Scott Johnson

I realized at some point I just I have to talk to this person.

You know, I don't.

I have to try, I have to do my absolute best to talk to this person to understand as much as I can about what happened and why.

And yeah, I mean, I, I don't know.

I don't know how it would have gone if I hadn't, if I hadn't talked to him.

I I mean, I had quite a bit of material from other people, but I didn't have his perspective and it was his perspective that I wanted and that I felt I needed to to to really understand things.

And ultimately, you know, I think the the kind of the

the sort of the big picture takeaway that really was interesting to me that emerged from those conversations that I had with him was kind of a larger, just a larger, a better, bigger, more nuanced understanding about the nature of kind of storytelling.

he was somebody who was constantly telling stories.

I mean, he told these elaborate stories to his victims to ensnare them in these really elaborate fantasies and these plots to get them to travel from Colorado Springs to Jakarta, Indonesia.

I mean, thousands and thousands of miles away to pursue these fantastical fake work opportunities.

You know, it takes a real skill, not just with impersonation, but with story building, like persuading people that this tale that you're spinning is real and legitimate.

And that was his real skill.

You know, he had a real talent for storytelling and kind of drawing people into these imaginary worlds.

And what I was so...

kind of compelled by when I started having conversations with him was just the the immense sort of descriptive powers that he had and the imagination that he had and the and the sort of ability to pull from all these different strands of you know myth

and movies and books and childhood stories and this whole universe of stories that he would constantly be sort of swimming in.

And he would use all of these things to inform our conversations.

And so as a result, we would have these really interesting conversations about

you know, Indonesian, Indonesian myth, or the, you know, the gods and the goddesses, you know, who people, the ancient, you know, the ancient religions of the archipelago, or, you know, like, you know, the, the, I talk about in the book, the, the thousand and one nights, he was a huge fan of the thousand and one nights.