This morning, a private detective I know here in Barcelona sent me a screenshot of a trending social media story:
“Couple Who Met On Dating App Rob Bank On First Date”
Can this really be true? I decided to do my own sleuthing.
It turns out yes, the story is roughly true, but with an important detail that’s missing in the headline above.
The man, Christopher Castillo, age 33, and the woman, Shelby Sampson, age 40, agreed to meet for a date.
Castillo asked Sampson to pick him up in her car. Once in the car, Castillo started drinking wine, presumably red. He then asked Sampson to pull over at a bank.
Castillo was gone for a few minutes. He came back sweating, wearing sunglasses and a hat (!), and holding an antique gun and a wad of cash.
He told Sampson to drive, which she did, for a bit, until the cops pulled them over and put the date to an end.
The crucial bit is that Sampson was not charged with anything, because, so the state believes, she had absolutely no knowledge of or participation in any criminal aspect of this first date.
This missing detail is what I found most interesting in the whole story.
I’ve never robbed a bank, but I imagine it’s hard.
The stock joke is that a typical man is unwilling to pull over and ask for directions while driving. Can you imagine how much more unwilling a typical man is to pull over, walk into a bank, hold up a gun, and ask for $1,000 in cash (and five years in prison, it turns out)?
No wonder Castillo was drinking in the car. And no wonder he felt he needed somebody “in his corner,” even if that was an unwitting and unwilling non-accomplice he had met on Tinder.
I found this interesting because, while I’ve never robbed a bank, I have done other, legal, things in my life. Some of these things I found personally very difficult to do, because they challenged my own identity.
There were times when no amount of auto-suggestion, willpower, or even red wine would push me over the threshold.
There were times when the only thing that would help me act would be having somebody “in my corner,” having a feeling of a home base I could come back to, even if that was somebody I had met minutes earlier and had no special relationship with.
I imagine this is all a bit waffly without specific examples. I might give those in another email.
My point today is simply that if you have something you know you should be doing (don’t rob a bank), but you cannot persuade yourself to do it no matter how you try, then having some kind of support or community of other people to rely on, however tenuous, can make all the difference.
Ideally, this is other people in real life. Real life seems to make a big difference.
But if you cannot find people in real life to act as a home base, then people online can sometimes act as a substitute. At least that’s the promise of online communities, groups, and memberships.
I am still keen on spinning up a new online community of my own, but I haven’t yet decided which (legal) things I would like to support people in doing.
While that’s going on, I can only recommend once again a community that I myself am part of, Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.
If you’re struggling to take the action needed to build your own audience… or to make deals with people who have an audience of their own… or to make your first $5k online… then you might find the support you need within Royalty Ronin. For more info: