This being April Fool’s Day, I’m sure you are wary of anything that hits your inbox today. But everything I’m about to tell you is 100% true and is almost guaranteed to lose me some friends.
This is the story of how I scammed my way onto the 2020 Oklahoma NEXTGEN Under 30 list.
I know what you’re thinking, “Scott, you don’t live in Oklahoma.”
That, along with every other necessary factor to qualify to be included in an Oklahoma under 30 list, is completely irrelevant.
Truthfully, the driving force behind doing this was cynicism. I hate the self-promotional world of LinkedIn and I especially hate any kind of empty self-promotional award that people celebrate. I went to the University of Oklahoma so I have a lot of friends still in the state and over the last few years I would see more and more of them celebrating their inclusion in the NEXTGEN Under 30 list. For the most part these are people who I would expect to be part of a list like this. The same people who were involved in student government and didn’t mind seeing their names and faces plastered all over campus. So being nominated for, and winning, an award like this made total sense. They’d probably met all the right people through the years and someone they knew thought they’d be a great addition to the list.
But there were also others who I saw posting about winning the award that surprised me. People who I didn’t know had achieved extraordinary levels of success at a young age. Those who I didn’t think had shaken all the right hands and attended all the right events to be noticed by the movers and shakers in Oklahoma society. After a few years of this I, along with my college roommates Estevan and Ryan, started wondering what the criteria could be to get placed on these lists. Could anyone nominate themselves?
I should back up for a second to explain something. During and after college Estevan, Ryan, and I lived together for five years until I got married. Over the years we developed a ton of overlapping interests, from obsessions with FIFA video games and watching the Premier League to attending Nicolas Cage movie premiers.
One thing we spent untold hours together watching was the MTV show Catfish. In the show the hosts Nev and Max would meet up with someone who was in an online relationship with a person they suspected might not be who they said they were. They would then research and figure out who the real person behind the online dating profile was and expose them. The show combined the mystery of a true crime show with the absolute chaos and messiness of a Jerry Springer show. In it’s first few seasons, before the participants became self-aware and played up for the cameras, it was a perfect show.
In the same way every white woman now thinks they are a homicide detective after listening to 50 true crime podcasts, we felt that we could be the perfect catfishers. We knew all the tactics that were used. Find a fake photo on the internet, always claim your camera is broken so you can’t video chat, if your victim starts getting wise make sure to come down with terminal cancer so they don’t push too hard. And, if you really want to spice things up you can always die. Sometimes the catfisher does it to bilk money out of their victim, sometimes it’s because they are too shy to present their full selves, but the best ones were the ones who did it purely for the love of the game.
Despite being years away from watching an episode of Catfish, we still had a latent, deep-seated desire to deceive someone for absolutely no reason.
You remember Joe Exotic right? He probably sends shivers down your spine, reminding you of those first few insane weeks of the pandemic in March 2020. Back when it was novel to be stuck in your home watching Netflix every day and night, disinfecting groceries before you brought them in the house, thinking all this would be over in a matter of weeks.
Some of us have known about Joe Exotic for much longer than two years. In our old apartment we used to have a signed Joe Exotic headshot. He’d send them to you if you joined his fan club. We’ve long been “supporters” of Joe. My wife and I dressed as Joe Exotic and a tiger for Halloween in 2015. Of course, we knew he was extremely sketchy. We never actually gave him money, but we followed all of his entertaining moves with great interest.
His zoo, of course, was the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park (or the GW Zoo).
I don’t know the exact reason we decided to apply for the 2020 NEXTGEN Under 30, but I can tell you the reason we actually went through with the application was because it was so dang easy.
Part of me was nervous about going through with it because I didn’t want to be accused of fraud or of wasting anyone’s time. As I filled out the application I decided to be as ridiculous as possible. If I was going to prove the point that this organization really didn’t scrutinize their candidates, I had to make it exceedingly obvious that this was not a real application. I chose a fake name, but made sure that even a tiny amount of Googling could prove it’s fakeness.
Rodrigo Blankenship is the kicker for the Indianapolis Colts and was the Georgia kicker for many years. His nickname is Hot Rod. He’s one of the most famous kickers in football. He wears spectacles while kicking and he’s really good. And his name is Rodrigo Blankenship. There is only one.
So I decided to be Rodrigo Blankenship II. Anyone from this organization would just have to Google the name to see that it’s clearly the very unique name of an NFL player and realize this was likely a fake application.
But I didn’t stop there. I wanted to apply in a category that might not have many applicants to increase my odds of winning. So I chose Animal Care (Estevan’s idea, actually). With that in mind, I knew there was only one place that Rodrigo Blankenship II could work.
I was filling this out in February 2020. So much had yet to happen. My first son was due at the end of the month. I was about to quit my job to freelance full time. A strange virus was making people in Asia wears masks in the airport. And Netflix was still a month away from dropping the trailer for Tiger King.
But Joe Exotic was not some unknown figure in Oklahoma. Not only had he been running the popular GW Zoo for years, his face had been on billboards around the state, he’d run for president, he’d been in the news when one of his husbands accidentally shot and killed himself in the gift shop at the zoo. And, he’d been the subject of a widely read Texas Monthly story that laid out many of the accusations against him, especially his mistreatment of animals. Included in that was crossbreeding animal species, creating Ligers and Tigons to attract people to the zoo.
This being an Oklahoma award, I thought it would be a funny little inside joke to make Rodrigo Blankenship II work at GW Zoo. In my nomination, written from the perspective of his boss nominating him, I was so over-the-top in my praise and description that no one could actually believe this was real.
Rodrigo has shown excellent skills when it comes to management of the Big Cat rescue and breeding program. His abilities are well beyond his years and he is on track to being the CCO (Chief Cat Officer) by the age of 30. He has overseen the world’s first successful cross-breeding of a Mane Coon feline and an Asiatic Lion1, a partnership once thought to be impossible. Remember the name Rodrigo Blankenship II!
That’s it. That’s all I had to provide besides an email address and a phone number. I even gave them my real phone number. I left everything blank that was optional. I created a Gmail account for the nomination then submitted it and completely forgot about it.
And when I say I forgot about it I mean I completely and utterly forgot about it. Between having a kid, quitting my job, wading through a global pandemic, binging Tiger King, and the myriad other things that happened in 2020 my joke application that would never be considered was a low priority.
In fact, I totally forgot to ever check that fake email again.
October 5, 2020. A few days after I turned 30 I finally made it onto an under 30 list.
Granted it wasn’t my name or anything about me. But I did it.
Despite the fact that I submitted the most glaringly obvious fake application, despite the fact that I had never responded to any of the emails sent to the fake Gmail account, despite the fact that everyone in the world now knew of the horrors that happened at GW Zoo, Rodrigo Blankenship II was now a member of the 2020 Oklahoma NEXTGEN Under 30 list in the Animal Care category.
And, because the category list is alphabetical and Animal Care starts with an A, he was on the front page of the nomination list. Everyone who looked at this list could clearly see that one of the winners worked at Joe Exotic’s zoo.
I might have laughed for an hour straight. This was my greatest achievement.
It was a bittersweet victory. For one, I didn’t feel that I could ever celebrate it because I knew many deserving and decent people on the list. They were probably nominated by their bosses or their peers and they truly had accomplished things to make the list.
And, at the end of the day it was just a name on a list.
Or so I thought.
COVID prevented the 2020 NEXTGEN ceremony from being an in-person event. Instead it was virtual and happened on January 22, 2021, nearly a full year after I submitted the application. Once again, I completely forgot to check the email account and didn’t know NEXTGEN wanted me to submit a video interview to be included in the telecast. But, instead of taking Rodrigo out of the broadcast, they included his name and workplace on a graphic along with the other winners (proof at the top of this article).
Someone had to sit down and type out Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park into the graphic and at no point did anyone ever question why there was a winner who worked there. This was then seen by all of the other winners and their parents and any of the Oklahoma dignitaries that were watching the event.
Disappointingly they didn’t include the II in his name, which means they technically gave the award to the Colts kicker.
Sometimes I feel bad about this. But then I remember that I put 0 effort into it. I spent less than 15 minutes filling out that form and when I was doing it I thought it would never get accepted.
Surely they’d Google the applicant’s name and see it’s the same name as an NFL kicker.
And if that didn’t make them suspicious enough, surely they would Google the person’s workplace to see that he worked at the most infamous zoo on planet earth.
But maybe the applicant is working to improve the reputation of the zoo…oh wait he’s breeding house cats with lions.
Ok ok, let’s send the guy an email and see if he responds. Nope.
At the very least let’s call the phone number and talk to him to confirm he’s a real person.
They did none of those things. They just accepted the application and gave Rodrigo the award. I didn’t even have to use the catfish skills I spent so many years studying.
Maybe you’re wondering why I did this. Truthfully, I don’t know. I just thought it would be a funny joke between me and two of my friends. Like, “Hey remember when we applied for that award? Wonder what the people thought who read the application…”
I never expected to make the list without a single bit of follow up. Maybe I was trying to prove a larger point about the legitimacy of these types of lists, but that would truly be giving me too much credit.
To anyone who legitimately earned their way onto this list, I am sorry. I wasn’t trying to invalidate your achievement.
To the real Rodrigo Blankenship, I am sorry. You are actually an incredibly accomplished person under the age of 30 and you deserve to be on lists like this.
And to my readers who want me to get back to actually trying out new things for this newsletter, don’t worry I have some cool things scheduled in the coming weeks and months.
If you liked this post, please subscribe and share it with friends. Just double check to make sure those friends aren’t also a NEXTGEN under 30 winner.
if you are lost this would be causing a house cat and a lion to mate.