Episode 537: Pamela Colloff's Now-or-Never Moment with 'Catch the Devil'

Okay, on August 1st at the Eugene Public Library, I'll be delivering my now world the famous unauthorized biography talk. 3 p.m. That's a Saturday. August 1st, the Eugene Public Library at 3 p.m. Oh, and Hasey and Effors, how sad. Sometimes the best idea you can come up with is the thing you wish you had when you were starting out. That's what pitch club is at welcometopitchclub.substac.com. I was such a frustrated freelancer, not knowing how to pitch, not getting any traction. So pitch club is that thing that 2010 me, and if we're all being honest, 2026 me, could have used and now can't use. Pitch is ranging from agent queries, feature stories, and off the cuff, unhinged essay pitches, source pitches, book proposal overview annotations, you name it. So much more. Forever free. You read a little, you listen a little, and I think you're going to learn a lot. Now more stories. Welcome to pitch club.substac.com. Come, come, come. Every assignment at the beginning, I'm sure this is the one where I will be shown to be a failure that I don't know what I'm doing. Like this is the one that's going to break me. Oh, Hasey and Effors, now I understand you have many things competing for your attention and your time and the fact that you take some of that valuable time and attention and spend it with this podcast is something I don't take for granted. Not one bit. Thanks for being here. This is of course the creative nonfiction podcast where I talk to the best and narrative journalism memoir essay documentary film sometimes. Biography. It's all about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, pod maxing. Today's guest I mean. Holy shit. Did you see the title? You didn't just like Willie Nilly downloaded right? Did you see the title from the bottom of my diaphragm up? Wow. It's Pamela Kohloff. You know her from her National Magazine award winning work for Texas Monthly and ProPublica Slash the New York Times Magazine. She's the premier investigative reporter in the country. She'd scoff at that but she is and she's now the author of Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception and injustice on the Gulf Coast. It's published by this little independent imprint called Knauth. I hope they're able to stick around. You know, you got to fight for the little guy. This book upends what you think a true crime story is about. The true villain isn't a person at all. It chronicles among others Paul Scoundek, a jailhouse snitch who doesn't get stitches, who prosecutors leverage his non-credible testimony to place numerous men on death row. Jim Daley in particular. And Pamela takes us through this riveting narrative and punishing commentary on capital punishment. And why Florida seems hell bent on being number one in executions. Show notes to this episode. More at Brendan O'Mara. Come here. Hey, where you can find show notes and links to all 537. Oh my gosh. The source of this podcast plus embed form so you can sign up for pitch club. Hello. And the werewolf newsletter rage against the algorithm. That one gets you a riff for book recommendations. Some news and seven curated goodies. It literally goes up to 11. Make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder. These cards are 11. That was cute wasn't it? Pam wrote me one of the kindest emails after we had our conversation that was especially coming from her validating for the enterprise of the show. I have a tendency to think and this is no mystery. The biggest piece of shit in the world. So I have since printed that email out and taped it into my journal for a future reference. Tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock I will no doubt feel my usual shitty self. Here's just a slice of what Pam is about. He's a two time to time National Magazine Award winner once for reporting once for feature writing. Her work has been adapted for narrative documentary films including tower which was short listed for oh I don't know and Oscar in 2016. Her work has been anthology best American magazine writing best American crime reporting. And next wave America's new generation of great literary journalists. We kind of pull in that thread a little bit. She joined pro public. She flies the New York Times magazine in 2017 after many many years at Texas monthly where she got her cut her teeth if you will in the 90s. So about 20 years at that magazine pretty crazy. Listen I could go on but you get the gist in this episode gosh well just listen to this list and tell me you're not going to listen through at least until the parting shot. Come on now. In this episode we talk about what drew her to Tom Wolf and Hunter S Thompson speaking with Tom do you know. The boys club of long form writing her start at Texas monthly being a journalism door. The elation in despair how every story is a Rubik's cube the skip Hollinsworth method owning the material knowing when to quote in one not to idea generation writing is hard. How magazine writing and book writing are different animals. Why catch the devil is her now or never moment beginnings are the worst being more disciplined with a book versus magazine writing and writing in this attention economy and how it is affected the way she goes about writing her pros. That is a lot of juicy stuff. I think you're going to want a notebook for this one. I often recommend a notebook for a lot of these anyway. But you're going to want one for this one pair this episode with episode 255 with Maddie Crowell in episode 414 which on Rosengren actually many of the other out of his true crime you pods too many dimension if I'm being honest I'd also chuck in episode 224 with Patrick Rydon Keith who of course blurb her book. He'll be back on the show eventually for the paperback run of London calling. But hey parting shot pretty cool I think and it stems from something Pam and I talk about in the show so parting shot on pitch meetings only pitch meetings for freelancers. So for now let's queue up the montage. Roof. That is fortunate it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Pleasing I guess to a biographer then that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject. You were the Dan Patrick of creative non-fiction. How about that? This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me. I understand you wrote your undergraduate thesis on Tom Wolf. Oh my god that is a deep cut and really hard to find. I don't know how you knew that but yes that is true and hopefully I don't believe it's been digitized thank god because it's I'm sure extremely embarrassing. But yeah take me to what was it like studying studying Tom Wolf for your undergraduate thesis. Sends you on a new journalism kind of path doesn't it? What a great question oh my gosh I've been thought about that in so long. Yes I wrote I did the honors program honors English program at Brown and we had to write a thesis for that and I you know this was the early 90s I was obsessed with new journalism and the new journalists and in particular Tom Wolf and Hunter S. Thompson and folks like that and I haven't thought about this in so long it's so funny. My writing couldn't be more different now than those writers so it's interesting to think back. I loved the voiciness of that writing. I loved the risk taking of that writing. I loved everything about it. I think I wrote about Hell's Angels which is a book that Hunter S. Thompson wrote that people don't talk about very much where I'm sure I'm getting this wrong I'm remembering this from long ago but I hope this is somewhat correct that he in the book sort of explains that he doesn't know how to wrap up the book and he deliberately because of that provokes this epic fight with the Hell's Angels like a physical fight with the Hell's Angels so that he has a dramatic ending. I found that approach to writing to be so exciting and interesting and I think it actually gets at something that I really worry is being lost right now which is that writing was really fun to read. It was fun and joyful and an adventure and like I said took risks and I feel like as we've over the past few years sort of as men's magazines have died out and a lot of different venues in which you could be a little bit more voicy or experimental as those venues have disappeared long for writing has gotten more serious and of course I definitely write serious stuff but I miss that old work. Yeah and speaking of someone who can push the boat out in terms of voiciness and that degree of style I remember reading an interview with like you and Tom Juno from like 2013 or so So there was someone who was. was maybe cut of that fabric who could really push the envelope and could scale back but also scale up. To that extent, what do you remember about that exchange that you had with Tom and talking long form gosh now 13 years ago which seems like an entirely different era altogether? It seems like such a different era. That was in Atlanta and I don't, it's funny, I don't remember the specifics of it but I remember just being so in awe that I got to talk to Tom's you know what I mean he was just and still is just the sort of next level practitioner of this work. His new book was mind boggling I'll get back to that in a second but I remember that trip to Atlanta because I believe it was for the city and regional magazine awards and we were we went to dinner at some point that weekend and I remember being at a at this long table of writers in a restaurant and I was the only woman at the table it was like 20 people and that's how magazine writing was for a long time. By that point things had gotten better but that definitely was sort of the world that I entered in the 90s and one of the things I so appreciated I remember talking when I talked to Tom that weekend was though he was of that world though he had come up through that world he I don't know he just we had we spoke somehow as equals I certainly did not feel like an equal to him but he just I don't know he can do things with words that I really I still just remain in awe his physical descriptions of people are so like most recently in his book his physical description of his father you can smell him you can taste him you can hear him you can you are you're not just in the room with him which is what we all try to do you're like standing right next to him I can feel him breathing and to be able to do that with words is such a gift I don't know anyone who writes descriptions like yes once your point about you know being the one woman on at a table of 20 other people I mean when you were enthologized in next wave and I love Mike Saker and Walt Harrington but it's like there are 19 writers and like three of them or women like you included and you bat lead off in this in this collection which is which is nice but it's that gets to the idea of like at least then and maybe maybe even still now I don't I don't know the extent of the breakdown but it's just it seems like that long form magazine writing was like a hyper masculine and certainly geared towards that I think so and I think whenever I get to nostalgic about the old days and I definitely do that too often I really try to remember that things like that which were not great and it extended beyond that I mean it was it was such the atmosphere of the boys club sort of permeated everything back in the 90s and I think one of the things that was interesting about doing this work when the people who had all done it before were all white men everyone was sort of allowing giving myself permission to to do this work and to take big risks and I was never I've never been a voicey writer but I've always liked experimenting with different ways to tell stories and to find different ways to connect with the reader. What do you think gave you that agency to try to to enter that world? I mean so much of it and I was so fortunate in this but I had the ridiculous good fortune to be hired as a staff writer at Texas Monthly when I was 25 years old and had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I feel bad saying that because there just are not opportunities like that anymore but it it was in that era you would just take a chance on someone who was doing work that you thought was interesting even if they didn't have a lot of clips I had you know put together a bunch of different writing. When I was in college I I did independent studies and through that I would do I would produce about three long form type pieces per semester. There wasn't a class for this there wasn't really even an outlet for it. I eventually found an alternative publication in Providence that would publish some of what I was writing but Texas Monthly it was like you know I suddenly had a front row seat to just some of the greatest writers of that time so I don't know how many people would even remember Gary Cartwright but he was the Hunter S. Thompson of Texas Monthly and just a really larger than life figure. Skip Holland's worth really took me under his wing and was when I mentored as it really even capture what Skip was to me you know he would call every couple days and really just ask me what I was working on brainstorm with me how to make it better he did all of that with a lot of humor and just was so incredible and I could go on and on Mimi Schwartz, Michael Hall, so many incredible people and what we did there was a cohort of us we were all in our 20s who started off there around the same time Katie Vine and John Spawn and I and several other people and we would periodically like ask Gary Cartwright out for drinks and we would bring old stories of his that we had annotated like we would have gone through them like the journalism dorks that we were like you know not just underlining our favorite lines but writing in the margins you know like how did he do this like how did he get this and we would sit we did this with Skip and others as well but we would sit there and and just literally have him walk us through some of his greatest stories and he was so flattered that like the 20s somethings were interested in what he had to say and I don't know I just always thought like gosh this is so much better than paying to get like a master's in journalism I'm I have this this PhD level education I'm getting at this place so I think both seeking out mentors there and then again at that time we all sort of worked in this like bullpen kind of giant room and so I could hear other reporters making their you know initial phone calls and I could hear how they would make you know get people to talk to them I remember you know I was still am I get very very nervous to call people for the first time to cold call them and I remember having my calls critiqued like I would leave some very meek message for someone like I'm so sorry about you you know I would text me I'll call me back and I'd hang up as quickly as I could and you know someone I worked with would say you know over the divider like yeah I don't think they're gonna call you back like so there there was this some of it was like hazing right but that I don't know that atmosphere at that time was was everything it's how I learned so much and I feel guilty saying that because I don't I don't know for writers starting off right now what the equivalent of that is I just know it's not all being siloed in our own homes on zoom maybe it's like finding community in other ways well I think someone like yourself speaking forthrightly about it on a podcast of this nature and probably several others so people who are unfortunately kind of silo in their own home offices instead of in newsrooms because we've so lost that this is in a way we can make a distributed newsroom of sorts where people can maybe eavesdrop and say like oh okay like Pam gets a little nervous with cold calling I get terrified with cold calling this is this is normal and then we can give kinship to to those kind of to those people and then hopefully they can spread from there maybe you know of course develop their skills but also help others along the way I literally have gotten that from this podcast because I think you always imagine I always think of the movie adaptation okay so adaptation is about a screenwriter who can't write a screenplay and in his imagination when he pictures Susan Orlean who's doing a different kind of writing she's doing magazine writing she's just sitting there looking beautiful and the words are flowing and she's you know tapping away and I always thought that was such a hilarious irony of that movie that Charlie Kaufman didn't recognize that we all are in the agony that he's in that we're all uncertain that we never we're always finding our way through the dark and that he in picturing another writer thought it was easy and I feel like your show and some other podcasts as well sort of demystify some of that. Yeah, I think that that really helps. And yeah, because it's nice to know that writers of national magazine awarding status and Pulitzer prize winners and everything of that nature, like they're wrestling without also. And the 2 a.m. voice that wakes them up every day telling them there are pieces of shit. And in the face of that, they put together amazing work that is affecting change. If not change, at least creating novelistically verifiably true art that is like, oh, this is this is a meaning making thing that can maybe stand the test of a time or at least maybe a generation at least. Yes, well, I every assignment at the beginning, I'm sure this is the one where I will be shown to be a failure that I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, there's there they're the different stages, right? There's the elation after finding a great idea and then the despair that no one's going to talk to you and then the elation when people talk to you and then the despair that you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. You know, it's just this endless roller coaster, but it's funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt and uncertainty. And I think maybe it just goes with the territory. Yeah, yeah, like what do you make of that? The more skilled you've become, the more experience you've become, the more accomplished you've become, it's still really, really hard. It's really hard. Well, to go back to Gary Cartwright, I remember asking him about this after a particularly tough close on a story. This was, I don't know, late 90s, early 2000s and I was really struggling just because it felt like every story took so much out of me. It still feels that way, quite honestly. And I sought him out and I said something like, gosh, this is so hard. Does it get easier? And he just laughed and he said, when it gets easier, it's time to hang it up. And that's not, let me take a step back from that and say that's not to say that we shouldn't all try to find ways to do this work in a healthy way, to exercise, to see friends, you know, to to have more balance. But I think what he was saying is, like when this work gets boring, when you feel like you really know what you're doing, that it's, you're not finding your way in the dark anymore, then maybe you should move on to something else. And I loved that. And it also gave me an appreciation, I think about this a lot now, that I feel so lucky at this point in my career to be doing work that is endlessly challenging. Like, it is, every story is a new, you know, Rubik's cube, to try to figure out. And that's, we're so lucky to do that kind of work. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up Skip Hollensworth earlier. And I'm in the, this story that I had read, I boovies from 2017, where you talk a little bit about him. There's something called the Skip Hollensworth method. If it's a method you still employ, what is that method? Okay, so I think what that might have been, well, there's several things that might have been referring to. But I think what it probably is referring to is he read a draft of a story of mine. I couldn't tell you which story. And his rewriting instruction was to take all the quotes out. And once I'd taken the quotes out to revise it. And then once I had revised it to decide what quotes to put back in. But he said, "But you've got to do a draft where the only voice that's in there is yours first." And such good advice because in that particular story, and I think this happens in stories where I'm having more difficulty, I was leaning really hard on quotes. And what he was trying to say to me is you have to figure out what the story is saying, you have to tell the story. And then thoughtfully choose where you need someone else's voice and judiciously put that back in. It might also have been referring to Skip's Bimbo theory of interviewing. That is, so this would help if your audience knew Skip personally. But he is just the most delightful effervescent personality you could ever encounter. And whereas my inclination is always to over-research everything before I arrive at the interview and to show the person, I do this less now. But to show the person that I'm so knowledgeable and almost like I have to earn their respect, Skip would often do that without betraying that. And then he would show up to an interview and be like, "Wow, so what's podcasting? How do you do it? Just the most broad questions imaginable." And he got great material out of people just coming to them totally fresh now. It wasn't, like, he totally knew what he was doing. He'd done his homework and if he needed to follow up with something specific, he could. But I think there's something to that of just, as I do this more, while I still do the same level of preparation, I am really working on coming in and trying to leave a lot of space for the person I'm interviewing instead of showing them how much work I've done. Yeah, exactly. Because if you come out at two knowledge, but it's like, well, why am I even here to talk about it? You already know it all. So yeah, the whole idea of doing narrative journalism and narrative book length journalism is like, you need to get them talking and get into their headspace. And yeah, it does help to have that baseball card knowledge and maybe even a little bit more about them. But yeah, the whole idea is to get them talking or in the podcast sphere or an interview show of any nature. The idea is to get the other person talking. It's not about the host. It's not about the reporters. It's about them. And to that point, so I will make my crazy list of questions, which is, you know, usually absurdly detailed and many pages long. And I'll spend a lot of time working on that. And but I put it away when I get to the interview. So I usually start off without any of that in front of me. And of course, the work that went into it is then informing the conversation. But I just try to have as normal of a conversation as possible for as long as I possibly can. And it's not until there's sort of like, okay, you know, now we're going to shift gears. I'm going to try to remember all the things I haven't asked that person that I pull out my notes. And I instead of like, I used to do, I used to be like embarrassed about looking at my notes. And now after I've had the conversation with them, I'll be like, you know what? I'm just going to look at my notes that I prepared before I came here to make sure I've covered everything. And then I have them out very visibly in front of me. I don't know why used to be so self-conscious about that. Like I had to furtively look at anyway. You know, it could be that I, you know, like over here, I have a monitor with, you know, notes and stuff from stories and quotes that I've curated that we may or may not get to over the course of our conversation. I have like a notebook down here too. And I'm self-conscious in that. You can see me. And so like, if I'm peeking over here or looking down, it might look like I'm not paying attention to you. So I'm sure you understand this because, you know, you'll be looking down at notes, but it might be that degree of self-consciousness that if we're not engaging in eye contact or looking down, that we've checked out and that the other person is going to feel like, oh, I'm boring them. Totally. That's totally, that's absolutely it. And I feel like when you ask people, you know, a lot of times I'm interviewing people about the most difficult thing they've ever been through in their lives, right? And so just creating this space for that and having the room for that and having them feel comfortable with me. There's so much work that goes into making people feel comfortable, establishing trust, establishing like rules and guidelines and all that. Well, I love when you brought up, you know, a skips thing of removing the quotes and then having the confidence to have authority with the material and then cherry picking the right ones. And Matthew Wolf's brilliant new book, "Fires in the Night About the Earth Liberation Front" that just came out. He does that mass-ferally. There's almost no quotes in it, but it's one of the most deeply reported and research books I've ever read. You know, we had a conversation about that. And I love that idea because I tend to outsource material to the sources like I, you know, we want to hear them. You don't want to hear me. But the fact of the matter is you need to take agency and shape it in your own voice. I just would love for you to run with that a little longer about like trying to develop and. forge that confidence to yes, take your reporting, put it into your own words, and then use the best zingers to really drive a point home. Absolutely. So I feel like before I have the confidence to write in the way that I want to write where I really like own the material, I have to spend so much time with people. So I will say at the outset, once I sort of walk someone through what it's going to involve after they say yes to talking to me, I'll say something like, "I'm going to be around a lot and you're going to get sick of me at some point." And it's not that length of time I'm spending with people. To be clear, it's not always in person. I just finished a story where a lot of it was done by phone and zoom and text, but I was in constant communication with my sources for about six weeks, just throughout the day, every day, in various ways. So for me, it's like spending enough time with people that I feel like I have the right to describe what I'm describing in a story and to tell their story sometimes in a somewhat omniscient way. And that their voice comes in when they say something that's either unique in the way that they phrased it or is really just like, kind of makes you suck in your breath, like, wow, what a quote. And other than those two things, I don't quote a lot. There have been a few pieces, not since my Texas monthly days, but where I would have long block quotes from someone. And sometimes, it's been a really long time since I've done that, but just to give you a quick example, I wrote a story about this town called Roby, Texas, where 43 people won the lottery, won this like outrageously large jackpot together, and then how that sort of destroyed the town. And the second section was entirely one quote from the main character of my story talking about the day they won, like walking walking through how it happened that they realized they had won. And that was because the way that he told it, there was nothing I could write in my efforts that would ever approach the way this man with his West Texas very particular small town West Texas way of speaking told that story. So sometimes you can really steer into voice, but that's more unusual for me to do. And you bring up that particular story and then of course, there's your book and then there's any other number of long stories that you've written. And then there are also false starts and stuff of stories that don't get off the ground. And then something up with ideas is paramount to ideas or your currency. And I think some people don't understand, don't realize that sometimes they don't get off the ground sometimes it is a numbers game and then knowing when to rip the cord and move on is a skill unto itself. But just just for you, how is, you know, how do you generate the story ideas that, you know, that that that you're able to hopefully run with be it for the pro public New York Times or even in a book. Sure. So when I started a Texas monthly 25 again having no idea what I was doing. We had a monthly staff meeting where everyone who worked the magazine came and before the meeting each writer had to submit five fully developed story ideas. And it was just like it would be cool if we wrote about this, but you had made some calls or you had done some real research and you had fleshed out. So it was two things. It was coming up with five ideas that were viable ideas. So really you have to come up like 20 ideas to get down to five. And then you had to flesh them out and you had to write them up and they were put in a packet that was distributed to everyone. And then you would get called on, you know, whatever the editor in chief thought was a good idea on your page. You would get called on to talk about. So this is what I mean about being in this like accidental PhD program there. There were so many things about that that built these great muscles right so to pull that off every month. You know every second of the day you're looking for story ideas. There's nothing that is not fodder. There is no conversation that is not something that might lead to a story idea. But like it made me I mean I was already a curious person, but just you know made me talk to anyone and everyone ask them more about their lives. So that was really good training. I think now there's so many different ways in which stories come to me. And I mean going back to what you said it really is everything. You can be good at all the other parts of this job, but if you can't come up with if you can't consistently come up with strong story ideas, you can't do this. So it but it's a muscle. That was my point in talking about those meetings and what was asked of us. I would be in a panic every month starting off doing this maybe I'd have one idea or things that were kind of half baked or whatever. And it's an exercise and it's a muscle you build over time. So now a lot of times it's checking in with different people who I know are fascinated with the same strange things that I am in the criminal justice world. There are a few academics I'm always in conversation with. There are practicing attorneys I'm talking to I correspond with a lot of prisoners. Just because I keep in touch with people I've written about I read voraciously. And I just there's no one I encounter in life who I think might not give me a great story. So oh, and then there's a extensive series of Google alerts on various people and themes and ideas that I'm interested in. And I have now manifest two different people I had Google alerts on have contacted me in the past year. Of course not knowing I had Google alerts on them and I thought, okay, this is good. I'd like to somehow manifest of this. But I think you just it's relentless right it's like you're always looking for things and there's always that feeling with with other writers. And there's a pretty small cohort of us who write about criminal justice of being like seeing a story of theirs and thinking like, damn it, I wish I thought of that first. That's so good. But to that point, when you're in the bullpen with younger writers and then yeah, this cohort of doing writing about criminal justice, stuff, capital punishment or whatever. And you're like, damn, or even like David Grants trial by fire a story that's very inspirational for you. That's kind of that encroached kind of in your turf in a way and and then you know, for those of us who are of weaker mind raises hand right here, it can be like, oh, I'm like that's that motherfucker like I'm like super jealous or like really competitive. I'll never have moments like that. I'm very I minded. But yeah, that is how if you maybe metabolize maybe competition or maybe even those little pangs of envy to I don't know, just like, all right, I'm going to keep my eyes on my own paper, so to speak. Well, sadly, I mean, as this industry has been whittled down, you know, now it feels like so few people are are doing this that honestly, I don't mean I don't have my petty moments, I most certainly do. But it just feels like anyone who's pulling this off right now, it's a triumph, right, like like the rising tide lifts all boats like thank God other people are doing immersive long narratives. In the case of the Cameron Todd willing him story, I had been working on that story and gotten pulled off of it to work on like a lifestyle piece of Texas monthly and came back. This was in 2009, I believe, and came back to that story and sorry, I should explain Cameron Todd willing him was executed by the state of Texas in 2004 for crimes that he, I believe many people believe he did not commit. And anyway, came back to the story and I called his mother in Oklahoma and I was like, okay, finally, sorry for the delay and finally back on this, it's been a while, like, can't remember exactly how long. Remember she said something like, you know, oh, you know, just the nicest reporter came through here, I don't know if you know each other, he's from New York and his name is David grand and and like I cannot explain the physical sensation that I had in my body at that point. And to be clear, I was very not far down the road with that story, like that would have been truly devastating. if I'd been two thirds of the way and I was like in this earliest stages of that reporting. And then spent however many months just like every morning searching to see if his story had run and obviously not doing the story. And then I have this like very visual memory of sitting and reading his story when it came out and just being like oh my god this is like maybe the best magazine story ever written and thank god like he was the person to do it. You know what I mean? Like there was so much I learned I've written a lot about that piece but there was so much I learned from watching him do it. So yes there are totally a moments of jealousy. For me it's more like gosh I wish I could you know like I wish I could write physical descriptions like Tom's you know I'm terrible at physical descriptions like I'm really really struggle. I'll be like he had hair and brown eyes. I'm not so like really bad. I can do landscapes but not people for some reason. So anyway. Oh my gosh well that's yeah that's a great way of you know phrasing it as well. But you've written so many like really you know memorable long long magazine pieces. When did you know that catch the devil would be you know like magazine versus okay this is this is my foray into writing a full on book. So I think I was always really scared to write a book. You know I writing is hard writing magazine stories is hard and it just seemed like the what I knew a book would involve was so um Herculean that it was very intimidating and there were so many people who like gave bad advice and describing what book writing was. I remember one person said just think of it like 10 magazine stories which is very much not what it is like right. I'll answer your question in a second but just to address that one of the shocking things when you've been a magazine writer for decades and then you try to do a book is they're totally different animals like pacing alone character development sustaining a a story arc over 80 or 90 or 100,000 words is just a whole other thing we can talk about that more later but going back to your question I spent a year researching this story and wrote a magazine article for the New York Times magazine in ProPublica and it felt like I had just barely scratched the surface of the piece and I hadn't felt that necessarily before when I had written these epic the innocent man is 26,000 words I think blood will tell is 21,000 words. I felt like I had done what I wanted to do with those pieces so this felt different and I also you know shortly before before all like while I was working on the story John Grisham of all people wrote a novel that was based on and he he gave ample credit in the book but like in the end of the book he explained that it had been inspired by a story I had written and the book was very very different than the story but I remember when that happened thinking like oh why am I not doing this like why am I not taking my stories and expanding them in this way so and and also at that point my career kind of felt like it's now or never there was so much happening in the events that I had written about in the article that was still happening like when I wrote this article a death warrant came down for the man on death row who was in this article and when I published the story he was on death watch he had gotten to stay but he was literally 30 feet away from the execution chamber at Florida State Prison so it just felt like there's so much more here and I want to follow it wherever it goes in your latest New York Times piece but also in catch the devil that when these men are on death watch or on maybe it maybe it's more death row and they they hear the guards stomping in the keys jingling and they're wondering if it's going to be their cell to them be taken to death watch like just it is so just chilling to hear that and they took you really kind of put us in their headspace of oh this has my death warrant been signed and it's it's really what's incredibly moving but it's just like it pulses with a kind of terror that you feel for them no matter what they may have done when they were out of prison it's like you do feel for them in that moment that terror thank you so much for saying thank you for reading my most recent story which was published an hour before the Supreme Court handed down all its end of the year rulings and so you may you and my mother may be the only people who read that story so thank you well we even had that story which kind of you know piggybacks on stuff you write about and catch the devil as well with that with the priest at the heart of it who has been kind of tasked with being with the these condemned men in their final days and hours and the toll that takes on him but even for you reporting on the stuff you've reported on for the book and for all your other stories like what is the toll that you know it takes on you and how do you gired yourself against that so this is hard to describe because so much of what I write about is I realize dark and intense but the people who I get to spend time with to tell these stories are by and large people who I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it and you know I always think about the perspective that I have as someone who spends a lot of time talking to people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated the things that they long for or the things that they savor when they have the chance to get them or I'm thinking in particular of one exonery who I've spent a lot of time with the way that they describe just the most ordinary things so this exonery Anthony Graves someone I wrote about earlier in my career he had been on Texas's death row and and then was freed but he talked about what it was like to go into a grocery store after you've been in solitary for years and the all the colors and the textures and the smells and the the the way light falls on different things and I mean the way he talked about going to the grocery store was like how one of us might talk about going to the greatest to see the greatest work of art we've ever seen you know the way these men talk about the food they long for or putting their feet in the grass things like that I feel like I have a lucky to have that perspective another thing is the potential for writing to change things and there are you know there's some stories that I've written that made actual real things happen in the world and that is the greatest feeling there is and then there are other stories that haven't done that but they have put a light on people who really needed that light on them if that makes sense you know it highlighted something that is either important to make readers think more deeply about or maybe it focused on people who are working in the trenches of something and no one's paying attention but it's so important what they're doing and a moment ago you said how you know this particular story as a magazine story asked more of you it wanted to be bigger so what was it about you that was like well this is the one that I that I truly need that what was it telling you that made you need to again this is this is the book one so I've been looking for a jailhouse snitch story for a long time and the reason for that is that you know whenever I would start reading about a case and try to decide whether it was the next thing I was going to write about whenever a case had a snitch it was always a big red flag it was a sign that something was wrong with the case not necessarily that the defendant was innocent but that something wasn't right there wasn't enough evidence or maybe there were more nuances to the case or punishment they were asking for was to express extreme or what have you and when I found this case and we can talk about how I found it but when I found this case it illustrated all the things that I wanted to say it had a really really fascinating and complex and sometimes hilarious and sometimes mendacious character at its center who could through our own interest in con man narratives and just interesting characters sort of carry us through all the inner workings of the criminal justice system. Like if I write a story or a book that pontificates about how bad Jill House informants are, it's not going to move anyone, no one's going to care. But if I write a book that's about a really over-the-top con artist who's been married to nine different women, who's this charming big amist, sort of a I always think of him as the sort of like 1970s Jack Nicholson type of guy. You know he's up to something bad but you're not sure exactly what but he's so charming you're along for the ride. Like if I can use a character like that to unpack all these things I'm interested in about why the criminal justice system is broken, that's a great way to tell a story. How did you find the story? Sure. In 2018 I published a story called Blood Will Tell that was about a small town murder case and junk forensic science and it was published in two parts in the Times magazine in ProPublica and I got this avalanche of male afterward with people who want to need or write about particular cases and this happens a lot and it's really hard to sift through all these cases because there are all sorts of terrible things you're reading about and everyone portrays themselves as innocent and so on and so forth. But there was one email that really stood out it was from a woman named Laura Fernandez who's at Yale Law School and of course her credential got my attention but she wrote to me and said that she represented a man on Florida's death row named Jim Dele and that she had been so concerned that his case was a miscurriage of justice that she had reactivated her law license after many years of not practicing so that she could represent him and I'd never in all my years of doing this scene seen that so that intrigued me but sadly I don't think that would have been enough had it not been for this sort of throwaway line at the end of her email in which she said that there had been a witness or the star witness against her client who was a former police officer turned jailhouse informant who had testified against him and I can't remember if in that email she said that he was this veteran con artist or not that certainly would have intrigued me but it was finally that like needle in the haystack like okay maybe this is the story I've been looking for this is the case where I can really really tell about the damage of a jailhouse informant and it's an interesting enough character that you're going to want to be along for the ride yeah you wrote this about Paul Skollnick you know my relationship with Skollnick had begun with the con when I first met him in federal prison he sized me up instantly he saw my hunger for a story no other journalist had not just any story but a story that mattered a story with real life and death consequences so he gave me exactly what I wanted he promised he would reveal everything and in the end of course he delivered nothing that's exactly right so I start the book with my first meeting with him where he tricks me which I thought was important because I I think it's easy with any story about a con artist to think like at least like idiots like I would never fall for this right and so I start the book where I go to see this man Paul Skollnick in federal prison this is in the fall of 2018 and at that point I know that he has helped prosecutors send upwards of 40 people to prison over the years a number of them to Florida's death row based on lies that he has told on the stand about having heard these men's quote-unquote confessions and I knew that he had been in and out of jails and prisons for 30 plus years so I knew exactly who he was and I went to try to get him to go to come on board with me for a story that you know rather than me piecing together what he had done that he would walk people through it and we would have things from his perspective and at that point he was old and sick and sitting in federal prison and I thought he might actually be willing to do this and so what I describe in there is just that he immediately sized me up and this is what he did with everyone you know what's the what's the thing this person wants and then he would give them that thing so for me it was I really want this story and so you know he he strung me along and said you know I think the story really needs to be told I think you're the person to tell it I want to help you tell it talk to the warden come back here as much as you can write to me in between and I'll help you tell this story and I was elated and called my editor and I was so excited that I'd gotten this story and of course he as I say there he gave me nothing there was months of wishy washy communication where he hadn't received the letter or something going on in the prison mail room and he wasn't feeling well and I realized okay he's not going to give me anything so my job here and that's really what kicks off the book is I have to go like my revenge is finding out everything that he didn't want to tell me not revenge but well I'm maybe so actually well I think what's really kind of cool about the book and maybe some somewhat of a slight of hand that you perform is that you open the book really with the you know an opening chapter on Skullnick and so we think that okay we're going to be with him maybe the whole time but then it quickly comes about you know Jim daily more or less and we're like more or less following him and his trials throughout and Skullnick of course pops up but it's it's almost Jim's story but he's not the one you feed us first. Yeah so that was probably that took so much time trying to figure that out so my brilliant editor Hillary Redman and I tried so many different configurations of this and in the end it was just so clear that Skullnick was the way into the story and at the same time that he's so immoral and he's so he does so many bad things that you wouldn't want to stay with him for the entirety of a book that you want you you want to also be with characters who whose interior lives you can describe and who have heart and so a lot of my reporting and then writing became both about Jim daily this man on Florida's death row who's there because in part because of Skullnick's word and then also the women and girls that Skullnick left behind and the sort of collateral damage that comes about when prosecutors offices trade bad information that he was peddling for freedom they would let him out in exchange for testimony in these cases and then he would go out and cause more damage. Yeah they're in the next wave in this authors sort of afterward to a story you know you write the off in the first thing I figure out about a story is how to end it and then I try to figure out how to get the end to the end as efficiently as possible and figuring out a story's first section can unhinge me but endings are pretty intuitive. So hearing you just work through the permutations of the beginning I sense that even here whenever this book came out what close to 15 years ago like getting into a story is still it's still like the struggle how are we going to what is this go what expectations is this going to set? Absolutely and it's so funny to hear you read that now because this book more than anything I've ever worked on was the book I didn't know how it was going to end I mean you know Jim is still on Jim at one point in the writing of this had an execution date and was within 10 days of that execution date and could at any moment at any time receive another execution date. So one of the things that was the challenge in writing this book was I didn't necessarily know what we were moving toward was was this ending with Jim with Jim's death or or not but beginnings oh my god beginnings are the worst or just the worst and I think my favorite writing is always like after like both as a reader and a writer is after you get after over that hump like there's so much like wind up and you have to set so many things up and you're um finding finding your tone, the writing style, there's so many different things you have to establish in those first couple of paragraphs. And for me it's more when it gets going and you've established the characters that you can really have fun with things. And also what struck me about the book too and some of the world building of it is being in the 1980s, Florida, and the newspaper culture and how crime was covered and specifically how the young girl who was murdered, how she was characterized in the newspapers too. So just what struck you about that and how she was and I'm blanking on her name and you'll know it. But about how she was characterized as part of the building of the story. Shelly Bogey, yes, I'm so glad you picked up on that. There's so much in there. I was a teenage girl in this era of the 80s and I remember I was in Florida but there was so much in revisiting that time that was so shocking about the way that girls were seen both by the media, by law enforcement. So Shelly was 14 years old when she was murdered. This is the case that Jim Dele was sentenced to death in and there's another defendant serving a life sentence in this case who has repeatedly confessed the crime and then recanted. But she was basically written about in the local paper as a bad girl. She didn't go to school all the time. She was out late at night and look what happens when you're a girl like that. I think the thing that shocked me more than that is there's a 12 year old girl in the book, this girl Karen Parker. And she encounters Paul Scalnick and she is a very precocious girl and she is fascinated and eventually infatuated with him and he takes advantage of that and prays upon her and she later goes to police and explains that he molested her. And when she does this, again, she's 12 years old. She is hooked up to a polygraph, if she's given a polygraph exam by a male officer, family's not with her. Paul Scalnick, the man who testifies against dozens of different men, is never given a polygraph exam. And while I don't believe that polygraph exams are accurate in any way, at the time, people believe they really determined whether someone was speaking the truth or not. And I just thought that double standard was so fascinating. On the cost of what happened to Karen Tule, I think even her father or parents were like, they didn't believe her. And then she ran away that year when she was 13, left home for good when she was 14, taking refuge at our runaway shelter. And it's just, and here's you drop in a quote and this goes back to our earlier conversations. Like I didn't trust anyone for a long, long time. And even just that, you hear the, just the cost of this isolated traumatic incident and how it can just reverberate for a lifetime. Yes. I'm so glad that you noticed that because I had told that whole passage in a non-nitian voice and I went to Hillary, my editor and I was like, I've got to have this quote in here. Am I allowed to do that? What are the rules? She was like, yes, you're allowed to do that. It's not like you sign a contract saying, I'm only, anyway, but it is different in magazine writing. It's much, you use quotes differently than you do in books. So that was something I had to learn. But you brought up pacing earlier and it's different from magazine stories, obviously, as it is for a book. And the pacing, I mean, it becomes a riveting, especially when Jim's death's certificate is signed and you like, okay, the clock is now ticking and resetting and resetting and then and so forth. So just what was the challenge for you to make sure that the pacing was satisfactory in book form, which is an altogether different muscle? It really is. So to give you a sense of how the pacing was a challenge, whenever I would arrive at something in the book narrative that maybe I had covered a tiny bit of in the magazine story, this I had to this so many times, I would think, ooh, today's going to be an easy day because, you know, I can just, and I did this so many times, I would, you know, copy the piece from the magazine, like the paragraph I was thinking of and I would plunk it into the book manuscript. And every single time I would have to cut it because they had totally different DNA. They didn't match in any way. And so the pacing of a book, you know, you you are asking so much of a reader. I think I handed in 100,000 words and it runs at about 80. Hillary really wanted to make it taught, you know, as taught as possible. But I think that you're asking so much of readers that my my impression going into book writing was, oh, this is going to be so fun, I can go down all those rabbit trails and explore all those things you never get to do when you're on a magazine deadline. And I found actually the opposite. It was like, I had to be more disciplined in a book because I can't lose you because I'm asking you to go such a farther distance with me, right? So how do you keep that pace? How do you both like breathe air into the narrative in a way that you don't in a magazine piece? And at the same time, how do you keep that that pace so that people don't turn the page? And I always think with magazine writing, you know, most people who are reading the New York Times magazine now are reading it on their phone. And so I always think about the fact that my words are competing with a reader's texts and notifications and alerts and calls and whatever else they were doing on their phone before. And I have to write in such a way that I'm making them swipe those things away and stay with the narrative. And that is always so challenging, not saying I always succeed in doing that, but that's what I'm trying to do. And it was the same with the book, even though it was longer for. Yeah, that's a it's crazy how the attention economy as such as it is has screwed fundamentally corrupted our capacity to sit with something longer. And that you the fact that you even have to think about making people like, Oh, is this worthy of swiping away this Instagram notification? Or am I going to go into the app and maybe forget about this great story from Pam that was reading and then lose yourself for 20 minutes on Instagram. That's what you're competing with now. It makes me really sad. And it definitely has changed certain things about how I write. I don't don't do long landscape descriptions anymore. I don't do long wind ups. I don't do meditative. They're definitely I write shorter paragraphs than I used to. And at the same time that that is sad to recognize that things have changed so much. I think anyone who pretends they haven't does so at their peril. I mean, this is the world we live in. I've seen my own reading habits changed dramatically. We have to respond to that in some way, you know. Well, I think we would be remiss if we didn't talk about especially with your with Ketsu devil, but also in your recent piece for the New York Times was about how Florida has just been accelerating the pace with which signing death certificates and Ronda Santos doing doing that and like far exceeding the rest of the country. So just like just take us to that and you know, what's happening there and how that makes the Jim Daly's case all the more grim really. So the most recent piece I did for the Times magazine in ProPublica grew out of some of my book reporting that there's a little bit of it in the book, but the book is really just narrative. So last year and this year, excuse me, let me rephrase that this year, Florida has executed more men than all other states combined. Last year, Florida executed 40% of the people who were put to death in the United States. So these are just like astonishing numbers. And I didn't see people talking about it. I mean, outside of the tiny little world of people like me who care about this stuff, I didn't see people talking about it. And I wanted to understand why and the story became because I couldn't answer the why because public records laws surrounding this make the decision process. So opaque and governor DeSantis who sets these dates really has said very little on the subject. I ended up writing this story about what the impact is on the ground, on the real people who have to carry out these orders. So I'm always interested. And you know, we change laws and make legislation at this very high level in state legislatures or in Congress. But then there are real people who have to carry these things out. And so in Florida, I focused on a priest who is walking then literally through the last days of their lives through a former death row warden and through others whose lives have been really changed by this pace of executions. And all the more tragic is that someone like Scalnick who is informing on someone like Jim Dele just making up a story in the prosecution runs with it. And it puts him with the story. He shouldn't even be behind bars. It's not a matter of he did something, but he shouldn't be on death row. What I would say about that is the book is about different kinds of storytelling, right? Like there are the stories that Paul Scalnick tells that are too good to be true literally, but they're useful to prosecutors who need a conviction or who want the death sentence. There are the stories that Jim Dele tells that his co-defendants tell. It was interesting to me who was believed and who wasn't. And how the criminal justice system, once it has accepted a narrative as fact, once jurors have heard live testimony once a verdict has been handed down, there's almost no turning back. It's so difficult to sort of unring that bell. And where that intersects with this accelerated rate of executions happening right now in Florida is Florida has 30 death row exonaries in Florida, the highest number of exonaries of any state in the nation. So we know that mistakes are happening. We know it's possible to get this wrong. And so when you're working on this accelerated pace with that knowledge, that's pretty terrifying. Yeah. And which builds to this crescendo where you write, but my revulsion at that moment was not reserved for Skullnick, who had known he would be rewarded all those years ago for telling just the right story. It was the entire apparatus that enabled and encouraged him for the detectives who incentivized him, for the prosecutors who represented him as a truth teller, for the trial judge who allowed jurors to hear Skullnick's testimony for the apple of judges who rubber stamped it all paving the way for the governor to one day sign a death warrant. And that right there kind of just, it is something of a crescendo. Well, thank you. You're making me so happy that you, that was a part I worked on a lot because I wanted people to understand that Paul Skullnick is not the villain of this book. He does a lot of villainous things, but our frustration, our maybe even anger, really shouldn't lie with him. It should lie with a system that emboldens and empowers someone like him. And that leaves his sight in the end. I mean, the reason that Paul Skullnick is deployed in these cases is because prosecutors are seeking justice in their minds to, you know, for victims' families and to, in Shelley's case, you know, make someone pay a price for what was done to her. And in doing so, in so many of these cases, you can see that sometimes prosecutors can lose sight what happens in the process. When you rely on someone like Skullnick, the damage to the whole system, the degradation to everything around it is profound. I can't believe he survived in prison with the reputation he had. So one of the reasons or the reason he survived in prison was he was so often put off by himself in, you know, some sort of cell where he was not in the mix in general population. And this to me made his stories all the more incredible. Like everyone knew he was a jailhouse snitch. And he's housed apart from other people. And he makes up these stories about, you know, whenever he's taken out to the prison yard or he's walking past someone's cell that they just blurred out a confession. And I mean, there are parts of the story. Like there is some black humor in the book of just like, how is it possible that anyone believe this, but they did. And with that paragraph I read earlier, you know, your revulsion, like that to me is a very restrained but voici paragraph. Like that's that's where you can have voice without it being wolfian or David Foster Wallace. Yes. You know, that's where you are imparting a degree of style, but it is understated. Yes. I mean, to be clear, if I had any idea how to write like David Foster Wallace or Tom Wolf, I would totally write like that and be extremely voici. I feel like I can only get voici after I've earned it and in the book, the last quarter of it is in the first person. And I feel like by that point, hopefully, you know, I've earned the right to do that. But it also was the part of the book that I lived through. The other parts I was excavating. And you know, someone like Karen Parker, the 12 year old girl we talked about, you know, I had to go through so many different public records and her name was redacted. And I had to figure out who she was from context clues and then track her down and can been sort of talk to me and all these things that that was a different kind of work. And a different kind of writer might have written the book entirely in the first person about that discovery. But I didn't want to be in the way until I could be sort of a vehicle for the storytelling that it needed. Yeah, that's a brilliant way of phrasing it, Pam. Fantastic. I need to be mindful of your time. I feel like I can totally, I'm sure a lot of people talk to you like this and they were like, I can talk to you for three hours for four hours. It's your, it's your skill of 100%. I feel like, no, I have to tell you, I will just say I am so grateful for this conversation. And I hope you don't have to record this part. But this was a particularly brutal deadline I just went through and I, it really helps to have had this conversation about craft and you're, you're like, it means so much to me that you went back and read all this stuff and asked a thoughtful question. So thank you. Oh, of course, Pam. Well, the one thing I love asking as I close these conversations down is for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can just be like anything you're excited about. So what would you recommend for the listeners? So I just got a galley of Robert Holker's new book. Oh, shit, I've got that too over here. Yes. I'm so happy to have this. So Bob, as he goes by, wrote this book, The Vanishing Family. And I literally, like, I'm so excited for the day on Book Tour when I get to just sit somewhere, like maybe in transit to the next thing and read this. This will be my reward. But for folks who don't know, Robert Holker wrote Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road to just, I mean, triumphs of narrative nonfiction. And he's the absolute master of telling a rich, immersive character driven story with exhaustive reporting. But you don't feel that. You just feel the great storytelling. And the book is about a family that has a genetic mutation that where 50% of people will get this particular type of dementia that's very early onset. I think it starts in your 40s. And it begins with, like, behavior that's not appropriate, having affairs and things like that. It's not immediately obvious. I think I'm par-- I haven't jumped in yet, but that it's dementia. And each person in the family knows they have a 50/50 chance of getting this. And they've lost half of their family to this bizarre and horrible disease. So he just has this way. And I think because I'm also drawn to dark subjects, he has this way of writing that I like to study where he writes about things that are tough. But he does so in a way where you're just gobbling up every word. It's so beautifully done. So I can't wait to read it. Awesome. And I love hearing you say, to read it and to study it, almost like the elder colleague you had in the '90s where you're underlining things and you're then picking his brain. That would be, you know, ripe ground for another podcast down the road or we do the film study. But I hope that door is open. And I hope we can open it down the road, Pam. But I'm just so grateful that we got to talk about, you know, your approach to the work and your wonderful book catch the devil. So just thanks so much for the time. Thank you so, so much. I so appreciate it. Awesome. Man, that was something, wasn't it? Thanks to Pam for coming on the podcast. And for having such nice things to say about her experience on the pod. I am buzzing. from her kind words. I think it would be important to read that, but I will just say it was very kind. Be sure you're following the show's Instagram page at Creative Nonfiction Podcast and at your subdub. On the podcast, wherever you listen to them and as well, subdub at pitch club and the flagship rage against the algorithm. Something struck me in this conversation. Well, many things were being honest, but one was parting shot worthy and speaks to my desperation as a 46 year old journalist and author. This is notion of the pitch meeting. Now, this was the great benefit of being in a vibrant newsroom, specifically a magazine newsroom that routinely published long form reporting, artful journalism as Walt Harrington might put it. As Pam said in this conversation, they were all forced to come to the meetings with ideas and pitch them in front of the group. You know, flesh out those ideas, maybe pre-report them out a bit. And yes, many were not worthy, but if you had to do a bunch of these every month and essentially workshop them and listen to others pitch theirs, you can envision a scenario where you can get quite good at crystallizing an idea into something that will keep you gainfully employed. Now, how many of us who don't have the benefit of a media institution force ourselves into this kind of pressure cooker of idea generation and idea development, the rigorous pre-reporting done again and again to ensure that there is in fact a story there. I'd say very few of us in the freelance world. Maybe we drum one or two ideas for a month or one or two over a year and we wonder why we can't land anything and maybe we don't pitch as often as we should because it's hard and tiring, time-intensive, labor-intensive. On some level, it sure as hell is a numbers game. But we don't have the peer pressure of bringing ideas to a conference room where we maybe have a minute to sell the editor in chief, who's sitting at the head of the table in front of the group, of an idea worthy of a full-blown assignment. Imagine what that would do to your sense of story and your nose for story. I'm not so sure if these meetings happen anymore but readers and writers and editors are worse off for it. I know the out of us team has pitch meetings where they review queries but it's just among the editors really. It's not like there's a staff full of writers bouncing these ideas off each other, not unlike how our writers room operates in television where you just throw out ideas and then through that group think you start to really crystallize on a narrative. I guess what I'm saying is maybe I need to build something of this nature that is a wing of the pitch club bungalow or to keep piggybacking on the actual club theme like a VIP suite of the club where writers are invited in to pitch ideas and front of a cohort where the pitches are workshopped, basically given thumbs-up or thumbs-down, not to discourage anyone but to say that needs more work or that's an idea you might want to give up on and move on to something else, similar to how the Texas monthly team worked through ideas. The purpose being if you subscribe and paid to be part of a pitch club cohort, you would find five or six ideas a month and you would find ways to work through them. You'd have more skin in the game and accountability if this was a couple hundred dollars to be in this cohort, a small cohort. You'd have no choice but to improve. Once you put some money on the line, you're going to go find some ideas. Because you'd be bringing five or six ideas to the VIP suite every month, say for a four-month stretch, that's 20 to 24 ideas, you might not have otherwise ginned up. You mean to tell me you couldn't maybe find one real zinger there that you can land somewhere? I don't know. Again, it's a numbers game. If you bring that many ideas, I think you're going to land something. Now, will I do it? Maybe it's a way that I can give pitch club away for free but have this VIP experience. I could survey the pitch club audience, which is starting to nudge near a thousand subscribers, which is pretty cool. But platform being currency, I want to keep seeing that grow. That's going to make me, as I say, a lot, that is what will ultimately make me attractive to publishers. As my editor for the Front Runner said, after the rejection of the one particular baseball biography, me being who I am, not being tethered to a media institution, like the athletic, or ESPN, I have to make my own weather. It's very hard for us who aren't tethered to a legacy media institution to make our own weather. We don't have the backing of that institution giving us altitude or a thermal to let us glide up on. We have to create that somehow and that's all the more challenging. That's why I'm always saying that's why I give so much away pitch club and stuff like that because I want the platform. I want the concrete platform I can put in front of gatekeepers and be like, "Oh wow, this guy's got an audience, making my own weather," I guess, as they say. In any case, the VIP suite could be this thing for four months or so, where yeah, maybe you pay 500 bucks and there will be five or six of us in that room and we meet every month and you pitch the ideas you got, kind of workshop them, be like, "You know, you got one there, I would go back to that one." It's just this notion of bouncing these ideas off each other and maybe I can be like, "Oh, you know what that would be a good fit for this outlet." I think you're pitching that to the wrong outlet. You should go here and so forth with it and that way it's actual, you know, it's putting it into practice, right? I think we would all get better. I don't know, it's an idea but as you know, I have a lot of ideas and I'm not big on execution. Sometimes I'm an idea factory but when it comes to actually implementing it, sometimes I just get tired, so very tired. So stay wild, see you in efforts and if you can't do, interview, see you. (upbeat music)