issues of abusive relationships, men who are obsessed with control, people who go down internet rabbit holes and get lost and then believe in one conspiracy and then another conspiracy and then a third conspiracy, the conspiracies could contradict each other. But as long as they were sort of semi-coherent within each one, a person could believe multiple ones.
00:20:54
Speaker
I did research on who is most susceptible to believing false conspiracy theories and the research indicated that
00:21:03
Speaker
that people who believe in one are more likely to believe in another and people who believe in two are more likely to believe in another and so on and so on. So all of these issues were in the air. There were issues immediately in the story in my mind relating to misinformation, disinformation, custody battles, family law, a woman trying to leave. This is one of the core aspects of the story, a woman trying to leave a terrible relationship and feeling trapped.
00:21:32
Speaker
And then there's other issues that I'm just fascinated by, which is how people with strong sociopathic tendencies affect other people who do not have them and sort of corral them and trap them, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's in relationships or in other social interactions. So all of these things were sort of in the air. But the real thing that cemented this story to me was I was talking with someone who lived down the street from me, actually, a sweet father of three children,
00:22:02
Speaker
who was clearly not interested in having his small children vaccinated whenever the vaccine was going to be made usable for children. And we were in a park nearby and I bumped into him and he asked how I was doing and asked what I was working on. And I said, well, I'm preparing to go up to San Francisco to tell this story. And he said, well, what is it? And I started talking to him about it. We have talked about vaccines many times and he had a response
00:22:31
Speaker
for everything, everything could be made into, could fit into his arguments about vaccines for COVID-19 and many other vaccines being bad.
00:22:43
Speaker
And there was no doubt in his mind. He was a loving father, took care of his kids. Our kids would play together sometimes when they were in the park. And I started telling him the story of Stephen O'Loughlin and Leslie Hugh and their son, Pierce. And he stood there. He just kept asking me more questions and more questions. And rather than sort of batting away any question or issue relating to the vaccine side of the story,
00:23:08
Speaker
he was fascinated and mesmerized and he's holding his baby on his shoulder and he's cramping up and I'm like, we can go, we can finish this conversation later. And he said, no, no, I want to hear how this goes. And then I told him the story and how it played out and the conclusion of the story. And he was just shell shocked.
The Allure of Conspiracy Theories
00:23:30
Speaker
And for me, it cut through this issue that society was fighting so intensely about. There was a core thing in it that he couldn't understand, which is what this man, Stephen O'Loughlin, ended up doing. And that's when I knew that this story was something that I wanted to really
00:23:50
Speaker
delve into in a really deep and profound way. And then I spent most of the last year and a half, the next year and a half after that, doing that to deliver the story. What's crazy about, you know, maybe people who are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories or they have an idea in their head and if you have a certain idea, you can find whatever answer you want to support yourself on the internet.
00:24:18
Speaker
It's just that way. And if you're on YouTube, if you watch enough videos on a certain amount of content, it's just going to automatically start feeding that stuff to you, which is only going to dig your heels in even more and actually make those delusions feel all the more true to you. And it's just that that's just the ecosystem we live in. It's what makes it really scary now. Well, if you think about it, in the old days, you know, you had to go to a library and you had to dig up a book and then reference another book.
00:24:48
Speaker
and then get a whole bunch of books and you can start piecing things together. Now we know that a lot of things in a lot of books are not actually true.
00:24:55
Speaker
But there was sort of a bar that people used to have that publishing was hard to do, and it required investment, which meant faith from some publisher. You could sew together a conspiracy based on that or based on articles in media. And then we had this rise of the internet. Well, actually, before the rise of the internet, we had desktop publishing became a thing. So the challenge of getting something published actually became a lot less. And then the internet just blew that away.
00:25:24
Speaker
And suddenly everyone can publish the old journalistic axiom that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Well, we all.
00:25:31
Speaker
can own a website. It's pre-formatted. We don't need HTML. We don't need to be able to build the website. It's just gotten easier and easier. So you can have a click through from what in the old days would have been one book to another or one magazine printed out to another or microfiche, which I think a lot of younger people don't even know what it is. Now you're just clicking through and clicking through and it can all feel like limitless evidence to support
00:25:59
Speaker
whatever you want or whatever someone wants you to start to believe in support. And it takes a sharp critical mind in this day and age to see through that sometimes, to see where things are credible, to see, you know, journalists are flawed, writers are flawed, academics are flawed, scientists are flawed, everyone has flaws, but it doesn't mean
00:26:19
Speaker
that all information is equal which i think is an impression that a lot of people can get or that all information is something you don't believe other than the information that you want to believe. And then you just find which is getting back to your point you just find the information that sort of cement what you already believed that i think is a really.
00:26:38
Speaker
an incredibly dangerous thing in this era. Yeah, and prior to our conversation, we just batted around this idea of this day and age. Granted, there has been misinformation or disinformation going back decades into various tabloids and periodicals, but it was not as easily accessible. And media literacy being what it was and what it needs to be is far more
00:27:07
Speaker
complicated and you have to have a far more discerning eye to determine what's credible and what's not, what's misinformation versus credible information. What would you propose to just get people more literate when it comes to how we metabolize and certainly ingest information? One of the things I do is I teach at the University of Southern California.
00:27:33
Speaker
And I teach journalism to usually graduating undergrads and mostly to graduate students. And one of the things that I try to get them to do and understand and cultivate the most is
00:27:46
Speaker
critical thinking, the critical thinking that is rigorous and that doesn't just say, I don't believe this, I don't believe this, I don't believe this, I'm doubting the official story that's out there, I'm going to get to, I'm going to sort of, you know, red pill, blue pill the issue. It is to look for credible sources of information, of data that support something or that undermine something and to look at it there.
00:28:09
Speaker
Part of what makes this era so dangerous is that you have such sophisticated media channels now that seem disconnected from a lot of truth. That seemed more motivated by getting people to have political beliefs.
00:28:28
Speaker
There's been a blurring that this has always been an issue. There's always been attention here. But in this era, it is so easy for political parties or just political forces within parties to spread information, get it out on social media. A lie goes much farther than the truth is the saying that in journalism, we know that if you put some vigorous lie out, it's going to do far better on social media than the correction of that lie.
00:28:59
Speaker
If it goes out to 10 people and nine of them never see your correction, then the misinformation or the mistaken information is still out there. I think solutions, I think we're all looking for them or we're struggling to find them. People will attack journalists, writers, politicians, you know, people in all fields really. Anyone on the internet can be attacked vociferously, not based on what they're really saying, but based on things that just might effectively get people to think
00:29:29
Speaker
about them in a negative way. And then that's the way you undermine the truth that some people are delivering. I guess I don't have a real easy answer for this. I think a lot of very smart people in this country and around the world are working on it because we're realizing how much it can undermine politics, justice, courts, people speaking for themselves in ways that are responsible, and so many other things.
00:29:55
Speaker
I genuinely don't have an easy answer. I could probably write a book about the search for one. Yeah. And, you know, with Leslie Hugh at the center of the story and given the sensitive nature of the story at large, how did you go about cultivating trust and getting access to her so you could properly report the story out? Leslie Hugh is unremarkable.
00:30:23
Speaker
woman, she went through something wrenching, unimaginable. And I met her about five months after the culmination of the story. And she was simultaneously like an open wound. And
00:30:40
Speaker
simultaneously conveyed incredible resilience and strength that I'm sure she didn't know that she had inside of her. She often would despair and lose hope. In talking with her, I think for me as a journalist and as a human being, I felt so much for her circumstances. I had just left my... When I went up to San Francisco just to take a step back,
00:31:09
Speaker
had just celebrated my son's ninth birthday. And I went up there to interview her, and it was, you know, a huge part of the story was about her nine-year-old son. And so it was a powerful human connection for me. It actually became very hard in ways that I didn't expect. I'm someone I've written extensively about
00:31:32
Speaker
war crimes about war, post-war trauma, it just felt so intimate on this one level. And so in talking to Leslie, I tried to be a full-fledged human being who also, I've worked a lot and been with a lot of people who have been through really intense traumas. And so,
00:31:55
Speaker
I would try to talk to her in a way that would convey how she might get through this.
00:32:03
Speaker
process this whole experience as much as she could. So I think we connected on that and she's expressed, she's talked about the process of telling this story in the year and a half since then as a therapeutic one, as one that's helped her to make sense of the parts that she could make sense of. I pointed out to her that something that I had often seen for people who have gone through extreme trauma
00:32:28
Speaker
is when they take their hardship and the pain and the things that they can't make disappear, but they could put it at the service of something else, like helping other people to avoid that. And I think that's been a huge part of the, and she took that to heart more than I ever dreamed. And she is looking for ways to make sure that other people don't go through the sorts of things that occurred and that are detailed in the story.
Complexity of Leslie Hu's Story
00:32:53
Speaker
At what point did you, you know, now as you're starting to fill up your notebook or your recorder, yeah, at what point do you start to feel like, all right, I've got I've got enough here. I'm getting a sense of a through line. Now I can draw up, you know, a pitch or something that can convey where I think the story might go. I think part of that was even before I went up there because I was so convinced. It was so clear from that experience I talked about in the park with with the guy down the street.
00:33:22
Speaker
And I brought it up to a number of other people. I brought it up to two women I know who connected to the story on a totally different level, women I know who don't have children and who had been in controlling relationships with a real controlling partner. I know someone who was brought up out of the blue, the power of who was getting divorced from someone who they only realized after the fact was a
00:33:47
Speaker
had really strong sociopathic tendencies. And this woman was telling me, this has nothing to do with this story, but this woman was telling me, I just don't know how I didn't see it. I was with this person for years. How did I get so blinded? And she was afraid to get in another relationship because of that. And there's a lot of parallels there with this story. And so people, I would talk to the story about connect to it on that nightmarish partner controlling
00:34:13
Speaker
sociopathic, egocentric, all of these qualities that no one really wants in the love of their life. So I felt that that story was there. The custody battle that is key to the story is a huge part of it as well. And people who have gone through divorces, whether as the people divorcing or their children, I think can really connect to
00:34:38
Speaker
the brutality of a divorce in these kinds of circumstances. There's the issue of vaccines, which is so obvious as just such a polemic issue in the country then and now, still for people who are fighting against the
00:34:55
Speaker
the COVID-19 vaccines. Although this story, as you know, centers around vaccines before there was a COVID-19 vaccine. It centers around childhood vaccines for newborns and very small children. So there were just all of these different issues that seemed so compelling. And so when someone says, what's the story about? It's actually a more challenging question than
00:35:24
Speaker
harder to answer than I usually find. And the reason is that it is an intersection of complex issues in some people's lives that add up to a really fascinating and powerful story, but it's not any one thing, it's all of these things. To me, it's fundamentally about Leslie Hugh, this woman and her love for her son and her sort of quest to survive.
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes when drawing up a picture, even just trying to get your focus, get your head around all the information, sometimes it helps to try to distill it, like capital A, what is it about, into like a word or a phrase. And there are so many
00:36:10
Speaker
spokes to the wheel in this story. It reads incredibly well, it's gripping, and it goes in so many different directions. Did you have a hard time getting your head around all of this so it did feel cohesive despite all the different spokes? Yeah.
00:36:29
Speaker
The easy answer is yes, it was hard. Well, I should say it was hard and it wasn't. It wasn't in that the core story is so powerful. It gave a spine from a storytelling perspective. It gave a spine to the story.
00:36:43
Speaker
but but or a trunk of maybe the metaphor of a tree is better. And then there were all of these branches and so many of the branches became so much they became so much thicker and sturdier than I expected every time there would be a small detail to follow what looking at at some of this the self help groups and spiritual groups that are key part of the story. I wasn't
00:37:07
Speaker
I wasn't really expecting to have some of those details become as expansive as they were, but they became absolutely fascinating. Tony Robbins is in this story, the self-help guru who became a very big figure in the 1990s when he worked with Bill Clinton and many other high profile people.
00:37:28
Speaker
in the country and abroad. It's a group called Access Consciousness based in Texas. It's absolutely fascinating. It's sort of modeled in some ways on Scientology and the story of its creation is fascinating.
00:37:44
Speaker
how they draw people in, how they drew in Stephen O'Loughlin into the group and got him to become a big part of the group, how this affects the mind of someone who is searching and who becomes
00:38:00
Speaker
who becomes contemplative and spiritual in ways that I think few people around him ever expected, but then how does it actually affect his relationship to reality, to facts, to the terrestrial world? And that was fascinating too. So yeah, I mean, to get at your point, it was easy to pitch it,
00:38:25
Speaker
And to hint at some of the fascinating things that were there, it was hard to actually write parts of that because all of the different portions of the story are so riveting and troubling and in a few moments uplifting, but it's a story of someone trying to survive and escape.
00:38:45
Speaker
you know, with her son. So I guess that core story of, you know, the search for survival is so palpable. That's the easy part. Going into all of these different worlds, you know, going to Germany, going to Egypt, going to Indian parts of the story, I think it became hard to boil it down to the details that were just the core details because any of those portions of it were almost cinematic. You wanted to go in more and more and more
00:39:14
Speaker
But the real story, the central story is the story of Leslie Hugh and her son, Pierce, you know, trying to survive a husband and the next husband who was declining very fast.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah, and the self-help spur is particularly engaging because it seems like there's a kind of mind that is particularly drawn to that, and I think a lot of us all want to
00:39:44
Speaker
improve and try to optimize ourselves as best we can so we can live as fulfilling a life as possible. And it's part of the rub or the appeal of those guru types out there who feel like they can deliver that to us if we're willing to spend $10,000 to do it. But when you were going down that rabbit hole, did you notice that in someone like Steven O'Loughlin, who was
00:40:12
Speaker
particularly drawn to that and the manifestation that some of those gurus promise that in the wrong, in the wrong hands, it can almost be like dangerous or like weaponized self-help, if you will. It's, you know, self-help is complicated, right? People want to improve and people who are struggling, you know, hopefully they want to improve and you want people to get the help that they need.
00:40:39
Speaker
And the question is whether the help they're getting is the help that they need. And whether it's also in good faith is something that comes up a lot in this. Because a lot of self-help groups are capitalist enterprises, they're businesses. So some of them may start with something genuine and authentic and then get lost because they're running a business with a bunch of employees or people have, in some cases have fancied.
00:41:03
Speaker
homes and jets and all the rest. In some cases, there's self-help that really does help a lot of people. And in some cases, you get structures that draw in vulnerable people and can exploit them. And then it leads to questions about where does it leave them? Where does this new worldview that maybe masks in certain cases, desire to pull more money out of people? But where does it leave those people after the fact?
00:41:33
Speaker
I don't think the people in these groups had any idea what Steven O'Loughlin was capable of, and yet some of them may well have contributed to his decline. And in other ways, this is someone who was already getting sucked down, you know, internet rabbit holes and different conspiracy theories, including some really
00:41:52
Speaker
really wild ones that are laid out in the story. As Leslie Hugh said, I was dealing with QAnon long before QAnon. And she met in her marriage. But when he started getting help, in some ways he stopped fixating on some of the really wild and crazy conspiracy theories that he was buying into. Because he was getting a worldview, I think, where
00:42:16
Speaker
it channeled a lot of that energy. So initially some of that might have seemed, you know, positive to her. It might have seemed like he wasn't staying up all night and she'd wake up in the morning and her husband, while she's taking care of their infant, her husband is telling her about the latest, you know, that Obama was born in a cave and talking about Illuminati and talking about everything else. Some of the conspiracy theories are so creative that
00:42:45
Speaker
I mean, it's just mind-boggling. But I think that there's a part that could be positive and constructive, and then there's a part that can idle people because they can become so reliant on a structure or on a leader of a structure, sort of gurus who
00:43:05
Speaker
I think we know that people who have absolute power in any environment who are not really called to account can become megalomaniacs, and they can start to interfere with the people that they're supposedly helping actually being healthy. So I think all of these tensions are there in the story, into various degrees with the different people that Stephen O'Loughlin and Leslie Hugh were encountering and how it was affecting him.
Crafting a Mystery Narrative
00:43:35
Speaker
And as you are getting all this information from all these kind of different branches on the trunk of this tree, when you're starting to set down to write the piece and structure it out, how are you outlining or starting to organize your thoughts so you can get down what you hope in the end is a coherent first draft that you can work from? I think it was clear to me early on that this story needed to be a mystery.
00:44:04
Speaker
because that is how Leslie Hugh and her boyfriend, after she was divorced, lived it. They were trying to figure out where their son was. And it's such a relatable, palpable thing. And that mystery holds in the air when you're going into all of these different worlds, when you're going into
00:44:28
Speaker
this guy starting to believe that the United Nations was going to send people to come arrest them in his house or that the government was going to come for him and he started keeping guns and food in the car and had packages of food for each member of the family to flee. It holds together when they go abroad to try to
00:44:55
Speaker
He goes abroad in part because he believed that there were all of these media conspiracies and he wanted to see for himself what the world beyond was, I think. That's the impression that I get. They go to Germany and then they go to Egypt in the middle of major protests that were all over the TV in entire square. He told his wife he wanted to go because he was convinced it was a lie and that it wasn't really happening.
00:45:26
Speaker
There are all of these twists and turns in the story that are riveting on their own, but the central thing that holds it all together is this woman trying to survive with her son and trying to survive a terrible marriage in the decline of her husband.
00:45:43
Speaker
And so to me setting up the mystery in the beginning of what happens gave it enough weight and strength to hold it together and to keep people caring about her and her son. And while they're going into all of these fascinating different worlds that the story delves into.
00:46:02
Speaker
When I was talking with a freelancer, she wrote this feature for Outside Magazine about a young woman who in 1976 died mountaineering. She got sick up there and she passed away and she had been written about a bunch.
00:46:21
Speaker
over the years to report, and she felt like this weird push-pull. She wanted to tell the story and honor the story, but at the same time, she was feeling kind of exploitative of it and was worried about picking at the scab of the family and friends who lost it, even though it happened 40 some odd years ago.
00:46:42
Speaker
And given how sensitive this is and how sensitive things that you've reported on in the past, how do you wrestle with that idea of writing about tragedy in a way that is part of what we do for a career, but it's also like these other people's lives?
00:47:02
Speaker
I don't know, an ethical push-pull of when is it okay to tell someone's story for our own gain versus not doing it at all. That makes any sense. I think it's a very healthy question and I think that a lot of journalism
00:47:18
Speaker
does unfortunately cross that line. In TV, people under such pressure, in local TV news in particular, in such pressure to get something, to get it on. There's not a lot of time for contemplation. They have to get a camera shot. And they're told by producers, you have to get a relative. And it can be really crass and difficult and demeaning. And I know a lot of former people have worked in that space who struggled with that. But that applies to
00:47:47
Speaker
people who write that applies to radio to an extent. I think two thoughts come to mind. One is that in this story, because of the way things played out, there was a surge of media just after the siege at the Capitol. There was a surge of media in the story, but it kind of got subsumed by the siege on the Capitol and all of the aftermath and how the end of the Trump presidency was going to go. And
00:48:16
Speaker
Some of that material can feel demeaning and crass. Some of it was quite well done, but still, there's a drive-by element to it. So I wasn't worried about doing that. I know that when I'm doing a story like this, I'm going to go deep.
00:48:35
Speaker
I spoke to students up near Stanford University years ago, high school students, and a teacher talked about the sort of journalism that I often do, and he described it as emotional journalism. And I hadn't really thought of the term like that, but there's an emotional depth or emotional understanding that I aim for.
00:48:55
Speaker
And so for something like this, I'm going to approach it with a lot of compassion. And I'm also going to bring in my own experiences when I'm talking to people who are involved who have suffered trauma to offer a sense of how other people
00:49:13
Speaker
deal with trauma and process it and in some cases overcome the parts of it that can be overcome and then the parts of it that stay with you and how that evolves and sometimes it can almost end up being the trauma itself can be like a family member or the loss can be like a family member. So talking about all of these different things I think pushes me
00:49:34
Speaker
to make this a constructive thing. And I hope that someone like Leslie Hugh feels like it has been useful and even therapeutic.
Narrative Therapy and Meaning
00:49:44
Speaker
If you think about therapy, when people go to therapy, they're usually learning, yeah, they learn coping mechanisms, et cetera, but a lot of people in therapy or in Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, they're engaging in what might be called narrative therapy.
00:50:04
Speaker
where they're learning to tell their own story. But in learning to tell their own story, they have to understand their own story. And by understanding their own story, it makes sense of things that don't otherwise make sense. When we're living our lives in this chaos and crazy things happen, whether it's because of ourselves or because of other people around us,
00:50:23
Speaker
It can feel random. It can feel like we're victims of circumstance. It can feel like we don't know why things happen because we don't usually stop and think about it. To do a story that is this challenging emotionally and requires, you know, I spent a lot of time talking with Leslie Hugh and a bunch of other people. She's learning to put her story in order in some ways the way people do in
00:50:51
Speaker
There is a narrative therapy effect, I think, that often happens. I've seen this many times in my career, to get people to go through the past and make sense of it. Because if I can't make sense of it, how can I tell the story? And so I try to share that with them when I can. And when I have questions about that and things I can't figure out, I'll talk to them about it. And sometimes they can't figure it out either, and we'll talk together.
00:51:15
Speaker
But in the end, hopefully the goal in this kind of journalism when I do it is for it to have been useful and constructive for the people who have gone through intense hardship. One other thing I would add is something I often tell to my students at USC is when you're interviewing someone, I had students who were interviewing a woman whose son had died in a bike accident and they were incoming graduate students and they were nervous about talking to her. They said they didn't want to re-traumatize her.
00:51:46
Speaker
And I had to point out to them that that woman wakes up every day and her son is not there. It's not like that mother doesn't know that. It's not as though she's not struggling with that all the time. This woman had a ghost bike near the front of her apartment. There are these bikes that are painted white where people have died in accidents and they're sort of memorials.
00:52:12
Speaker
And so this woman was thinking about it all the time. So what I said to my students was, she knows. There's no surprise to her. You not asking doesn't mean she feels better or worse. If you did it insensitivity, of course, yes, it could be a terrible thing.
00:52:27
Speaker
But if it's done empathetically and for a higher purpose and you communicate the higher purpose of that woman who lost her son in the bicycle accident is talking because hopefully it will help prevent other people from having that loss, there is some degree of constructiveness. And to me, that's also a therapeutic effect. And I think Leslie Hugh in this story has been very much about
00:52:51
Speaker
about that looking for the constructive and useful things and to help other people avoid the various types of hardship and extreme hardship that she and her son went through. This is something that you probably speak with your students about and something you definitely exercise yourself in your own practice is this idea of interviewing for information and interviewing for scene. And especially when you're dealing with sensitive things and having to reconstruct
00:53:20
Speaker
very just, you know, sensitive scenes and sensitive issues. So when you're approaching those two different styles of information, it's just like, how do you, you know, interview for information versus, you know, for scene, especially when you're dealing with, you know, such a sensitive subject matter.
00:53:44
Speaker
I think it's a great question. And oftentimes, I think you generally want to do the informational first. So you get many of the basics beforehand. You research as much as you can. You have sort of the spine of what happened. And then the details are always going to be a little different even from what you might initially hear. In a story like this, there were so many
00:54:13
Speaker
Yeah, it was a big challenge. And it involves recognizing the moments that are going to be scenes. Because you can't ask someone to describe everything. You can't say, put me there. Walk me in the front door. What was it like? What did it smell like? What did it look like? What did you feel? What did the dust feel like? You can't do that all the time. It's too exhausting. And it's just too much. It's like you're asking the person to be there for a novel.
00:54:42
Speaker
So you pick the scenes that feel evocative and important, key turning points or particularly salient moments, and then you go back usually and you'll talk to them. It depends on different stories, but for a story as expansive as this one, it involved a lot of going back and double and triple checking and getting people
00:55:05
Speaker
They're getting people to think differently at different times. So in the interview, sometimes sort of talking factually and what was this and what was that and what was the other thing, but then at other times pivoting to put me there, use your five senses, tell me how this was or what do you remember or what did you feel? There's definitely a lot of toggling that goes on.
00:55:29
Speaker
I try to not have it be too much whiplash for the person that I'm interviewing. I try to make it as efficient as possible, but sometimes you have to be reactive in the moment and toggle because you realize that there's a special moment that can be conveyed. Something I'm very sensitive to is when you talk to people about very difficult moments in their lives,
00:55:54
Speaker
some journalists get what they want and leave. And I think of it almost like a surgery, if you're going to open someone up emotionally or psychologically to talk about such sensitive things, you have to close them up. You can't leave, you can't leave them there while they're, they're sort of an open wound. I just think it's really well said. Yeah, it's it's a disrespectful thing to do that. And I just think it's, you know, morally wrong to do that. And
00:56:22
Speaker
getting back to the positive things, getting back to making sense of things, getting back to the constructive part, and also reminding them of why you're there to tell that story, which for me is usually because we want to make sure that other people aren't going to go through this if that's at all possible, if there's accountability, if there are other things that could be done to help solve whatever the problem is that you're writing about. But to me, that's just a crucial, crucial element.
00:56:50
Speaker
kind of getting to that back to that point of the teacher who said your lack of a better term like brand of journalism is like emotional journalism and you know this story definitely has just a gut-wrenching emotional through line through it with you know Leslie Hugh being at the center of it and her son
00:57:11
Speaker
Would you would you identify is like that is almost like the North Star of the stories that you're drawn to that you want to report and invest, you know, in the case of this one, you know, year and a half to do? Yeah, I mean, I go to what I'm fascinated by and what I'm troubled by and what I think is powerful and significant. And and so this story was all of those things.
00:57:40
Speaker
I've done a lot of types of journalism in my career. I used to work for Newsweek magazine internationally, and that is not a place for emotional journalism, or I should say, Newsweek's changed a great deal. At the time it wasn't, and it's not now, it's just a different thing now. But I've worked for daily newspapers writing in Southeast Asia, I've worked
00:58:05
Speaker
But yes, to answer your question, yes. The stories that I tend to get drawn the most to are stories of human impact, often around resilience and overcoming, people trying to overcome scars and trauma and big challenges, whether that's in Central or Western Africa, or in various parts of Europe, or the Middle East, or Latin America, or here in the United States. So this context is very different. This is, you know, Steven O'Loughlin,
00:58:34
Speaker
was a white-collar Republican in San Francisco who went on what he sort of described as a spiritual journey that obviously went very, very wrong. So the context is very different, but the core of the story with Leslie Hugh and her son I think is very much in sync with the work that I've cared the most, the types of work that I cared the most about and that I think is incredibly important. And it takes a
00:59:03
Speaker
really a lot of work to do it. So you have to have a clear north star. You have to know why you're there and why this is, why do you do all of the work and get into all of the intense emotional reporting and all of the other very complex details to tell the story. And for me, it's very, very clear. But my wife says,
00:59:28
Speaker
She seemed to be working on the story and she knows how intense the weight of it was. And she said that she sort of said she was sorry that I was going through that. And I said, no, I feel great doing this story because not for professional reasons, for human reasons, because I think Leslie Hugh is a remarkable story of survival. And I think a lot of people face these epic challenges in life. And we need to learn from people who are
00:59:58
Speaker
resilient or as resilient as they can be against all odds. And so to me, there's an uplifting component in telling a really hard, difficult story if you know why you're there. How did you process the weight of it, the weight of it all and all the several conversations you've had with Leslie and just so you don't shoulder too much of it on your own?
01:00:24
Speaker
So early in my career, I spent several years in Cambodia and often wrote about really hard and difficult things. It was post-war Cambodia. There was a genocide there and everyone had family members who were either killed in the genocide or took part in the genocide or both. And I was with a lot of
01:00:46
Speaker
It was an era when the sort of post Vietnam, the Vietnam War era journalists, some of them came back and they had this old sort of, you know, at times you'd see them drink, hard drinking in the Foreign Correspondence Club and other places. And it could feel like you're trapped in an early Oliver Stone movie.
01:01:06
Speaker
and self-destructive and hard-hitting sometimes. But it struck me there seeing the contrast between them and my own generation of journalists, some of whom follow that path and sort of romanticized it.
01:01:22
Speaker
But it struck me that the ones who had a real hard time with substance abuse, with self loathing, with other things, they didn't seem to be processing the hardship in a constructive way. A lot of times they were writing, they were doing journalism that was, this happened, this side says one thing, this side says the other thing, the sort of both sides ism in a really extreme circumstance.
01:01:49
Speaker
And for me, what I realized is that the people I saw who were writing it and processing the information more, coming to a deeper understanding and then telling the story so that they really felt like they were there for a deeper purpose. A lot of those people seemed a lot less self-destructive. I don't want to say that it's 100% one way or the other.
01:02:08
Speaker
But it just taught me lessons about when you're telling stories that can be impactful and that are meaningful. And if you feel you get the deeper truths in the story, that helps to process the tough stuff. And so if I'm doing that, then the weight isn't there in the end. If I don't do that, and if I can't tell the story, if it gets blocked or frozen for some reason, yeah, that's really hard.
01:02:35
Speaker
And there was a time with this story where I was struggling because I could relate so directly to Leslie's experience. Because, as I said, we both had these nine-year-old children in California at the same time.
01:02:53
Speaker
Her son, Pierce, you know, I'm seeing these videos and it's just such an adorable, you know, lively child. And I could feel for him and connect for him. I feel like I've known, I've known Pierce's. And so, yeah, that did become a huge weight. And it took me a while to get through that. I've never had a delay like that in a story before, in fact.
01:03:20
Speaker
But that was very challenging. But then it's getting back to that North Star of, you know, why are you here? And I was able to get back to that. And talking to Leslie, we talked far more than several times. We've talked dozens and dozens of times, in fact, to get the story because she wanted this story to come out in a
01:03:44
Speaker
in a useful way. She wanted something useful and constructive to come out of this and she's just been such a source of strength that I think it's really a testament to her that this story is coming out and how dedicated, how much she was willing to dig into her life and her and Pierce's life and share
01:04:04
Speaker
videos and photos and court documents and some of the most difficult things in her life. She shared it all with me. She's just been a remarkable subject.
01:04:16
Speaker
I know with some of the stories I'm drawn to or the personalities I'm drawn to, they tend to be very singularly driven or singularly focused and almost obsessive. And to some extent, I really admire a lot of that in the people I like because sometimes my mind is a bit frenetic and prone to not focusing
Resilience in Journalism and Life
01:04:38
Speaker
much. So I think I'm drawn to these people with this singular devotion because I'm like, oh man,
01:04:42
Speaker
I really admire that and I wish I had more of that. And I bring this up to ask you, when you're doing these long types of features where you really lock in with a central figure, is there something illustrative of who they are that reflects something in you yourself as a person and as a reporter?
01:05:07
Speaker
What I tell my students is that journalism is really hard. It's been hard for a while, for decades. And it used to be that you got a job somewhere and you kind of had a career path and you did that kind of journalism. And you might shift from this newspaper to that newspaper, or you might move from Newsweek to Time magazine. And then the collapsing economic model of old school journalism kind of started to blow that up.
01:05:37
Speaker
And then the, um, the advent of the internet and then social media really blew it up. And it's the, the, the survivability of it is, is, you know, almost everyone needs to think entrepreneurial in an entrepreneurial way, if they, if they are writing these days. And that's been the case for 20, 25 years and in some ways 30, 30, 35 years. But it's, it's hard to imagine writing these kinds of stories without being entrepreneurial and thinking.
01:06:05
Speaker
How do you move your pawns forward? How do you tell these stories? And all journalists forever who are doing serious journalism, they face rejection all the time. It's a little bit like baseball, right? You have this little stick in your hand and someone's throwing a ball. Just think of Major League Baseball. Someone is throwing basically a leather-wrapped rock
01:06:31
Speaker
at 100 miles an hour at you and you're supposed to hit it with this stick. It's pretty crazy and you fail most of the time. Most pitches, you don't hit and you don't hit them where you want to hit. If you do it once and every four times, you're very successful, which is a little bit like journalism. You get people saying no all the time, details are impossible to get. You can't get documents.
01:06:57
Speaker
Sometimes you're interviewing people who are upset with you or with media or with journalism in general. There's just so many ways, sometimes your management, your bosses, your editors, or if you're an editor, your reporters are difficult. You face a lot of real challenging high stress situations and there's not a lot of economic security. There's not a career path that is like it used to be where you got a job at the newspaper and sort of stayed there for maybe a whole career.
01:07:26
Speaker
knowing why you're there is everything. And resilience in journalism, this is what I teach to my students, resilience in journalism is so important. It's such a powerful thing to write about. I think it's a great thing. We're all gonna face these enormous challenges in our life, unless we get hit by a bus tomorrow, in which case the people who know us are gonna go through the enormous challenges. But the central thing about resilience, just to get at the two sides of your question, on one side,
01:07:56
Speaker
There is, it helps you as a journalist to know resilience yourself and to not let all of the obstacles prevent you from doing what is really important work.
01:08:06
Speaker
And then the other side is that we all need that. We all need to remember the importance of resilience. We've been through some crazy times with the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic plays a part in this story, as you know. But we all need to be resilient and remember resilience and getting over the many challenges we're going to face in life. We're going to lose family members. We're going to get sick if we're alive long enough to. We're going to have our bodies decline
01:08:33
Speaker
So we need to know how to overcome and develop a broader vision and broader perspective and find the joy in the hardship and difficult and ugliness. And so, yeah, the simple answer is yes, I get all of that in some ways from the story of Leslie Hu.
01:08:52
Speaker
Well, very nice. Well, I want to be mindful of your time, Eric. And the question I like to ask people at the end of these conversations is a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. It can be anything that you're just excited about, you know, be it a brand of coffee or a brand of socks. You know, it doesn't matter. So I'd ask that I just extend that to you, Eric. You know, what might you recommend for the listeners out there as we bring our conversation down for a landing? Recommend about absolutely anything in the world. Anything.
01:09:23
Speaker
I think it is...
01:09:25
Speaker
Well, just because we were talking about the pandemic, I'm just thinking about how so many people got their lives shrunk down, their lives got smaller, their social circles in many cases. I encourage people to get out, to do something, the kind of thing when I'm working on a story like this, I will go and play some very intense basketball to clear my mind and then come back to the story fresh. Or I will go down to the ocean, which isn't so far away down here in Southern California.
01:09:53
Speaker
and be with, you know, the waves are breaking and the sand and the breeze and it just clears the mind and keeps you healthy. So I encourage people to, I don't like coffee. My socks aren't great, but I encourage people to get out and be aware of the amazing things that surround us in nature and in life and in other people and hopefully connecting with that.
01:10:17
Speaker
That's amazing. Well, Eric, this piece that you wrote for the activist is incredible. It's just a really skillfully done piece that's just going to deliver on so many levels for so many people. So I just got to say just what an awesome piece it is, an awesome job you did. And thanks for coming on the show to talk about it and journalism and reporting and writing. This is a lot of fun. I really appreciate you having me.
01:10:50
Speaker
Okay, all right. Hey, thanks seeing efforts. Thanks to Sayward and Eric for the time. That was a great conversation. Love having these out of his chats. I think Sayward might be being the point on these for a while because Jonah Ogles was on paternity leave for a few months. I think she's happy to
01:11:10
Speaker
to maybe take the next month off, maybe next two, and turn it over to Jonah here. So we love you, Sayward. Thank you so much for being able to do this and being so insightful. Also, thanks to Eric. That was wonderful. If you like this conversation as much as I did, consider sharing it and tagging me in the show at C&F Pod on Twitter and Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram.
01:11:33
Speaker
The show will only grow because of you. As you know, I'm something of a nobody, so is the validation of your endorsements that makes the needle move. There's so much content out there, so many old shows that are worth listening to, and many more new shows that deserve attention. And this show will only survive the pod fade if you celebrate it, so long as it's worth celebrating.
01:11:55
Speaker
and consider heading to patreon.com slash cnf pod to throw a few bucks into the tip jar the show is free but as you know sure as hell ain't cheap i've kind of riffed on this notion in the recent past and even even the distant past that uh that i've often felt like i uh i miss the train
01:12:12
Speaker
I remember in 2011, it was a particularly big train that I felt I missed, when Grantland, the great pop culture and sports site, that was Bill Simmons' passion, Vanity Project, Passion Project off of ESPN, and it was coming out. And I remember the ethos was to celebrate and highlight new and up and coming voices. And I remember thinking, how did you even get noticed? I felt like I was a new and up and coming voice in sports writing.
01:12:38
Speaker
I was desperate to do the kind of work that typically got anthologized and say, best American sports writing. That was my thing. And I had a book coming out, I wrote features, but I was in just the land of obscurity. And if I'm being honest, not very good.
01:12:57
Speaker
Yet, and some might argue still not good, but I kept thinking that I had missed the train for years. There are other people I admire too that just seem to have caught their train and they're gone and just left on the platform. There were all these other places my peers were writing for and I was like, shit, there goes another train and didn't even know it was coming. How did I miss it? And I kept missing it.
01:13:25
Speaker
I'm only realizing now that there will always be another train. We just don't know the shape of that train. What opportunities are forthcoming that might be there at the nexus of our rigor when this unforeseen train arrives on the platform. Who knows what new venture-backed website might be there when you're skilled and ready that you could never have predicted.
01:13:48
Speaker
Or maybe audio? Or video? Who knows? As someone who has felt like he's missed his shot and then at 42 nearing 43, then I'm like too old to have a career because I didn't get that crucial traction in my early 30s when everybody else was. You can't predict what will come next, but there most assuredly will be something.
01:14:12
Speaker
You know, when you look up at the Arrivals Board, with estimated times at the train depot, there's a train coming, but you just don't know what or when or where it's going.
01:14:26
Speaker
Crucial to this are structures in your life that allow you to endure the fallow periods. My spouse is the breadwinner by a pole, as we say in horse racing. She has the insurance and the steady income. I mean, she hates her job and it's killing her. So naturally I do what I can. But I clean the bathrooms, vacuum, do the dishes, cook, clean. I'm not great all the time.
01:14:54
Speaker
But I do have reminders on my phone on Wednesdays to clean the bathroom and on Tuesdays to clean the air fryer and on certain days of vacuum. Anyway, I embody the traditionally domestic roles as my career, such as it is, allows for that. This privilege can't be ignored or denied. Her job has allowed me to tread water.
01:15:19
Speaker
to spend years on a podcast that doesn't make any money, to freelance, barely in nickel, to finally getting a book deal where we hope we won't even have to touch the advance money at all. If you don't have this incredible gift I have, and it is a gift,
01:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's okay. The train will come it might not feel like it But the train always arrives on time and we just have to believe that So stay wild seeing efforts and if you can do interview. See ya
01:16:12
Speaker
you