Jon Ronson
From CaseyPedia
Jon Ronson (born May 10, 1967) is a commentator for BBC Radio who interviewed enthusiastic malingerer Casey Serin in May 2007. The interview ultimately aired on June 20th, and was available for streaming online at the BBC for the following week.[1][2][3]
[edit] The BBC Radio Interview Transcript
JON RONSON: (segue from previous item) I think what David Schneider achieved that night is what we spend our lives chasing: an absolutely perfect moment, maybe with our families or at work. This is a programme about how rarely those moments happen, and how so many of us are crushed as we try and attain them. Last year, when Casey Serin was 23, he decided to fulfil his life-long dream of becoming a real estate mogul.
(MUSIC: 'Once in a Lifetime' by Talking Heads - extract beginning "You may find yourself/Living in a shotgun shack/You may find yourself/In another part of the world...")
CASEY SERIN: I started by looking into all the different ways that you can make money, and I've always been entrepreneurial...
RONSON: And so you did these courses... what, kind of in hotels that were all about how to make money fast from real estate?
CASEY: Yeah, I've gone to a bunch of different courses. It started off by watching late-night TV one night, my wife and I, and she saw this infomercial promoting one of the courses. Of course, they make it look easy and flashier, real nice houses and cars, and people are successful and happy and running on the beach, that kind of thing...
RONSON: You should always be suspicious of people running on a beach in an advert. It's always for credit cards or cigarettes. The more healthy and good looking they are in the advert, the more trouble the products they're selling.
CASEY: That's funny, and that's probably true. Although I'd like to give some credit to the seminars, because you can learn a lot from them.
(MUSIC: The song continues, this time from "You may ask yourself/How do I work this?/And you may ask yourself?/Where is that large automobile?")
RONSON: (narration) Casey learned about 'flipping'. You buy a decrepit house at below market value. Maybe the owners' lives had fallen apart and they had to sell fast. Then you do the house up in a couple of days and immediately sell it. The courses Casey attended said flipping is a foolproof way to get rich quick - as long as you don't do anything stupid, like lie to get the bank loans. (to Casey) You lied to get the loans to buy the properties, is that right?
CASEY: Something I'm not proud of, but I did use what's called in the industry 'liar loans'. They're stated income loans, and they were originally designed for self-employed individuals that have a hard time documenting their income, but unfortunately with the hot real estate market they've been abused a little bit in the last couple of years.
RONSON: (narration) And so the 23-year-old Casey used 'liar loans' to buy eight broken-down homes...
CASEY: At first, things were going good. I was using some of these creative buying techniques for how I can pick these things up below market values. Problem was, I was doing too many too fast and I was going out of my local area, so not knowing that area I made some mistakes in selecting the kind of properties that I really shouldn't have been buying to begin with...
RONSON: What was wrong with them?
CASEY: Well, for example, I had a couple of them that had a garage conversion, so instead of a garage they made it into a room. In some neighborhoods that's OK, but in the ones I was buying in, that was a little bit nice neighborhoods, that's looked down upon and actually goes against the value, not increases the value like I thought. I've been taken advantage of by contractors because they see that I am inexperienced, and I've had a lot of cost overruns.
RONSON: So basically, the builders would look at you and think 'we can make some money out of him fast?'
CASEY: Well yeah, you're right. I mean, they saw that I was new and they were able to make some money on me.
RONSON: So they kind of saw you as you saw the real estate market. Everybody was thinking 'I can make some money here!'
CASEY: Of course.
RONSON: (narration) Casey has so far failed to sell every house he's bought. He's a 24-year-old man who currently owns homes in Sacramento, New Mexico, Utah, California and one in Texas that cost him $269,000 and apparently has various problems. But Casey doesn't know for sure, because he's bought it sight unseen. He owes several million dollars. The reason why the world knows of Casey is because he's decided to write a daily blog about his life and financial troubles. He thought his readers could learn from his mistakes and offer him emotional support and maybe buy some of his eight houses. But it hasn't worked out that way. He went into the real estate business a year ago looking for the perfect life. Two weeks ago, an Internet magazine called him 'the world's most hated blogger'.
(MUSIC: same track continues - "You may find yourself/In a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?")
RONSON: (to Casey) When I just looked at random last night, I instantly found somebody saying that you were much too ugly to be married to that beautiful woman that you're married to - Galina. And somebody else was doing a petition to have Galina put in jail as well as you. It's horrible, it's like you've attracted thousands and thousands of people who just hate you every day.
CASEY: Exactly. And it's hard to explain exactly why people have so much animosity. I mean, it's not like I went out and killed somebody from their family.
(MUSIC: same track continues - "How did I get here?/Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down/Letting the days go by/Water flowing underground/Into the blue again/After the moneys gone...")
RONSON: People on the internet hate the fact that you like to drink wheatgrass...
CASEY: I don't know what it is - wheatgrass is one of the best things for you. Much better than coffee - very very nutritious.
RONSON: What do you think it is about wheatgrass that they hate so much? Does it imply pretentiousness?
CASEY: Maybe that, and maybe also they think I'm into the latest and greatest trend. Basically, the argument of the Haterz™ is "Hey, he can't afford organic food, he can't afford wheatgrass, he shouldn't be doing all this stuff - he should be buying, you know, really cheap food and just living way below your means.
RONSON: But this wheatgrass juice did cost you $4.90 plus an extra $33 because you were already overdrawn. So this wheatgrass juice cost you $37.90, and your very beautiful petite young wife has to go out and clean houses to help you pay your $170,000 credit card debt. Which you can understand...
CASEY: (laughs) Yeah, that definitely sounds really really bad if you put it that way. And, you know, it all depends on which angle you look at it. And yes, my wife at one point had enough of the financial instability and she went out there and started, you know, cleaning houses. And so that made me look really bad and that brought the Haterz™ to a whole new level of hate.
RONSON: The other thing that slightly annoyed people was one way of dealing with the $170,000 debt was to go to Lake Tahoe and do some blue-sky thinking, which seemed to be kind of... an excessively expensive way to... I mean, why couldn't you just think about it in your room? Why did you have to go to Lake Tahoe to think about it?
CASEY: Well, sometimes you just have to get away and have fresh air and blue water and the mountain views to inspire you.
RONSON: And how much did it cost?
CASEY: I forget the exact bill - I think it was something like maybe $225 for a hotel. And it was just two nights in a hotel plus maybe some food, and...
RONSON: Was Galina cleaning houses at the time when you were in Lake Tahoe?
CASEY: No, that was before that.
RONSON: OK. So did Galina come with you?
CASEY: No, she did not. It was a time where I just needed to get away, so...
RONSON: I do sympathise. I really do. I think it's very very easy to get into the situation that you got yourself into. Well, not very easy, because it does involve a huge amount of lying and spending $2.2 million on houses you haven't seen - but it's sort of metaphorically easy to get into that kind of pickle that you're in.
(MUSIC: same track continues - "And you may ask yourself/What is that beautiful house?/And you may ask yourself/Where does that highway go to?/And you may ask yourself/Am I right? Am I wrong?/And you may say to yourself/My God! What have I done?")
RONSON: You're like a victim of American optimism...
CASEY: I guess you can say it, and I'm still very very optimistic that this isn't the end of the story.
RONSON: Does it hurt your ego to be known as not only a huge real estate failure but also 'the world's most hated blogger'?
CASEY: Anybody who's into marketing or promotion knows that good or bad exposure is good exposure - as long as you're able to leverage it.
RONSON: I bet that it would have been better to be the world's most loved blogger or the world's most successful real estate person...
CASEY: Yeah, but there's so many of those out there, and you wonder how many of those are real. But if you see someone who first screwed up big, and then is able to come back and make something out of it, then you see where that person's coming from, so there's no question about whether they're genuine or not. Tell me of anybody who's been truly successful in any field, whether it's finances or sports or anything, that has not made mistakes. And not just small ones, but big ones, before they finally made it to where they wanted to go.
RONSON: And where do you want to end up?
CASEY: My goal has been from about the year 2000 when I graduated from high school, is to build passive income, which is income that's coming in from your business and/or investments, that is coming in whether you're working or not. Now it sounds real idealistic and almost like it can't even happen.
RONSON: It's like lazy income!
CASEY: (laughs) Some people think that, but just to acquire that takes so much work that most people are not willing to pay the price.
RONSON: It's like you take out liar loans to get passive income.
CASEY: Well, taking certain short cuts like I tried to do is not something I'd recommend to everybody - unfortunately, I'm paying dearly for it. Short cuts aren't always the best way to go. Being efficient is a good thing, but you just have to be smart about it.
(MUSIC: same track continues - "Same as it ever was/Same as it ever was/Same as it ever was/Same as it ever was/Same as it ever was...")
RONSON: We recorded our interview with Casey Serin three weeks ago. Last week, he and his blog vanished from the internet. I suspect he's finally agreed to his wife's demands to give up being an entrepreneur and become someone's employee instead. This world is full of people who try and fail. It can break your heart, especially when they don't know they've failed... (segue into next item)
[edit] References
- ↑ Jon Ronson On..., BBC Radio Player
- ↑ Jon Ronson On..., JonRonson.com
- ↑ Jon Ronson On... Crushed Egos, MP3, Serin segment starts roughly 8 minutes in
