1. Interview Carlos Barragán [Francesca] Carlos Barragán, welcome to Writer's Voice. [Carlos Barragán] Thank you so much. [Francesca] This was a fascinating book, The Yahoo Boys. I've long been interested in what is really behind this phenomenon, and you do such a wonderful job of talking about it. The book really is an immersive kind of experience, and I really loved it. You write that when you first came to Nigeria, you weren't there to write a book about romance fraudsters, or even to meet your fixer, Biggie, who was also a Yahoo boy. You were looking for the man who had scammed your own mother in what seemed like an impossible attempt to understand why she'd fallen in love with someone who didn't exist. So tell us more about that. Orient our listeners to your story. [Carlos Barragán] Thank you so much for your kind words, Francesca. So this project started way before I knew I was writing a book. In 2015, my mother, who is a single mother in Spain, in Madrid, I encouraged her to join a dating app because she had struggled a bit finding a partner, and she's a dentist. She was working a lot at the same time, taking care of me and my two other brothers. So she joined a dating app, and after a few months, she met this wonderful, beautiful American soldier called Brian, and my mother fell in love instantly, I would say. And they would exchange these beautiful, but a bit weird, emails almost every day, and she would tell me about it. And, you know, well, I was 19 back then, and I didn't want to get too much into my mom's sentimental life, but it sounded very weird from the very beginning. And after a month, and after my mom telling us that Brian was going to move from Syria, because he was supposedly based in Syria, he was going to move to Madrid, and my mom had bought two rings for him and for her, and they were going to live in this beautiful life together. After all that, and of course, my brothers and I were becoming increasingly suspicious, although I would tell the listeners, you know, the internet in 2015, and the internet now is not the same. We were less suspicious back then. But I think what really made me see that this was a scam was that Brian told my mom, I'm going to send some gold bars to my mom's apartment. And, you know, we all want free money, but we all know that nothing is free in this life. So I started doing some research, and I found that this was a very common scam in America, already the scam of the American soldier deployed overseas. So I proved to my mom that Brian actually was not an American soldier in Syria, I tracked the IP email address. And the result was the email was coming from Lagos, Nigeria, rather than Syria. As you can imagine, it was a bit of a shock for my mom, because she had already built this kind of like beautiful castle. But because she trusted me and my brothers, she deleted the conversations, she stopped talking to him, and kind of move on something that later I would discover that it's very difficult for victims to do. And as a family, we moved on from that story. We pretended nothing had happened until the pandemic came. And, you know, pandemic for me means isolation means lockdowns, and means my mother's loneliness. So during that time, I was already becoming a reporter, and I became increasingly interested in knowing who Brian was, you know, the American soldier, who actually was a Nigerian scammer. And the book was born out of intense desire to really know who Brian was. And in the first 20 pages of the book, the readers discovered that I'm not going to find Brian because Lagos is a city of 20 million people. But at least I'm going to really learn about these Nigerian romance scammers. [Francesca] So the scams themselves have a history. You trace a line from the older Nigerian 419 scams, and the famous Nigerian Prince emails, I remember getting those, to the Yahoo boys of today and today's romance scams. Although that, as we'll talk later, that landscape is changing as well. How did the evolution happen? [Carlos Barragán] Well, it's very interesting. Obviously, with everything in life, you have to go back to the past. And these scams predate even the modern independent Nigeria, you know, the British Empire colonized that area of West Africa, even created Nigeria out of nothing because Nigeria is a combination of hundreds of tribes and languages and religions. So the first impersonation scams, as in like locals pretending to be white people, are dated around the early 20th century. And they were not targeting white people. Actually, they were targeting all the locals. These locals would dress up as British emissioners or British soldiers, and they would try to get cattle or money or grain from these other locals. And they would be so scared of the British soldiers that they could give them whatever they asked them to. Then this industry that we are more aware of, the so-called Nigerian Prince scam, it started in the 80s, when the oil boom of Nigeria, when the Nigerian economy kind of like went into shambles after the oil boom of the 70s, you had 10s of millions of people, of graduates, of university graduates who were unemployed. And one of the industries that emerged was this scam industry of also impersonation. And letters, they would, they sent these incredible letters to the American, to Europe saying, I'm a Nigerian Prince, and you white man or you white woman, I need your help. If you send me a 5% of this money, you will access all these funds. It would also happen not only with Nigerian princes, but also with petroleum ministers. And I think it reveals a bit of like, not only what was happening in Nigeria, but also what was happening in the West. In the 90s, these scammers were targeting greed. It tells a lot about that time in America, that time in Europe, about the unbridled optimism of our times. But then in the 2000s, and I would say with the advent of the smartphone, they moved from targeting greed to targeting loneliness. So they moved from these Nigerian Prince scam to, I'm an American soldier deployed overseas, and I'm very lonely, and I want to start a new life with you. Or maybe they also pretended to be a superstar, and they wanted to have a new life with you. So I think that that evolution tells a lot about both the Nigerian economy, and the situation in the West. [Francesca] So you're putting this in the context of what's going on in the zeitgeist of the time. I mean, the 1980s, greed is good. Loneliness. Why do you think people are so lonely now? Why is it so easy for people to give up in some way their, you know, their rational mind in order to come under the influence of people who many times the victim themselves suspects is a scam, and yet they keep on? [Carlos Barragán] That's probably the biggest question in the book. And I really like that some readers, even though I thought I ended up writing a failed book about loneliness, some readers described it as a modern study on loneliness. To answer your question, I could go back to my first trip to Nigeria. When I started meeting these scammers, who were scamming both men and women in America and Europe, I was expecting to find a very sophisticated organization, something that justified someone like my mom, who is well educated, who managed to raise three kids, who is a successful businesswoman, to almost send money to someone who she has never met. Instead, what I found was this group of young men who were kind of like freelancers, they were on their own, just with a phone, with a lot of time. And they were just providing something that these people on the other side of the ocean didn't have, which was attention. So I think it was a very humbling experience for me, because I realized that I was looking for something so complicated and intricate. And then I realized that there is nothing more powerful than simple human connection. And these scammers, like, for example, Biggie, who is one of the main characters of the book, he would tell me that there is nothing more powerful than a good morning every day. And, you know, the first time he told me that, I thought, is that true? But then reading all these messages, because that's another thing I managed to get, dozens of scammers let me see how they scam these victims. And what really drew the victims into the scammers' horror, it wasn't these beautiful messages that they wrote, because sometimes these messages were hard, like even grammar mistakes. It was just the sheer amount of time they devoted to the victims. And then it kind of tells you something about what's going on on the other side. And we can talk more about that. But my guess is that it's connected to, as you mentioned, the saddest of the time, where everyone is competing for our attention. [Francesca] If you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with Carlos Barragán. He's the author of The Yahoo Boys, Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance. Romance scammers. You've really pointed out one of the fascinating contradictions in the book, which is these relationships are fake. But the emotional labor within them is quite real. The scammers have to listen, they reassure, they flirt, they have to remember details. Sometimes they console people who are depressed. What happens psychologically when you spend months pretending to love someone whose life you are simultaneously destroying? [Carlos Barragán] That's another angle that depends case by case. When you are there in Lagos, as I was in a community, I focused in one neighborhood in Lagos, so I can't speak for all Lagos, let alone for Nigeria. But in that community, you see that the least successful scammers are those who are wondering all the time the impact on the victims. But at the same time, when you see so many of these young kids, as I did, doing this, you know that these scammers are no psychopaths, because there are all the socioeconomic conditions behind driving this scourge. So that led me to wonder, how do these kids or how do these doing something manage to handle the psychological pressure you described in your question? Because it is a lot. Even like, we can all think about our own relationships, our family, our partners, it's always difficult to manage that emotional baggage. And we know that the people around us, it's difficult for them to manage their emotional baggage. So how do they do it? One quick answer would be to say, they don't care, but I don't think that's true. They wouldn't tell me, they would tell me that that's not true. And the way they handle that, it's either by smoking a lot of drugs. They do a lot of drugs. Initially, they do it because they spend a lot of time talking to the victims at night, because mostly they are talking to Americans and their time zone is different. So they need to be awake at night. I think that drugs are very useful to shatter down their conscience. That's one way of thinking. The other way of thinking is kind of like lying to themselves as well. I had another main character, Chibuke, who was scamming an Irish woman and was, you know, destroying her life. He scammed her for more than four years and got tens of thousands of euros from her. And he would tell me that he was in love with her. And there were things he would share with her that he had not told anybody else, even though he was pretending to be a white man. So I wouldn't say that he was lying to me or lying to him 100%. I'm sure there was a kernel of truth, because when you are playing that role all the time, reality is unlike fiction, blurs, and you don't even know what is true and what is not. And I think that that produces that weird element in the book where you don't know whether the scammers are lying to me or lying to themselves, or the scammers are already accepting that they are a different persona. And yeah, I think there's a lot of lying to themselves as well. [Francesca] So take us inside the Scammer's Playbook. How does a Yahoo boy find someone, create a false identity, often the identity of a woman, gain that person's trust, and eventually turn the emotional intimacy into money? [Carlos Barragán] Okay, I'm going to talk as if I was a scammer, so the listeners know the playbook as it is. The playbook for them is so simple that they have memorized it. And if you want to be a Yahoo boy, as they call themselves, if you want to be a scammer, first you have to decide what kind of romance scam you are going to do. Are you going to do military, as they call it, the same that they did with my mom? So you pretend to be an American soldier deployed overseas. Are you going to pretend to be a famous person, impersonate a famous person? And that means impersonating someone from Donald Trump to a WWE fighter to Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie, you name it. But you could also be a porn star, or you could be a random woman that is a single mother, and then she's looking for someone to be with. Then you decide who is going to be your target. Because one important thing that I saw there is that even though we associate these scams with female victims, they target both male victims and female victims. If you're a porn star, they are targeting male victims. And if you are an American soldier, you're targeting female victims. Once you decide who you are going to be, you create a fake account on social media, mostly Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. It may be sometimes they hack an existent social media account because that way it appears more legitimate. And once you have that, they do bombing, basically adding new friends, so they appear even more legitimate. Again, they post pictures, etc., etc. They try to turn their social media as real as possible. Of course, most of these guys that I talked to, they are teenagers, they are 20-somethings, they don't really know much about the Western world. So from an outsider's perspective, the account feels off. You know that there is something weird. But for some people, it doesn't. And once they've built that, they start sending messages, as many as they can. And, you know, they might send 100 messages to 100 people, and only five of them reply, and only one of them will send money. But that sending money will require hours of conversation, days of conversation, in some cases even months, depending on who they are pretending to be. And once they get the money, and, you know, I'm simplifying this a lot, but maybe I think the listeners will get an idea. To get the money, imagine you're an American soldier. In the case of my mom, they tell you they're going to send some gold bars so they can start a new life together. They know that victims like my mom, they don't care about the gold bars. They don't really need the money. They care about the emotional connection they are building. And they tell you with that money, we're going to start a new life. Or maybe they tell you, okay, I'm traveling, I'm flying to your city, but I need money for the tickets or whatever excuse they come up with. And then they ask you to either buy gift cards or buy Bitcoin, and that way they receive the money. [Francesca] You mentioned Chibuke before. And you said that it depends on who the person is, how it does affect them. So I wanted to just go back to that because I had not followed up with it. His story is especially painful. The money really doesn't necessarily liberate these young men. They can end up broke, addicted, paranoid, just like he did. What did his life teach you about what Yahoo does to the scammers within the context of their society? [Carlos Barragán] Yeah, the case of Chibuke is a very special one, because he scammed an Irish woman for four years pretending to be the WWF fighter Cody Rhodes. And for four years, he gets tens of thousands of euros from her driving her to bankruptcy and even losing her house. While he's spending all this money in hotels, in parties, while he's giving away this money to everyone who asks him, because he would describe himself as a street boy. He had a very rough childhood. He didn't know his father. He grew up with his grandfather, and his mother didn't let him call mom. She demanded him to call her auntie, which is a very difficult thing for a kid. He would tell me that he had felt lonely his whole life, and that Teresa, this Irish woman, was the only woman that he had built a real connection in his life, which is very paradoxical, and it shows you how he can be both lying to himself. Well, maybe there is a kernel of truth here, because in a socioeconomic context like Ecotun in the neighborhood of Lagos, where I based the book on, life is very difficult. You know, especially since the pandemic, a lot of people struggle to put food on the table. If you don't have a job, and if you don't have money, a lot of people treat you like you don't exist. So Chibuke realized that the only way for him to be seen was getting money through the scams. Of course, this doesn't justify what he's doing, but it tells you the background in which he was raised, and it explains a lot why that part of society is okay with these scams happening, because a lot of people in the community know where the money is coming from. But I could say, to answer your question, probably it taught me how messy reality is. You know, there is not an easy answer to Chibuke's life, because on the one hand, I spent so much time with him, and he didn't really express remorse about what he had done, but on the other, I wouldn't like my children to have the childhood Chibuke had. And again, there is so much harshness surrounding Chibuke's life, that for people in the West, even for wealthy Nigerians, it's very hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone like him. But on the other hand, while he was scamming, and he was becoming very rich, and then, you know, it's kind of like a poor to riches story, but then there's the fallout, there are other people in Ikutun who also struggle a lot, and they don't turn to scams. And again, that adds another layer to your question, that circumstances don't always justify your actions. And I guess that that's what attracted me to the story so much, because you have here a character that in a way, you can empathize with him, but on the other side, you see that actually, there are other pathways. And for me, Chibuke, rather than an answer of what, like, I've learned about life, represents a question, you know, what are you willing to sacrifice? Or what are you willing to do in order to feel maybe less lonely? [Francesca] And it's a contradiction for the reader as well, because you really describe the real devastation of the Nigerian economy after the oil bust that occurred. And there is so much corruption as well, that people who are on the bottom, and there are many, when you say they can't put food on the table, I mean, people are literally starving, they're just not getting enough to eat. And so what struck me was, you know, how embedded Yahoo has become in the Nigerian culture. It's normalized. Some parents even encourage their children to learn the hustle. And yet traditional Yoruban ethics and values are quite the opposite. They look at ill-gotten gains as something that never does well for either the perpetrator or the victim. So talk about these contradictions. [Carlos Barragán] Yeah, that is another, I would call it beautiful tension and contradiction of reality that drew me and kind of like pushed me to tell this story. Because whenever people hear Nigerian Prince scammer, whenever people hear scammers, and it's a good moment to tell the listeners, there are scammers everywhere. And also these kind of scammers are based in Southeast Asia, where the circumstances are completely different. So there is nothing particular about Nigerian scammers, it's just socioeconomic and historical and technological conditions. But it drew me because the more time is spent in Ikotun, the more I saw that it was a fundamental question for the locals there. And I think that you see so many parallels in other societies around the world, even in our own societies and countries. It reminded me a lot of like impoverished communities in the US or in Europe, where they might deal with drugs and what happens to young people who see no clear future for them. And they see these bright future associated with drugs and these older friends and older brothers draw them into this culture. Obviously, you need to understand that there's so much money coming from, these scammers are bringing so much money, that a whole economy is created around them. Because these are what, 18-year-old scammers, maybe 25. Sure, there might be other scammers as well. But in Ikotun, they are like very young people. And as young people do, they are not very smart about the way they spend their money. So a lot of older, smarter people develop ways to extract that money from them. And the way they do it is they have hotels, they have clubs, they have boutiques. And many Nigerians would tell me, yeah, they are scamming the scammers. I can give you an example. A scammer could go to a boutique. And because he wants to look good, he will buy these clothes. And his friends are coming with him and he wants to show off. He wants to tell them, look how much money I have. So the owner of the boutique will charge him double for the clothes. I've also had hotel owners who serve bottles of water to some of his friends who are sitting next to a group of Yahoo boys, with the intention of making the Yahoo boys feel like, oh, look at them. They are buying bottles of Moet Chandon or bottles of you name it. We have to order more because we are the ones in charge. So they prey on their fear of their status. Because a lot in these communities is based around status. When you have so little money, the people are always looking for who can take care of me or who can give me money for food or who can protect me. And at the same time, you have many Nigerians who oppose this culture. Because in the shorter term, it's inevitable that this money trickles down into the community. But in the long run, you have all these young men who skip school, who stop studying, who maybe even communities like they might not go to university, but they become cobblers, or they become tailors, or they become all sorts of traditional workers. But they'd rather be with their phones working at night than investing in their careers. Because that's what is going to bring money in the short term. But in the long term, they might do a lot of drugs. So that creates a mental health crisis. And it's harder as some professionals would tell me to bring young people into the fold. [Francesca] Most of the book is about Yahoo boys, but then we meet Miracle. What changes when the scammer is a woman? [Carlos Barragán] It changes a lot. And while I was working on this book, I was fixated with the idea that this book was becoming very masculine, because the scammers were men and they were kind of like subjugating female victims, even though they were also scamming male victims. But then all the female characters started to emerge. You have the mothers and you have the grandmothers who are either in favor or against. But at the same time, I had heard that there were scammers, female scammers, who were joining, as they call it, the game. Why? Because in the first place, the male scammers, they needed their girlfriends or their female friends, because if they were scamming, let's say a truck driver in Kentucky or an American doctor in Chicago, sometimes they would need to talk to them on the phone. And, you know, you might be a very good scammer, but you cannot pretend to be a white woman on the phone. So they would ask them, they would ask their girlfriends, Hey, babe, why don't you talk to the client? Because they call their victims clients and they would do it. But maybe they wouldn't get any money from the conversation because the money would be directed to the boyfriend. So at some point, these girlfriends decided, what if I do it on my own? Why am I doing it for my boyfriend? The problem was that it was very hard to find a because they were, in my opinion, they were smarter and they were more calculating and they bragged less about it. So I found Miracle by chance. And Miracle was not only scamming a man from Kentucky by pretending she was a white woman, she also taking the scamming to another level. She was scamming women around the world by the so-called adoption scam. She would offer babies to adopt around the world, and she would charge them thousands of dollars. And from my conversations with her, obviously the readers will see that the lie behind Miracle is very dark because you see that it involves sex trafficking. When she's a teenager, it involves the death of her mother. It involves so many difficult and painful things for her. And then suddenly she returns to Lagos and she becomes this very reckless, kind of like larger than life scammer. And if anything, I realized, or I learned that sometimes behind a perpetrator is another victim. And that might be difficult for us to accept because that might force us to change our approach towards the so-called perpetrator. But that's life. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't sing aloud when someone is harming another person, but that's the reality with Miracle. And I think that that's an uncomfortable truth. [Carlos Barragán] Now, speaking of these gender dynamics is another thing that's very complicated here. Not only women scamming men, but men pretending to be women scamming men, for example. Young Nigerian men spend their nights inhabiting the identities of white women, flirting with men, exchanging sexual messages. A lot of times they're depending on their girlfriends to tell them what to say because they don't know what a woman might say. And this is all in a society where same-sex relationships, which actually these are, are criminalized. What did you make of that? [Francesca] I once asked Biggie about that because Biggie, after scamming women, he decided he would impersonate a woman, a white woman, and he would talk to men. And he would tell me he was very successful at quote-unquote making men cum. And he also told me that he had learned a lot about how women behave both from her mother, from his mother and his three sisters, and also from all the relationships he had, which is an answer that makes sense, right? But then when I pressed him and I asked him what did he mean by what he had said about men, about he knew what kind of like buttons to press, he didn't want to talk about it. It was something that he wanted to keep in his mind. He didn't want to share it with me, even though he would talk about almost everything else. And when I pressed him again, he told me, that would be gay. If I told you that that would be gay, would you sleep on the same, under the same roof than a gay person? That would be crazy. And you know, that makes me smile because it reveals so many contradictions. In the end, we have two men chatting at night, talking about sex. Only Biggie knows, or only the scammer knows. But in the end, that's what he's doing. And I guess that that goes directly into the contradictions of this story. [Carlos Barragán] Right. And they're receiving all these dick pics as well from the men. [Francesca] Yes, exactly. And, you know, I guess they also become a bit traumatized or maybe desensitized because they received so many of them. Sometimes they talk about them with their friends. But it's also funny because you have a sis who is a young kid, age 14, who is also impersonating a white woman. And he's also receiving these these pictures. And at the beginning, he thinks that that is going to bring money. Again, it's important to know that this is a kid who is in primary school. He doesn't really know what sex is because he has not had a girlfriend. But he's chatting with very lonely Americans who are sending nudes. And he thinks he's very close to getting money. But Biggie, who is a seasoned scammer, knows that a dick pic doesn't mean money. In fact, probably means that this is another American who is going to waste my time. I also think that that's fascinating, the way they learn about the American loneliness or the Western loneliness. [Carlos Barragán] So I think I mentioned this before, but toward the end of the book, you actually turn the on yourself. After you spend so much time with Biggie, Chibuke, Aziz, and the others, you acknowledge how easy it became for you to enter their world and sometimes lose sight of the victims. What frightened you about, or were you frightened by your own capacity to start seeing the world through the scammer's eyes? What was that for you to realize that, oh, I've forgotten about the victims here. I'm actually looking at them kind of through the eyes of the scammer? [Francesca] Well, in terms of morality, that was probably my biggest concern. And it involves a technical question. Should I write this book in third person? Should I be involved in this book? Should I show up more often than I did? How much of myself should I include in the book? And it was a very difficult tightrope. But I think that in the end of the book, I show up, or at least my character shows up, wondering and pondering, am I getting too close of the scammers? Am I seeing the world just through their eyes? Probably because at the beginning of the investigation, my worry was, I'm going to fall for all these stereotypes about Nigerian scammers. They are going to be one dimensional characters, as they always are. As most times, when a white European writer goes to Africa, everything is just the excuse for him to express their paranoias and their obsessions from back home. You know, everyone is just an excuse or a vehicle to write about what you really want to write about. And I didn't want to do that because I want to take them as they were, as human beings as they are. And I want to give them as much complexity as I could give my mom, for example. But that was the worried beginning. After months of reporting and hundreds of hours of interviews, the opposite was true. And that was that I was justifying what they were doing. I was getting immersed into their fabrications and lies and their justifications. And I realized I needed to step back because it was very easy to find myself laughing with them about their techniques, about the way they scam the quote unquote stupid victims. And I was doing the same thing that I had told myself not to do with them. I was having this one dimensional vision of the victim, you know, the gullible, stupid victim. And I think that prompted me to go to the other side and try to see what is on the other side of the phone, you know, rather than I followed the opposite journey. [Carlos Barragán] Well, we'll leave it to our readers to actually learn how you did confront that other side by meeting with a number of the victims, which was also a really powerful part of the story. This is just a terrific book. The Yahoo Boys Love Deception and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers. Carlos Barragán, thank you so much for talking with us about it. [Francesca] It was a pleasure to be with you. 2. Interview with Howard Mansfield: [Francesca] Howard Mansfield, welcome back to Writer's Voice. It's been a while. Thank you very much, Francesca. It's always great to talk with you. So this, another one of your books that looks at things that people don't usually think about with your own unique perspective, which I just find charming and profound and lovely to read. Invisible Monuments, Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. So what drew you to this subject of monuments? Well, as you know, some of my earlier books, such as In the Memory House and The Same Axe Twice, I'm always really fascinated by what we save and who we commemorate and who we remember, essentially who gets to enter the memory house, who gets their name on the landscape, who gets holidays. And right now we're living in a building boom for monuments. And yet most of the monuments we build will be just pretty much white noise and stone, as one historian said. They will not move us. We will have tremendous arguments about them and what they should represent. And after they're dedicated and after all the spending, we'll walk away. And with a few exceptions, never look at them again. Why? What makes a monument work? Why other ones fail? You quote someone who said that we are homo-reminiscence even more than we are homo-sapiens. [Howard Mansfield] Michael Blakely, who was in charge of the rediscovery of the African burial ground in Lower Manhattan in 1990. They were digging the foundations for a 34-story federal office building. And the backhoe struck some bones. Everything stopped. Bosses called the other bosses who called other bosses who called in the archaeologists who arrived like a bomb disposal squad. Everything stopped. And they realized they were in the site of what was called on the maps an old Negro burying ground. It had last been used in 1804. But as Manhattan moved north, it was covered over in places by 25 feet of fill. And they think there might be 15,000, 20,000 graves there. They dug up and labeled and researched about 400. And what it did, it made northern slavery visible. It put a different New York on the map. It showed the wear and tear of slavery, of being enslaved on these people's bodies, broken bones, arthritis, anemia. It showed the mortality rate. And it became a visible monument. And there was a fight to preserve that African burial ground in Manhattan. It was torturous. Take us through a little bit of that. [Howard Mansfield] Oh, my gosh. Yeah, the black community was really torn about this. They felt like just leave those bones alone already. Let these people rest. And other people in the community said, you know, let them work. Let's see what happens here. And so they kind of reached a compromise. They studied 400. They left another 200 in the ground. The bones went off to Howard University, where they felt like they're being properly looked after. Then they came back in a very loving attention kind of burial, ceremonial burial in a new memorial on the site. So a good outcome overall. One of the things they said was, you know, leave them bones alone. Them bones are my bones. Them bones are my mother's. Them bones are me. They're quoting an old spiritual. And it's the power of bones. And in fact, the book, Invisible Monuments, starts by talking about bones. It talks about what Viet Nguyen, Vietnamese, born in Vietnam during what they called the American War. He said this, you know, he said, Vietnam, we bury the bones twice. The first time far away from the village. Then once the earth has taken the flesh, we dig up the bones, wash them and bring them closer to the village to have the ancestors closer. That is exactly what we are trying to do with these monuments. We are trying to bring the bones closer. We are trying to bring our ancestors closer. We are trying to animate the past. The problem is that what the old memorials and the old rituals said was that the dead are always with us. Our ancestors are us. It's a unity, you know, a continuing line. The grandmother is the granddaughter. That's not true anymore. And so we wrestle with this question all the time. We want that to be true. But the question that's always hovering at the edge of these things is this aching question, are ancestors obsolete? And we don't dare answer it. [Francesca] What do you mean by that? I mean, I think our ancestors are with us, in our DNA, if in no other way. [Howard Mansfield] They're with us in our DNA, and yet our lives are not their lives. And so the old monuments, the great man on the horse, the obelisk that's like 14 stories tall, the column with the urn on it, that was an entirely different view of life and death and how the living and the dead look after each other. We don't have that anymore. How many funerals have you gone to recently as opposed to celebrations of life? We have a hard time with this. Of course we do. It's no head-scratcher. So we feel that gap between the past and the present. And we can't quite bridge it with a very few exceptions, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I've never met anybody who hasn't been moved by that. Maya Lin's design, brilliant. Famous story, she's like a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate, enters with something she did for a class, I think she only got like a B-minus on it, against 1,400 other entries, wins. And she said that she went to the site, Constitution Gardens right there in the mall, before she designed, which is unusual. And she said, I had an impulse to cut into the earth. I wanted to cut into the earth and let us feel the pain and let time heal it. So what you feel there in this minimal monument that really freaked out a lot of people is that you walk down into the earth at the very apex, the two corners, as she calls it, the apex, you're six feet under. And to your left is the Lincoln Memorial, to your right is the Washington Memorial. And there's just the names, 58,000 some names of young men, most of whom never got past their 21st birthday. And the black granite, the highly polished black granite, so you see your face, you are there and there's no hiding out and there's no narrative to hide out in. You have to confront loss. It's a brilliant monument. And what happens there is call and response between people. It's a back and forth between the monument and the person who's visiting. It's call and response, like as a minister, a priest or rabbi leading a congregation, call and response. As in the song, call and response. That's what happens at the great memorials. I'll give you another quick example. Farther off in time, the end of the Great War, World War I, in London, it's 1919, the Treaty of Versailles has been signed, and they want a hasty monument put up so the soldiers have something to salute as they go by. And Edwin Lutyens, brilliant architect, country houses and later do capital for India, and a sketch on a napkin, a proverbial sketch on a napkin, creates a cenotaph. It's a very sleek, very minimal monument. It's like 33 feet tall, and they build it out of wooden plaster. There's no crosses on it. There's no soldiers, there's nothing. There's just an inscription that says the glorious dead, and it dates for the war. People will line up through the night, into the night to leave flowers at this, to stand there and look at it. And it was supposed to only be up for one night. It was supposed to be temporary, and it was adopted by the public. It became the locus of their loss because no remains from like 1.1 million soldiers just in the British Empire came home. They were all left overseas. So the word we'd use today in our therapeutic state is closure. There was no closure. Widows, brothers, everybody just stood there before this. They were just drawn to it. It was tremendously powerful. [Francesca] I want to go back to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because you say that it actually changed how we mourn. [Howard Mansfield] Yes. One historian said this succinctly, it made memorials matter again. And that's why you're seeing this just tremendous growth of these war memorials in and around Washington, the Korean Monument, the Woman Nurses Monument, the Gulf War Desert Shields Monument, and the World War II Monument right in the middle of the mall, which is a terrible design. As some critics said, no one wanted to let the Vietnam War Memorial have the last word. I think that's a fair point. And people saw how powerful this was. And there's all sorts of walls with names around the country now for different things. None of them work from what I've seen as effectively as Maya Lin's monument, because all the details that she had to fight like mad to preserve are precisely correct. Yeah. One of those details, they wanted to alphabetize the name so that people could find them easily. And she fought against that. One was a very practical reason. Do you really want to have 600 smiths, one right after the other? But there was a deeper reason as well. Well, what was this Asian woman, a woman of Asian descent, doing designing this monument? It was pretty nasty then. You could imagine what would happen today. But she held her ground. They said black was a color of disgrace for the grant. They wanted white marble. They wanted raised up. They didn't want a trench. They wanted soldiers. They wanted patriotic inscriptions. They ended up adding just a few words to the monument. No one notices. They got their statues off to one side. None of that matters. It's just the overall number of names. And Viet Thanh Nguyen said, you know what? That's great. But if you really want to take account of that war, taking the two million or so would be at my knees dead. And that wall would be two miles long, which is just overwhelming. [Francesca] Well, just to kind of put a pin in it, the names are not alphabetized, but they are in order of the time of death. [Howard Mansfield] Yes, they start at the apex, the corner, and then they trail out and go into the earth, Maya Lindsay, and then they come out the other side and continue, which is a really interesting telling detail. But it also emphasizes the personal connection of the people who come, because in some way, you have to know the time of death of the person that you're coming. You have to find the name. It slows you down. It slows you down just enough to pay attention. That's sort of the brilliance of it. And then people began leaving all these offerings, and no one in the National Park Service expected that. Bibles, dog tags, boots, all sorts of things. And letters, letters written on hotel stationery from the hotels nearby, someone sitting up that night or that morning saying, I never got to say goodbye. I love you. I miss you. You're still 21. I'm 71. You know, it's just ripping, just so painful, so painful. [Francesca] But it's interesting. You wrote in that chapter, if democracy is an experiment, so is our commemoration of the war fought to defend it. But what I thought when I read about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in your book, Howard Mansfield, in Invisible Monuments, was that how old men sent young men to die in an imperial war, not a war to defend democracy. It made me think to myself, as I was reading that chapter, that the tragedy is not just the deaths, but the pointlessness of those deaths. [Howard Mansfield] Yeah, I mean, this is sort of where I come in the room as just as a person, because I was just young enough, certainly not to be drafted, and my brother just, my older brother just missed it. But I remember being in the room with people arguing about this. I remember the moratorium in 1969. I remember a kid with long hair saying, why are we bombing villages? And an adult replying, get a haircut. I remember the confusion of the veterans of World War II, which is my father and other men. Why can't we do our part? How come you can't go do your part? They didn't understand. And it was very hard to understand how different this was. Yeah, it was the hurt, the anger, the torment. It was so sharp. People don't remember it now. But I remember a kid being with a moratorium button, walking to some store in my town and being thrown out by the owner. He would not have it. You remember that. [Francesca] Oh, I was at the Pentagon when they tried to levitate it. [Howard Mansfield] Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. Really? The Norman Mailer book. Oh, my God. Armies of the Night. Is that it? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's fantastic. [Francesca] I got arrested, but they arrested so many people. By the time I got arrested, they brought us in buses to go to the jail, and then they just let us out. And, you know, the interesting thing is, I have to say, it was radicalizing to me, because when I went to that demonstration, and I think it was November of 68, I went absolutely convinced that we young people, all we had to do was petition our government, and our government would say, "Oh, of course, you're right. Of course, we don't have to be there. We should get out of Vietnam." And by the time I left that demonstration, I understood the imperialist power of the US state and how they were not interested in listening to our voices. [Howard Mansfield] And that's the heartbreak of that era. And that's the heartbreak when you see the protests, when you see the civil rights marches fighting so hard for what should just be theirs to start with. When you see all the folky music going on, that's heartbreaking. I do want to emphasize that the book isn't only just about that monument or the other war monuments at all. [Francesca] No, and we're going to go on to the other ones as well. But it really did strike me. And in fact, that war memorial, the Vietnam War Memorial, does not make a political point. [Howard Mansfield] Not at all. But you point out that we need to find another way to memorialize the evil that lies behind so many deaths so often in terms of war. And you talk about anti-memorials. You've given an example of one, the Monument Against Fascism in Hamburg, Germany. Tell us about that monument or anti-monument by Jochen Gerz. [Howard Mansfield] This monument is however tall it is, I forget. And it retracts inch by inch, day by day, until it goes into the ground. I find that really puzzling. It seems like a retreat to me. But then Gerz and his wife did this other monument. It was called At the Place of the Invisible Monument. And it's a Holocaust memorial in this small German city in front of what had been the Gestapo headquarters where people were tortured in the basement. He and his art students went at night, dug up cobblestones, replaced them with replacement cobblestones, carried them away, and inscribed them with the names of 2,000 Jewish cemeteries that had been desecrated in Germany. Then they snuck back in and they buried the stones face down. And then people went there and they had to imagine what the monument was. Gerz says, "now you are the monument. No one's telling you, it's inside you." I think it's poetic, but I think it's troubling because given people's grasp of history, we're really very bad witnesses and very, very bad memorializers. But on the other hand, I find it to be an expansive view of memorializing. It's something to get you thinking about it. The Holocaust is a very hard thing to memorialize. I think that's the only Holocaust memorial I talk about in the book because I think it's its own category. How do you bring somebody close to looking at evil without driving them off? How do you get somebody comprehending the incomprehensible? It's really, really difficult. And any architect, any committee that takes it on, I'm not going to line up and criticize them. [Francesca] I want to go to a monument that is not to the past, but to the future, the Clock of the Long Now. Now this is really fascinating. Tell us what that is. [Howard Mansfield] So Brian Eno, who is very well known for his music and winning Emmys for all sorts of albums, I think he did The Talking Heads and so forth. He said, you know what, we need to look to the future. We need to set up a clock that will run by itself for 10,000 years so we can start looking forward and not back. You know, they figure roughly civilization as we know it has had like a 10,000 year run. So we've done all this mayhem in 10,000 years. So they say, let's do this. So they buried in a mountain in West Texas, drilled down this elaborate clock that you could make this incredibly difficult pilgrimage to and see it running for the next 10,000 years. It's a technological sleight of hand, yes, but it's also trying to say, okay, enough looking back, let's look forward. I find it fascinating. They actually are building it. That's where the air kind of goes out of the story a little bit for me because Jeff Bezos just wrote a check for $42 million so they could build it. When it was theoretical, when it was an idea, I kind of found it fascinating. Then you get to that point where Jeff says, yeah, well, let's just do this here. Here's some change I found in my couch. But it's a great poetic idea, I think. [Francesca] Well, actually, it's a tremendous irony because Jeff Bezos, yes, has given $42 million for building the clock of the long now, but he's doing his best with his fellow techno lords and fascists to destroy our civilization. [Howard Mansfield] Yeah, no kidding. I mean, he seems to have no concept of the future, and yet he gave money to build this clock of the long now, which I think is a wonderful idea because you point out that all of our time is so fast and is based on such a short horizon. The people who make those decisions, including Jeff Bezos, makes his decisions about his business based on the next stockholders meeting. You wish he would internalize the clock of the long now. That would be the real monument. [Francesca] Well, that's it. So tell us what you suggest. We don't even have to internalize it. We could in a way create monuments of the clock of the long now everywhere. [Howard Mansfield] I think it would be a wonderful thing to have on the Village Green or the Village Common or on Main Street next to the Civil War monument in zinc that was made in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They made hundreds of them, thousands of them. It would be great to just, oh my gosh, look at this. This is ticking towards the future. What am I doing to make that future better? I think if they, instead of drilling into this mountain, if they had made a lot of little replicas or different interpretations of it and spread it around the country, it would have been pretty fascinating. It would have been kind of a bit of performance art, really. [Francesca] And so in monuments, we honor our ancestors. What does the clock of long now say about being ancestors? [Howard Mansfield] Exactly. It says we are the ancestors. It turns it a whole thing around and puts it on you. It's that whole thing that's now cliche about thinking for seven generations. Can you really do that? It's really hard, but it would be great to train ourselves to do that and saying, okay, this decision we're making today, what does it mean going down the road? We're just killing ourselves with short-term thinking, you know, no kidding. So I think I wish they had done it that way. [Francesca] And yet you finish the book, Howard Mansfield, in such an interesting way. Here you have spent the whole book talking about monuments, talking about memory, and then you call for being in the moment. You call for moments, not monuments. [Howard Mansfield] Yeah, you know, I think the Buddhists, and God bless them for being patient with us, for derating their religion and their beliefs and making a mess out of it, a bumper sticker. But their view is like, there only is the moment. The moment arises and then the next moment. And when you think about the times you were most alive, it's when you've had that call and response to the universe, call it the soul, call it the universe, but you've been in that moment without thinking about it. And what I think a lot of monuments try to do, and a lot of religions try to do, is to take a moment where everybody, or some people were alive, were responding, were there, and freeze it, and commemorate it, and freeze it in stone or in scripture. But it's really the moment. So I think we'd be better off not so much with these monuments, but more trying to free ourselves to realize that it's moment, moment, moment. It's a tough thing to do. I mean, I'm no Buddhist. It's a tough, tough thing to do, but it's what I admire, them and the transcendentalists and Emerson. [Francesca] You admire the transcendentalists. [Howard Mansfield] Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think Emerson just about gets the last word in here, doesn't he? Ralph Waldo, Waldo, as they called him in his time. Okay. Emerson says this in Nature, his famous essay, crossing a bare common in snow puddles at twilight under a clouded sky without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. You know, he's not exalting the view from the Grand Canyon, the rim of the Grand Canyon, the north or south rim. He's not in Big Sur feeling like the land you're on is about to fall into the ocean any minute. He's like crossing a bare common. It's not even the calendar view of winter. There's puddles. It's bare. And yet, there he is. He's alive in the universe. At that moment, there's nothing better. That's a monument to me. That's the way to live, if you can do that. And all of us at different times have had that and do have that. So that's, I think, the lived experience that I wish myself and other people could just clear the way for a little bit. [Francesca] Well, that's a beautiful place to stop, I think. This is also a beautiful book written in your inimitable style, your penetrating insight. It's like a meditation. Invisible Monuments, Tribute Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. Thanks so much, Howard Mansfield. [Howard Mansfield] I always enjoy talking with you. Thank you very much.