Interviews with Writers for People Who Want to Start Writing - Episode V: Video Essay, with Juan Felipe Salguero (Café Kyoto)
Is writing a pleasure or a punishment? Juan Felipe Salguero (Café Kyoto) reveals the secrets of the video essay: from the “stripping away” of writing for others to the almost physical need to put ideas down on paper.
12 de mar. de 2026 — Roberto Chuit Roganovich
In my brief experience with literature, one never wants to write. You either write or you don’t. That's it. It feels like an annoying weight, an unbearable ghost hanging on your ears that forces you to sit down, open a Word document, and start typing. But generalizing how I feel would be irresponsible, a silly conclusive leap I'd like to avoid. I suspect, then, that there are indeed people who could use a little nudge.
That's why I decided to start working on this series of interviews with writers for people who want to start writing. I reached out to people I respect and whose writing, in one way or another, inspires me. Maybe you'll find in their answers, their advice, and their working methods what you need to finally start putting one word after another. The saga continues with Juan Felipe Salguero from Café Kyoto, to talk about writing video essays.
Roberto Chuit Roganovich
You started writing for another YouTube channel. You scripted content for someone else to take charge, with their face and gestures, of your words. How did it feel every time you saw someone else say your lines? Did you feel good being the director of a sort of theater, someone who, from the shadows, commanded a puppet at your will? Or did it rather create some discomfort, as if someone were stealing something you thought belonged to you?
The feeling was (and in some ways still is) strange. From the first line I wrote for another, I understood that those precarious sketches didn’t belong to me in the slightest. But they didn’t fully belong to anyone else either. They were texts without a clear home. I didn’t put a gram of myself into those drafts, or at least that’s what I thought. And when I did, when some idea slipped through the assignments and requests, a feeling of dispossession emerged that I couldn’t name at the time. Over time, I came to understand it better, and I ended up channeling it into my own reflections on ownership, authorship, and that idea that something can be “someone’s” in a pure and stable way.
Obviously, there’s a conflicting authorship issue at play. Writing for someone else always involves a negotiation between one’s own voice and another’s, between what one thinks and what the assignment demands. But at that moment it was the vehicle I found for my ideas (which at the time were just intermittent flashes, inaccessible even to me) to find a destination. And that destination was hundreds of thousands of people who, unknowingly, were being addressed by a face they would (probably) never know.
Writing for someone else always involves a negotiation between one’s own voice and another’s, between what one thinks and what the assignment demands.
Over time, the task became mechanized. It turned into a trade. And in that mechanization, I began to feel more clearly that dispossession I mentioned earlier. No longer as a specific conflict, but as a structural condition. In this world, in the end, nothing belongs to anyone. And just as dancing was never something I felt was my own, envy is a feeling I was stripped of the day I was born. Maybe because I understood too early that words are merely a temporary loan in a conversation that is much bigger than me.
Why did you leave that job? What did you feel was not being satisfied? Was there something in the creative process you disagreed with, and would you have preferred to be the one in total control of the operating room?
I don’t know if it was out of loyalty, professionalism, or simple modesty that, whenever I’m asked, I respond: “I left due to creative differences.” Maybe the first two. A pity, to no one. At this point, every exercise is counterfactual. But I’m convinced that if the initial agreements had been respected (those de facto pacts we established when I decided to fully engage in the project), I probably would have stayed there for years. And in that case, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I don’t regret leaving in the slightest. I talk about agreements because, for a year and a half, what initially seemed like a marginal trait of the third partner in discord (the other was my brother, with whom I happily continue to work to this day) ended up expanding like a metastasis that invaded every cell of the project until it made its continuity unviable without an intervention as traumatic as it was structural. My role as head of the writing team was fully assumed, and it wasn’t even a dispute over control. The problem was deeper. Within the same body of work, two projects coexisted that were as antagonistic as they were mutually exclusive. They couldn’t coexist without canceling each other out. We reached the point where those tensions turned the project into a heart that beat but didn’t pump. The board was made up of three, and one’s whim ended up prevailing over the shared criteria.
We left through the back door. Then, history did the rest.
Roberto Chuit Roganovich
What you were doing was your livelihood. It was called, without much fuss, work. Do you consider yourself a worker of words? What do you think it means to work with words?
For a long time, I resisted identifying myself as a word worker, even though I practiced my craft with a discipline more akin to that of a factory than the romantic bohemianism often attributed to writing. It's a label I gradually became comfortable with as I shed others: YouTuber, popularizer, communicator, streamer, journalist. Each described something about what I did, but none reached the core. The word (and, consequently, writing) has always been the genesis of everything else. For me, writing has always been a form of self-discovery. One begins to understand oneself to the extent that one can explain their thoughts on a blank page, in the darkness of the most secluded corner of their home.
The epiphany came to me at the beginning of the pandemic, a period I spent largely with my partner at the time. At one point, I faced the challenge of returning home to record a series of videos I had written during the first twenty days of strict quarantine. As a word worker, I didn’t fit into the arbitrary category of 'essential worker'; I had no legal way to travel from the French-style palaces of Recoleta to La Boca, where I lived. Until I came up with an idea that, in that context, seemed brilliant: donating blood. With that permission, I could travel to a hospital in Barracas. I could have simply gotten off the bus at the door and walked home, but for some reason, I went in, stood in line, and donated. It was the price to pay.
Roberto Chuit Roganovich
"Writing" is a strange task, even more so in Argentina, a country that still seems to hold a certain reverence for this work. When did you realize that you were actually "writing"? Did it scare you to know that you shared your craft or profession with people like Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Walsh, Sara Gallardo, or David Viñas, to name a few?
Stephen King has an autobiographical text titled On Writing, where he talks about many aspects of his life closely tied to his craft, including his alcoholism. There’s a scene that has always stuck with me: he recounts that before going to bed, he had to pour out the remaining beers from the fridge into the kitchen sink. Because if he didn’t, when he lay down, he would hear them talking. And then inevitably, he would get up to have another. And another. And another.
Accepting myself as someone who works by writing is very different from accepting myself as a writer. The craft can be a task. Identity is another matter.
I accepted myself as a writer when I understood that writing could also speak to me. When I discovered that if I didn’t sit down to write, what I didn’t put on paper began to murmur in my head with the same insistence with which the beers called to King. I didn’t need to pour anything down the sink to be able to rest. I needed to write it. I accepted myself as a writer the day I realized it wasn’t about prestige or labels, but about dependency. Although yes, I also had issues with alcohol consumption.
Over time, you "tamed" a certain language and adapted to the contemporary dynamics of popularizing political philosophy and video essays on YouTube. What ultimately refined your way of communicating? Are there specific YouTube channels or podcasts that have shaped you?
It was a long, arduous, and traumatic process. The truth is that for a long time, I despised my writing style. It seemed (and still seems to me to some extent) mechanical and artificial, as if each sentence was more concerned with showcasing its architecture than with clearly conveying something.
Writing has always been a form of self-discovery for me. One begins to understand oneself to the extent that one can explain their thoughts on a blank page, in the darkness of the most secluded corner of their home.
I remember one day in college, a professor read aloud a story he had written for his class. After getting tangled up in an absolutely unnecessary concatenation of subordinate clauses, he stopped and, in front of all my classmates, asked me: 'Why do you write like that? Do you really want to write like that? It's like reading (Theodor) Adorno'. He was right. And I admired Adorno. But admiration doesn’t justify clumsy imitation. There’s no possible light in a lighthouse covered in its own soot. He remains, to this day, the best teacher I had throughout my university life.
What helped you understand how to write? Do you have any go-to books on journalistic or essay writing? Would you recommend any?
Over the years, we developed a beautiful dynamic with the audience of Café Kyoto. There’s an implicit pact: anyone who has sat down to listen to me attentively knows that we never talk solely about the text, but about what each of us experiences with that text.
Under that logic, any work written with a bit of heart has potential in the eyes of those who approach it with honesty. That premise allowed me to establish a very fertile back-and-forth with the audience, an exchange that shaped my writing style and taught me to draw that blurry line in this craft between being misunderstood and not wanting to be understood. The first I could work on: with practice, listening, and constant feedback. The second, however, is a matter that exceeds technique. That’s already material for therapy.
Roberto Chuit Roganovich
Did you take any literary workshops or courses in essay or journalistic writing? What was your experience like?
My journey as a writer began long before I consciously developed an interest in perfecting my craft. The only formative experiences I had were the various workshop levels I completed during my Communication Sciences degree at the University of Buenos Aires.
Among an exceptionally talented faculty, I must highlight my professor Osvaldo Beker, who, with a teaching style as demanding as it was insightful (on par with those uncomfortable yet necessary critiques reminiscent of the Adorno incident), managed to bring out the best in his students. Studying with him made me realize that, despite having been in the field for over five years, I was writing poorly. Very poorly. And yet (or perhaps because of that), I didn’t lose the desire to improve.
When you started writing longer pieces, who did you share your progress with? How open are you to feedback and revisions from others? Do you find feedback helpful, or do you prefer to work alone?
Without a doubt, my brother Tomás. For many years (especially during the formative phase of Café Kyoto), writing was a constant back-and-forth between us: reading aloud, debates, rewrites, agreements, and disagreements.
Sometimes one can have a good idea, a solid starting point, but quickly realize that it’s aiming for the sky. And nothing more than that. In those cases, having someone point it out in time is crucial. Today, Café Kyoto has become something much more personal, partly because I no longer share these concerns in the same way with anyone else. It’s been several years since we lived together, and when we do meet, it’s usually in a work context. That makes it harder to foster that kind of dialogue, that space for creative friction that requires time, trust, and a framework to contain it.
Do you use any specialized software to organize your writing process? Notion, Scrivener, Plotter, Hemingway Editor, Final Draft?
No. Just a couple of years ago, I started writing in Google Docs, solely to have the texts handy in case I needed them for editing or sharing. More recently, my sophisticated playfulness has led me to incorporate Adobe Acrobat, mainly for some of its PDF editing tools and for an AI assistant that’s limited enough not to make me feel complicit in feeding Skynet every time I look up a word, definition, topic, or key chapter in some material. I’ll look into the options you mentioned.
Do you write by hand or on the computer? Why?
Computer, no matter how romantic I want to seem. My handwriting is terrible, and I also have the issue of pressing too hard with the pen while I write. My body doesn’t understand what it means to write without tensing up. After a couple of pages, I end up exhausted. With the computer, I can spend many, many hours writing. And let’s be honest, I’m a Gordian knot of insecurities. A sentence, no matter how simple, can go through dozens of revisions before I leave it alone.
Not only are you a writer, but you’re also a designer, director, editor, and filmmaker. Herzog said that often what he envisioned for his projects ends up transforming not just in the editing process but also during filming. I understand that you follow certain beats that are already determined by the written text, but how much of what you write actually makes it to the final product we see? How much do you allow yourself to play during the recording sessions?
Logically, the script is the backbone of all my videos. I write them as if someone else might read them someday (footnotes included), even though rarely does anyone read them after I’ve read them in front of the camera. Perhaps it’s the fantasy of someday publishing a compilation.
The tone of the video can be inferred from the topic we’re addressing, but that doesn’t prevent surprises from cropping up during the process. Writing to read is one thing; writing to say is something completely different. There are words that work perfectly on the page, but when spoken aloud with a Rioplatense accent, they sound artificial or forced. Those details are usually corrected on the fly during filming. In practice, almost everything that’s written ends up being said on camera. However, when it comes time to edit (with a cooler head), some phrases may sound redundant, confusing, or simply unnecessary, and I cut them without much hesitation. Except in rare cases, when a scene has been planned well in advance, the aesthetic of the video starts to take shape during filming and is finalized in post-production. A few months ago, we shot a video where, during the filming process, the idea of giving it a horror movie aesthetic emerged. It worked. And those are the kinds of creative games I enjoy the most.
Enzo Capocasale
How did you train as a director, editor, and filmmaker? Did you attend any specialized academy or university, or are you more of a self-taught person?
Like almost everything I’ve done in my life, it was completely self-taught. I did what I had to do because I could, and with the few resources we always had. That’s how I also put down the guitar and became a drummer. In any creative process, challenges arise that (especially in this field) often require certain technical skills. And since I never had money, the equation was pretty simple: if I wanted something, I had to learn how to do it. That little “joke” gradually pushed me to where I am now. Someone had to do it.
What reading route or work processes would you recommend to someone eager to start producing videos like yours?
First and foremost: give it a shot. I often meet friends or colleagues who would love to dive into the world of video essays, and I always say the same thing: the most important step, above all else, is to do.
Unless your idea is to create a unique and unrepeatable Take On Me, to dedicate yourself to this, you need to be able to do it today… and do it again next week. You might have a great idea, sure, but that doesn’t guarantee you can sustain it in the medium or long term. In fact, having an idea doesn’t even ensure it can materialize into a concrete video.
Writing is a process. It's friction. You need discipline. You need consistency. You have to tolerate that what comes out today may not meet the expectations you had. And come back tomorrow.
That's why —at least for me— the key is to sit down and do it. See if that idea flows, if it develops, if it goes somewhere. Once you have that, try recording yourself. However it turns out. The best you can with what you have. You don’t need to be an expert to be a great artist. Art Attack Doctrine. Then you'll face another big challenge: editing. With some practice and a few tutorials, you'll probably figure it out. And when you finally upload it, you might find that it turned out pretty rough. Some jerk will probably let you know in the comments. It doesn’t matter. Now you know a ton of things that will make those same tasks much simpler next week.
What programs do you use for design? Which ones for editing and assembling, and what others for color treatment and post-production?
I practically work entirely within the Adobe ecosystem. That includes Photoshop for designs, Audition for audio treatment, and Premiere Pro for editing, assembling, and color grading. I tried to incorporate more sophisticated tools, but I never really got used to them.
Three books?
The Anarchy by Errico Malatesta, Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, and Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer.
What should I do if I want to start writing?
First and foremost: write. There’s no more sophisticated shortcut than that. Not reading ten books on how to write. Just sit down and write. Even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad.
Most people who say they want to write actually want to have written. They want the result, not the process. But writing is a process. It’s friction. You need discipline. You need consistency. You have to tolerate that what comes out today may not meet the expectations you had. And come back tomorrow. The label “writer” comes (if it comes) later. Before that is the craft. And the craft is repetition. And if you find that you can’t go too long without doing it, then don’t worry. You’ve already started.
Why should I go for it?
Because if you don’t, you’ll be left wondering who you could have been when facing a blank page. Writing, above all, is an act of honesty. It’s telling yourself: “I’m going to see what I have inside.” And that’s scary, because it might be mediocre. Because it might not live up to the image you have of yourself. But that’s great, because it’s also a way to build your own identity. And, above all, because writing organizes. It organizes what you think, what you feel, what you sense but can’t articulate. It’s a form of self-knowledge that has no substitute. If you don’t take the plunge, maybe nothing will happen. The world will keep going as it is. And so will you.
