Behind the Bastards - Part One: Why Kidnapping Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

Robert and Sarah Marshall sit down to talk about the wave of kidnapping conspiracy theories that recently led a random woman to murder an Uber driver in El Paso. (2 Part Series) https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/why-fake-kidnapping-stories-are-everywhereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, and I have some bad news for you all kind of if you started this episode. Starting in like 2021, kind of late, you know, early pandemic period, I started chatting with a good friend of mine, Corn Mac McCarthy, about bringing one of his books to life and the way he'd always intended, which was by having me read Blood Meridian in my award-winning Boston accent in its entirety. We finished our discussions right before he tragically passed earlier this year. Sophie and I recorded the whole thing. We were about to release it as a surprise, but as of the, the writers and now the actors strike in solidarity

decided to delete the entirety of Boston blood meridian. So, you know, I'm very sorry. I know a lot of you were looking forward to this. And all I can say is that if you want to do something about this and, and force us to release it. David Zoslav's home address is Beverly Hills, California. So, you know, I'm not telling you to do anything. Just think about it. That's where his $65 million Beverly Hills mansion is. Uh, also. Don't loop me into this weird crime you're doing right now. Sophie, it's not a crime because the mansion that he bought used to belong to the other

Robert Evans. So I'm allowed to read it on air. There is no other Robert Evans. You are the only one. Thank you, Sophie. Speaking of other people who are the only example of their kind, Sarah Marshall. Hello. Actually, this is true.

We're both doppelgangers. We are both doppelgangers. We are both doppelgangers. It is interesting that we both have a famous person who utilized our name that is involved in Hollywood. It is, and it's also weird to be the real person, the non-Hollywood person. You are the real version, yeah. And yet, I'm the other one.

I will say that. I will say that. I didn't say version. Yeah. And yet I'm the other one. Every time I come across a copy of that movie at a red box, I kick it. So I'm doing my part. So there you are doing your part. That's all I ask for. Yeah. You are you are one of the most accomplished podcasters in the biz. A real, I was going to like give you a nickname based on a famous podcaster, but most of the miterable people actually. I'm a real, real, real, real, real, real, um, no, you, uh, you, you, you, you do some of the best podcasts in the business, and you also live in Portland, Oregon. How are you doing today? Yeah. I'm so good.

Yes, this is an all Portland show, which I love. I especially love it when I meet people who say, do you live in New York or LA? And I say Portland. It's like the third secret answer. And there are answers. I remember. Always. Oh.

Yeah, it is. It's a thing. Oh, and then they say, and where are you from? And you say Portland and they say, oh, see that's different because there are, that this is, Portland's a little weird to me in that. And that like, unlike all of the other West Coast cities, you ask anyone where they're from and it's anywhere about the West Coast. But in Portland, some people actually come from here, which is surprising to me. It's a, I mean, it's a great city to stick around in.

I feel like Pittsburgh is the same way. It's like, I don't know. And it's, you have a really nice quality of life here, I think. I like it. I like it. Yeah. I'm so happy you like it. It's thrilling.

And I was just juicing a watermelon before we started because it is watermelon time. There are little signs for Hermiston melons up in our streets where you can go buy him from a truck and it's watermelon time. I'm pretty happy. I had watermelon for lunch. Thank you so much. Honestly, I'm extremely hungover right now. So watermelon sounds great.

I do, and I'm sorry if he's telling you this Sarah, but the AI will be able to take your line where you said that you were just using a watermelon and turn that into a conversation with Joe Rogan about steroids. So I do a call to check. And we all have to deal with that. And a pair, whereas I call, I was just gonna say apparently you only get paid for one day of your work and then they'll use it

forever. Yeah. Yeah, they juice you and then they throw you away. Yeah, Joe Rogan or as I call him, the guy from News Radio. The guy from News Radio. Oh, man. Yeah, it's good because we all needed a shorthand that we could use to simultaneously refer to Joe Rogan and Andy Dick.

I also like jokes for three percent of our audience. Why is it also that like, and that here's a joke for that three percent as well, I can't believe that podcasts that has truly changed American society has come from a news radio alum and that it wasn't day fully. I think it's all it if he had that size of a following. I would be okay with that, I think. Yeah, I would have been okay with Phil Hartman having that big of a follow-up. Oh my God.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I the other one. I do. Oh, she's got to say wouldn't it be nice to fill Heartman was alive, but yeah, that does really complete it.

The wish. Speaking of tragedy, how do you feel about kidnapping, Sarah? I am always ready to talk about a kidnapping as my ex-Idy brain at one in the morning when I'm on Wikipedia. So this is much better than that. That's good because we're kind of our subject for this week is pretty focused on the anxiety brain and how it relates to paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping because it turns out that's a real problem.

And we're going to start by talking about kind of the deadliest manifestation of that problem. On June 16, 2023, Phoebe Howard Copus, a 48-year-old woman from Tompkinsville, Kentucky, flew to El Paso, Texas to hang out with her boyfriend. Upon arrival, she got into an Uber driven by a 52-year-old man named Daniel Piedra Garcia. His niece later described him as a hardworking and funny guy who had an instinctive ability to lift other people up when he was in a bad mood. Piedras was the sole breadwinner for his family

and had started driving for Uber after recovering from an injury at a previous job. He started driving Copus to her boyfriend's place. She was not familiar with El Paso. She had been one or two times before. and she got spooked because she saw a sign for Juarez, Mexico, which convinced her for some reason that she was about to be kidnapped and trafficked across the border. Now El Paso, if you've never been, is the sister city or sibling city or whatever, to Juarez.

They're effectively suburbs of each other, right? Like Juarez and El Paso are basically the same city with a border in between them. So seeing signs for Juarez while you're in El Paso, not a weird experience. But purpose. They're all over the place. It's constant. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's right there. It's also very pretty city. It's a great city. We're we're we'll talk about that. But Copa gets freaked out. So she pulls a handgun from her purse and she shoots Pietra in the head from behind. The vehicle, which was not particularly close to any of the entrances to Mexico, not that that really matters, but she's going

to make claims about this, slid to a stop and impacted a freeway barrier. Copa's texted a picture to her boyfriend and then she called 911. Now, this story when it happened because she kills him, goes viral. For several reasons, obviously it's at the intersection of a bunch of salient issues in US politics. You've got immigration, you've got the border, you've got gun control, you've got racism. But it's also a story that can kind of be briskly described as part of the now expansive Karen goes crazy, genre, right? Where you've got like a woman who reacts in some sort of aggressive or violent way

because of shit that people would kind of could kind of like sum up in that way. When the story broke on Twitter before much was known about it, many of the posts that I saw just kind of casually assumed that Copus was a white suburban woman because that was the picture of the person who would do something like this that most jived with their pre-existing assumptions. And kind of the again assumption was that

she was probably a strong right-winger who would invite a lot of racist propaganda about the border. Now, as I'm going to talk about, we don't have super clear information about like what sort of info ecosystem she existed in. But Copus is a black woman. And from what I can get about her socio-economic status,

she seems to have been kind of broadly middle class. She's a grandmother. There was not anything, I found her social media and there was nothing in it that would make you think. She was not posting about guns, she was not posting paranoid conspiracies about the border or about any of this stuff. Like it was like a weirdly normal,

like social media profile. 48. 48. Okay. So, you know, someone who had a kid and young and became a grandma pretty young, but, you know, there was nothing in it that like set off, I do this all the time, right? Like I used to for a living when, you know,

mass shootings and stuff would be done, scrap shit on the people who had committed the shooting to talk, like try to figure out, like what had been going on with them prior to making that decision. And Copus, I don't, there's nothing that's, I would consider a warning sign in her publicly available information. The most recently updated post on her Facebook before killing Pietras was a profile pick from February 17th.

And in general, most of the activity on her Facebook was just like occasionally updating her portrait. What update she did post were all super normal. There's an update from March of 2022 that's just a video of her dancing with her grand kid with the text Tatum's birthday dance. He loves dancing with his Gigi, love him. And it's one of those, because I got to this, I don't know, maybe a day or two after the shooting, the comments on there are, it's this weird thing that you get with the internet,

where like somebody does something terrible, and then people find their anodine social media posts and start like commenting on it. So the first couple of comments on this year old post are like family member being like, oh, it's so cute, you know, you and the kid are so cute. And then it becomes like a bunch of weirdos posting like your family member is a murderer, like fuck this lady, she killed somebody.

Which is like, yeah, I mean, she did kill somebody and I broadly agree, yeah, fuck her, because that's bad. You shouldn't shoot people in the back of the head. It's so true. You're always saying that. I'm always saying that. But I can't not find it kind of unsettling to like hop on these

pictures of a lady and her grand kid and just be like, fuck you for killing a guy. And it's like, it's not just fuck you for killing a guy, but like, hey, person who is a family member of this person, like your, your relative is, is a bad person. That's a, a strange impulse, I guess I feel like is, it's weird. It's strange to have that technology available to us. And all of all of the things that let's us do, yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's weird. Kind of like right below that first post, your kin is a murderer post, is another comment from somebody who told one of Copus' relatives, visit her in prison while she is alive, LOL. El Paso, another type of jail, she will get it, LOL. Which I think they meant like El Paso has another type,

it's a reference to like the death penalty, right? That like, which is true, but like also, I don't know, man, like again, what she did is bad. I, like you shouldn't be able to do that and just like walk away from it obviously, but like it's weird to just be like, hey, family members of this person who murdered a guy, like your, your relative might get the chair.

Like that's such a strange thing. And at this point, the ease of being able to do that without leaving your house is very dangerous. Yeah, and there was another, someone else posted, like commenting, like had scraped her details enough to figure out that she was like a home designer for a living and like noted gleefully, she'll have to decorate her new home cell with scrap, maybe using toilet paper. And then it...

The prison fantasies are just never sit right, no matter what somebody did. It's like, okay, calm down. Because like, using prison is a way of fantasizing about revenge reveals the whole thing being what it is. Yeah, and it's fascinating, because this person starts by being like, ha ha ha, she was a home designer and now she'll be designing a cell. And then in the middle of the post is like, oh, I take it back. She was a case worker, which is, I feel like someone other than me, you could like, there's

so much to say about America and just sort of analyzing the decision this person made to like real-time fact check while she was making her post without like editing or changing it. Like there's so much there. I don't know what to say about it, but it's like, I feel it's like Finnegan's wake. We're like somewhere trapped in that post is like the secret to the madness of the United States. Yeah. But yeah.

I just need someone to write a dissertation on it. Yeah. Kids in college who are listening to this podcast, there you go. That's a free one for you. And it is like we're talking about how weird this is, but at the same time, it's not weird, right? This is just like anyone who's not unfamiliar with the internet knows, like, we have, there's like public facing social media

for somebody who does something terrible. This is gonna happen to it, right? That's just the way the world works. So, you know, it's weird, but it's not weird. As far as copus goes, the closest we get to anything that reveals like what kind of ideology might have made her shoot a stranger in the back of the head while he was driving her down the highway.

Is a lecture, a quote or a clip from a lecture that she posted on her Facebook. An elector is by a guy named TD Jakes who's an American non-denominational mega-church preacher. And it's like a kind of very patriarchal, traditional little like thing. He's talking about how like a woman is like salt, you know, she makes everything better, including like she makes men who are like shitty better. And that's like the job of a woman, right? It's like worse.

Yeah. It's obviously like, it's toxic, but it's not also, this isn't like a, like, TD Jakes, ain't Jordan Peterson, right? This is a guy you walk into any, maybe you've never heard of him, but you walk into any fucking bookstore in the United States and there's TDJ's books and shit. Like he is an incredibly popular mega church preacher. So I wouldn't, there's nothing in here

that I would call like a warning sign. The most actual like, like kind of thing that we get that might suggest some toxicity in her in her personal life comes from the the fundraiser that her family posted on GiveSendGo after she got arrested. It reads or it starts our daughter who is an attractive 48 year old African American woman is being detained in El Paso, Texas at the El Paso County Detention Center, because of the charge of reshooting a Hispanic male. Now, that's a little weird, right? Who wrote that?

I heard that, right? Her family, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our daughter who is in a track pool. Who is in a track, then? Okay. That's weird. That's a little lot.

Yeah, and rule, right? That sentence for that. In fact, in the grave to do it, it was expensive. God, that's right. That's a bit peculiar, right? Now, the post goes on to claim, and there's no evidence for this, that she asked the driver to stop numerous times, and he refused to stop, and then he engaged the child locks, which is why she decided to shoot him.

Yeah, it's, again, peculiar that like they describe her as attractive. What we can say safely given the known facts of the case is that Phoebe Copus was a pretty normal seeming person from the outside who probably, I mean, it's probably accurate to say, had a distinctly irrational fear of being kidnapped and that fear was exacerbated by her proximity to Mexico. Copus has spoken out since her arrest through her lawyer to claim that she demanded Pedro spul over and let her out and that he told her he was taking her to a fair in Juarez. Again, there's zero evidence of this and the police report states the defendant never called for police or emergency services to report her being in any immediate danger prior to shooting the complaining witness.

The defendant took a photo of the complaining witness after he was shot and sent it to her boyfriend via text message prior to calling 911. Um, Copus's lawyer, Matthew Cossack, has claimed that the like media that Copus had been ingesting had contributed to the mindset that she was in when she carried out the shooting. From Yahoo News, quote, he said that his client was in fear of her life because of her knowledge of violence and kidnappings in Juarez

and seeing highway signs on US 54 showing exits to Juarez. During the hearing, Cozik showed news articles reporting on violence in Juarez, including stories about drug cartels and kidnappings. He also showed photos where the shooting happened and traffic signs showing the highway led to Warres. So that's what her defense is going to rest on. And I think there's a degree to which,

like I don't think that's a good defense, but it is accurate that if you are somebody who engage who consumes mainstream news media, most of what you hear about Juarez is kidnappings and murders, right? Most of what you hear about the US border is kidnappings and murders. Now, I can remember like,

fucking 15 years ago I was on a road trip and we were in El Paso and crossed over to Juarez to get lunch. And when we came back, the Border Patrol guy was so suspicious of us that he stripped our car down, like took every, like almost to like the fucking metal. Because he was like nobody stops in Juarez for lunch. It's the most dangerous city on earth. And it's like, man, like yeah, if you're fucking doing weirdo,

like if you're doing certain things, it's dangerous. But like it's also a place just a lot of people live. You can go get lunch in Juarez. The cartels aren't coming for you there, you know, like, but it is like that's just how people think about the city, which is peculiar to me. But I, I, yeah, I started kind of looking into the media surrounded kidnaps, surrounding kidnappings in the United States because it was one of those things. I felt like there had to be something peculiar there that would set someone like

Phoebe Copus off, like there had to be, even if we don't have evidence from her info diet, when I started looking into just going, the major social media apps, looking up like what kind of the trending stories involving kidnapping or human trafficking was, you start to like see some patterns. And one of the patterns is that kidnapping related content is among the most reliable ways to go viral on the internet right now.

If you start looking for kid tick tocks using kidnapping, using human trafficking, you'll see a bunch that have multiple million views. And if, particularly one of the things that keyed me and is like, I would see some weirdo who would do something like take a clip from a made for TV movie about a kid getting kidnapped and then like put an AI voice over it to be talking about like, here's, you know,

how kidnappings happen. And that video would have like four million views and everything else in their channel would be like 10, 20,000, right? So it's like, oh, this is like a reliable way to get follows and to get views is like putting a kid in there and they should out there. AI voice that they use in like movie summary accounts

and also stuff like that where it's like, the girl is walking down the street. The girl. That's her by the wrist. The girl. The girl. Yeah, you've seen exactly the ones I'm talking about. So I started looking into this and it kept getting weirder and weirder. So one tick-tock that I found in my research was from the account TV Moments, which has 244,000 followers and 14.3 million likes.

And it mostly posts clips from news stories with on screen text summaries, stuff like triple homicide, suspect it appears in court with the text heartbreaking story and read above it, or titles like Child Abducted from Berkeley Home, American Kidnapped Walking Dog in Mexico. And this video that I'm about to show or so if he's about to show you, which is posted April 2nd, uses a clip from News Nation, which is a news network that is kind of like a mild conservative bent.

And here's how it sounds. Before $40,000 reward is being offered to help find an American woman who went missing in Mexico. This new reward comes four months after that she was snatched into a van in broad daylight. And now her family in California is calling for authorities to finally bring her home. News Nation correspondent

Jorge Ventura joining us live in El Paso tonight. Jorge, we are learning that this was a targeted attack. Yeah, that's right. Natasha, we have new images of an American woman, Monica De Leon Barbara Barbara, showing her alleged kidnapping in Mexico in November of last year. The FBI says she was walking her dog from the gym and at this kidnapping is most likely targeted. She was actually walking in the Calisco State in Mexico. The FBI is asking for the public's help and

fighting and they're offering up to $40,000 for information leading up to her recovery. Now, FBI and Vescagers believe that her attack was targeted and we're still waiting for more information on that. So you listen to that and it's clear this is again, it's like a targeted abduction, but the actual like media, like everything that's like written and text on the clip everything in the title Any of the clip is just an American was kidnapped in Mexico The actual story here is like yeah, this this person was kidnapped specifically because of who she was This was not random. They were just like looking for a lady like they were looking for this woman because of like a family connection

Right like which is the thing that happens and that's how most, very rarely are people abducted at random anywhere in the world. It's not a super common kind of crime. But this would have been, I think, kind of one of the most recent stories that Copus might have encountered relating to El Paso. It was kind of a big deal. And it sets off up this kind of idea that like Americans

are getting randomly picked up off the street right at the border. Obviously the reality is that El Paso in particular is one of the safest cities in the United States. It's the fourth safest large city in the U.S. It has extremely low rates of violence and property crime. But that's not what people think when they hear about it because of the reliability of like content that involves kidnapping in the border going viral. Every aspect of this story is tied in with the fact that for more than a century, the United States has been engaged in a kind of perpetual moral panic over our border with Mexico. And it's one of those things that like this is, you know, people have been kind of like broadly positive about some of the ways that the

right has performed poorly at the ballot box in the last couple of elections. But one area in which their prop like conservative propaganda in particular has been undoubtedly successful. Is that creating a sense of fear in behalf of the majority of this country about the border? An NPR poll from last year showed that more than half of Americans perceived that there was an invasion going on at the southern border. Support for immigrants has broadly declined over the last four to six years. has broadly declined over the last four to six years. And it's, you know, again, all of this is kind of playing it. It's kind of cooking into the stew of whatever was going on in this woman's head when she decided to shoot that guy.

The fact that Texas recently made permitless concealed carry legal also certainly played a role. And there's something else that I suspect might have contributed, which is that for the last eight years or so, false stories have been spreading with increasing regularity about random people being targeted by kidnappers or robbers. These primarily spread today on TikTok and Facebook, that's where most of the stuff comes from. But also, this kind of brand of content has been going on and been spreading in this country since well before the birth of the internet.

You might remember Sarah because you and I are both olds. Like the stories about like hook-handed killers in the backseat of cars, right? Do you hear that as a kid? You over here that like, yeah, those tales about like people waiting in the seats of cars. Yeah, I encountered it, I think. Yeah, because there's like, I think I'm more encountered at second hand through other

forms of media, but like, yes, there's definitely a lot of hook-handed men to go around. I know there's a great hook-hand story in adventures in babysitting. Yes. Is it handsome John Pruitt? Yeah, great film also. And it's one of those things like, I can remember I'm sure that like, particularly just because of aspects of our culture, young women get like more of these kind of warning stories.

You should always be aware people might be there to abduct you, but like when I did my driving school, when I went to like driving school to like get my license, one of the things they taught us was that anytime you're going back to your car, you should check underneath it to see if someone's there. Yeah, I got it. Like, that was just like a thing in driving school that like there might be people waiting under your car to attach to you.

That's like how many confirmed cases do we have of this that aren't Cape Fear? I have not come across a single one. Yeah, it's just Cape Fear. It's just, yeah, I'm sure it's just the result of a fucking, oh God, now I've forgotten his, you know, the Cape Fear guy. Oh, yeah, Max Cape. It's Stephen, Stephen Cate. Well, I was going to say Stephen Cate.

It's just like Stephen King funding all of the driving schools in this country. Like, no, you have to warn people. The Mico Hughes driver's exam, he's a civilian. Yeah, there's also, I mean, there's so many of these, but what I remember making the rounds when I was in high school was like, women should not wear overalls or long ponytail or braids because if you have a long ponytail, so if you're fucked by the way and so on, or long ponytail or braids because if you have a long pony so if you're fucked by the way and so on, I have a long ponytail and you have a long braids. That's why I shaved my head.

Stop me from I'm not going to get kidnapped now. Yeah, because of the kidnappers. It's like when you go to the pumpkin patch to get a pumpkin, they want to handle. And it's like if you don't give them a braid to grab onto, you'll be safe. That's like, I'm fucked't give them a braid to grab onto, you'll be safe. And it's like, I'm fucked. That's the only hair style Sarah. I'm so screwed. It's amazing you've made it this far, honestly.

Well, for more than just that reason, but yes. It's very funny, because like, again, I think probably the majority of times when people get advice like this, it is like women being warned about the dangers of the world. I have also, especially when my beard was longer, I would just like, you know, I'm going to like, I'm at like a gunrains or something and some guys like, you know, if you don't shave that, you know, in a fight, somebody will like pull that to control you, you can get control. And I'm like, man, how many fights are you getting in?

Like how often are you get, are you scrapping with dudes? Like, I've been in more fights than most people, just because I'm a public person who gets assaulted on the street sometimes, and I don't get in enough fights to be concerned about my beard getting pulled. Like, that's not a, you can't let it keep going.

You can't let it keep going. You can't let it keep going. You can't let it keep going. You can't let it keep going. You can't let it not a, you can't let it keep like beard lengths and the fascists way. Yeah, then the, then the fucking Nazis of one. It's so like this kind of like beard. It's this, it's this interesting mix of like true crime brain and tactical brain that have like created something. And again, I think this is rel, you know, relating to the murder that cop is carried out. But, these two things cooking together to this, like you have to always be on, like be ready for danger. And also being ready for danger means being

perpetually armed and prepared to do violence. It's cool. It's good stuff. I was a kid, there was this story that went around at a different middle school than mine, that somebody had been kidnapped, and it was really scary, but they were okay. That was a lie.

That didn't happen. But everybody knew exciting. But everybody knew about it, and then like into early adulthood, I brought it up somebody and they were like, that was literally just them trying to scare the shit out of everybody to not talk to strangers. It's like, yeah.

Cool. Wow. What a great misinformation campaign. Love that for us. Yeah. It is great, Sarah. And we're going to talk more about kind of the prehistory of America's paranoia of getting kidnapped by strangers.

But when it comes to the modern kind of kidnapping panic that I think played into this murder that that is sort of sweep it continuing to sweep through social media right now, I can trace the origins of it back to 2015, which is it when rumors started spreading on social media, namely Facebook, that Carthieves had cooked up a new tactic for like getting people, right? Text from one relevant story reads, Carthieves are always trying to find new schemes for getting into your car to steal your valuables. You may have heard reports of tech devices used to enter your car, but some thieves are

using a less intricate method. There have been a rash of robberies using of all things, a penny or a rinickel. How were they using a coin to enter your car? Whether your car, basically the idea is that like if you see a pinny or a rinickel and like slid into the door handle of your car, it's like evidence that a car thief is trying to like break in, right? And there's so bored, aren't they? They're bored in their dumbest fuck Sarah. It's so fucking, again, I'm a very paranoid person because people like have attacked me

and threatened to murder me, right? So I have a grenade launcher sitting next. That's not part of the paranoia. That was just a recreational grenade launcher. But like, and I don't like obsess over this kind of shit. Like, it's, because it's stupid, because like that's, the initial version of this is that like thieves were, you know, if there was a coin in the door of your car and that a thief was trying to disable your remote locking systems, this does not really work, right?

Like, you can't actually disable a car's remote locking system, like realistically this way. Yeah. Yeah. There were a couple of cars a while ago that had a specific sort of problem that allowed something similar to this to work, but it was never a widespread thing.

And because that was such a silly thing, the theory, I don't know, conspiracy theory isn't what, I don't know what to call these things, but so it starts off with this is evidence that someone has tried to get into your car. And then it evolves to instead of they're using sticking pennies or whatever in your car to disable the locks, it's a way to mark which vehicles have goodies so that they can steal from them later. And like, why not just do it now?

Why not just break in this? I had my car broken into not all that long ago back. And I mean, this was in San Francisco, but like a bunch of shit jacked from it. Cause that's, and say if you park with anything in a car in San Francisco and walk away, your car will be broken into within seconds. But it's also like nobody's like marking your car

for later. They see shit. They break a window. They grab it, right? Like that's the way that. No, everyone has a master plan. Everyone is boring. Yeah. Yeah. There's like fucking rings of people marking. And it's also like, if you actually think logically about it, are they marking it like following at home to get your fucking purse? Like, what why? That's shopping all day. None of it makes any sense. And Snopes looked into all of these kind of ver-, because there's a number of variations. And they found no evidence that like, this was at, like, people sticking pennies into

car doors was a factor in any sort of crime. They talked to like service departments at dealerships who were like, yeah, locks don't work that way. They talked to police departments who were like, we've never heard, you know, of any sort of tactics like this being spread among car burglars. And in an article at the time, they tied this myth back to certain myths

that had spread back in like the 80s and 90s through what were then called chain letters. Sarah, again, I apologize, but like you and I are both ancient, you know. We make terrifying sounds when we got up from squatting. That's right. Yeah, we're a thousand years old. We've seen the birth of time itself.

And so we remember chain letters. Like our Ginzy listeners are like, what the fuck is a chain letter? Yeah, and it's funny because again, I don't remember receiving chain letters, but I remember them being something with like that everyone made jokes about and that there's a lot of cultural literacy around in the nightmares. I was, you know, even from like, because I was mostly the same way where it was a thing that like my mom and her sisters and stuff, they would talk about my older cousins would

talk about. I remember one specific time we got a chain letter and it was like shown to me because they were starting to get rarer in the early 90s. It was shown to me as like, look at this, isn't this funny, look at this weird thing that we got. And we're going to talk about what chain letters work, because really what we're seeing when we look at a chain letter is the birth of meme culture. It goes back surprisingly far, but it all relates very directly to the shit spreading on TikTok and Facebook. But you know what else relates to misinformation spreading on the internet?

Oh, I know. Advertising, because advertising is what makes disinformation profitable. So Sarah, Sophie, Piusomads. Oh, great! Sacred Skando, one of best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church la luz del mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth.

It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States, until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers call him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption.

This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members, one after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids?

And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or

high. It was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, Bombing, with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. I'll have guests like Sam J. We'll say Sloan, Michelle Butteau, Mac DeMarco, DJ Doug Pound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more. Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on WheelFare's Big Money Players Network on the I-Hard Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's your name? What's your name? What's your name?

What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name?

What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name?

What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? What's your name? but the more I got into it, the more I realized like, oh, like everything that's happened today that's happened for the last 20 years on the internet in terms of what we call meme culture was sort of preceded by chain letters. And in fact, an interesting aspect, chain letters are like,

they are letters that would, and as back in the day would arrive in your mailbox and they were a mix of like, forward this to the next 10 people that you know in order to not get bad luck. Sometimes they were like, here's a story about like a bad thing that's happened or like here's a thing to be worried about.

Forward this so that your friends know about this danger, about these, about this thing that murderers do or whatever. Like there's a variety of different kind of like chain letters over the years. One of the things I didn't realize until I got into this is that geneticists, like scientists and researchers teaching genetics, use chain letters in there because you can apply some of the same algorithms that you apply to calculating mutations and genetics to the way chain letters alter over time. There's a surprising amount of stuff about it.

It's a really good way to talk about, because over time, both people would alter chain letters in order to make them more relevant, but also just mutations would occur, because a lot of chain letters were initially handwritten, and then they'd they'd get memia graft and then after a time it would get so messy that you'd type up a fresh version and you'd introduce changes. So like it was actually like it is a pretty good way going over like, oh, here's 80 years worth of like related chain letters and we can sort of track the alterations over time

in the same way that we look at the way that mutations get introduced into a genetic sequence. I didn't realize that, it's not really relevant to the story, but it's kind of cool. But it's so great. Yeah, I'm so glad to know that. Yeah, there's a like a surprising amount of like scientific studies on how durable it actually is to use chain letters for this purpose.

Yeah, cool stuff. So I found a contemporary casual history of chain letters on slate. And there's a couple of other places that have done similar sort of, again, casual histories. And they generally tie the birth of the chain letter back to Europe, generally England, and the United States starting in the 1700s, right?

Kind of when we both have the origins of a relevant, like, or of a reasonably reliable postal service, which kind of starts to happen in the late 1700s, and when we have a printing press so that people, like obviously, right? You can both print letters and copy them sort of semi-reliably and you can send them places. That said, again, this is what you get in the casual histories.

When you really dig and do it, and you find the chain letter, like, like the chain letter nerds, I guess you'd call them, the obsessives, they kind of bristle at starting it in the 1700s. Their argument is that it goes back much, much further. And this is where things go off the rails a little bit. The most detailed analysis of the history of this art form that I have found comes from the independent researcher named Daniel W. Van Arsdale. Starting in the 1990s, he started collecting huge numbers of chain letters and posting them on his private website, which is a thing people don't

really have anymore. His website is down, but it's still you can find it on the wayback machine. And It's very much like a late 90s early 2000s. Here's this maniac who is obsessed with chain letters. In a degree that probably no one else in history ever was. He wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of words. He read God knows how many of these letters. He categorized them and graphed them. Anyway, he splits chain letters into, he's probably the number one expert on the concept of chain letters, he's ever lived.

What does the W stand for? No one knows. I don't. Okay. Someone probably knows. I assume this man is dead. I think it's Daniel Wayback Machine, Ben R. I'm sure.

Yeah. There's no way this guy is alive still, but I love him. But this is what social media is taken from us, right? You used to get crazy people who would build websites dedicated to their obsession, and you could learn so much from those websites. And now everybody just argues about race science on Twitter. It's so much worse this today.

We used to have Ted the cavever, you know? Exactly, exactly. We used to have Ted the cavever. God. What a glorious time. So our buddy Van Aarsdale, in his maniac website, splits chain letters into several broad categories. One category is what he calls letters from heaven. These are letters that people claim were written or channeled via God or an angel or some other divine being. And like generally either like, you know, this letter will protect you if you send it to X number of people. These became

particularly common in Europe, starting in World War One and then again in World War Two. You would send them to like, they were primarily, I think it's like you'd have families who were, their kids were overseas and they were worried about them and they would get a letter being like, this will protect your son if you send this to ex, you know, number, right, whatever. Oftentimes there was a kind of a scam involved where like, you wouldn't just have to forward the letter, you'd send a donation to a central area and you'd forward the letter to Tin Random People or whatever. And, you know, folks are superstitious. They're kind of, when you're waiting for you to know if your son got killed with the psalm, you're kind of out of your mind a little bit, you know, like with worry. That's a normal thing.

Yeah, a consumer base, really. Yeah, yeah, it's a great business to be in, is what I'm saying. The other major kind of chain letter is the Good Luck chain letter, which is kind of a more secular version of the letter from Heaven, right, where it's instead of like, I'm an angel, and here's how you can protect your loved one. It's more like, this letter is Good Luck if you replicate it and you pass it on, and sometimes also if you send money to somebody, right? These are kind of broadly speaking what most chain letters, you know, for 200 years or so

in the West, like kind of fell into. But Van Arsdale argues that the origin of the chain letter starts a lot older than the printing press, than the postal service, and even potentially than Christianity. One example that he picks out, that he, this is what he says is like kind of the earliest example that you can find of chain letter like content, is from the ancient Egyptian book of the dead. But you weren't expecting us to go there. I never am.

It turns out Brendan Fraser had it in his hands. He did. And like in Brendan Fraser's classic film The Mummy, I am now going to read from the book of the debt. So. Oh boy. Well, here's what's, here's a passage that Van R'sdale can, and I actually think he's probably right about this that he considers to be this is kind of ex, an example of a precursor

sort of content to what you got with these chain letters. The man who shall make a picture of the things which are to the north of the hidden house of the twat South find it of great benefit to him both in heaven and on earth and he Who knows it shall be among the spirits near raw and he who recites the words of ISIS and Sarah shall repulse a pep and Amin Tet and he shall have a place on the bodhifrah, both in heaven and upon the earth. The man who knows not this picture, she'll never be able to repulse the serpent, Netra-Rah.

So it's like both, you have to, you know, in order to avoid being, you know, punished by these evil spirits, you have to recite these specific words and you have to share them with other people, right? And if you don't, someone who like hasn't seen this is vulnerable to this, right? It's that same idea, right? Like where there's this, here's this thing that you've now been informed of and you both

have to be aware of it and also spread it to other people. Otherwise, you will suffer in some way, you know? It's so fun how it's like the opposite of a curse. Like we got in the evil dead where it's like, don't read the words. And this is like, read the words, or read them to all your friends. Yeah, please do read them to everyone. Otherwise you're fucked. Yeah, some serpent scum. I'm not an ancient Egyptian expert,

but I think it's pretty obvious. Like, oh yeah, that is, there is an element of what people were getting with these like chain letters that is present in this ancient religious text. And it, it comment it, comment and subscribe. Yeah, like comment and subscribe to avoid the serpent Nara Fara. So Van Arsdale likewise notes that some early Buddhist sutras promise good luck or spiritual

benefits for reproducing specific pieces of text. Quote, and this is from Vanarsdale's website. The world's oldest example of printing are Daharani, or magical incantations, printed in Japan between 764 and 770, during the reign of the Empress, Shatoku. A total of over one million copies of four different Daharani are from the great

Daharani sutra of the spotless and pure light, were printed to be placed in one million pagodas, built at the command of Shatoku. In this sutra it has stated that if a person were to build several million small pagodas and place copies of Dharani in them, that person's life would be linked and evil karma would be expunged and rebels their enemies would be vanquished. So again, back in the day, you had to be emperor to indulge in chain letter culture. Like today, you can just send a bunch of letters to your friends and family, or you could in the 80s when people sent letters.

But back in 770, you had to be the emperor, so you could build a million pagodas to put the message in, otherwise you're gonna get killed by rebels. I'm just seeing an influencer do that today. The milk to go to challenge. You have to, Mr. Beast needs to make a million pagodas or he's gonna get murdered. He's really great.

Yeah. And back in that, so these Dharani, this is again, a very early printing process. They would have been mate printed using copper plates. And it's likely that prior to the advent of kind of traditional printing presses, this sutra would have been among, if not the most widely-produced

piece of text in history. Many of these small pagodas that in this didn't just happen in Japan, there were kind of variants of this all throughout Asia where like, basically if you're the king, you want to make a bunch of pagodas with a specific message in them in order to avoid bad luck befalling you, right? Incredible. Again, that's not that different from a chain letter, really. No. It's more labor intensive. Yeah. Yeah, it's much more labor intensive, although it is other people's labor. Right.

I know. I also find it interesting that like, again, a lot of like modern chain letters were stuff like, you know, if you spread this, you know, you won't get fired, you won't lose your job or you'll get a raise at work or something. Whereas with, with impers, it's like, if you spread this, you know, you won't get fired, you won't lose your job or you'll get a raise at work or something. Whereas with with impers, it's like, if you spread this, it is saying you'll lose you won't lose your job, but it's like rebels won't over through you and murder you. The stakes have decreased a little bit. The stakes decreased slightly. The commonality here, though, is that it's it's kind of relying on the paranoia and fear of a comfortable person generally that they will become less comfortable. They don't follow these instructions.

And there's a degree of like, this is a, everyone's always, especially like, and this is a thing that like, you know, we can talk about what wealth doesn't, doesn't do. But the way in which the super rich act and the paranoia that is kind of ever present in their lives is proof that like when you're one of the people who like gets, God's, hits God's great roulette wheel and winds up with millions and millions of dollars, you're still always worried that something is going to take it from you. Likewise, just everyone feels that way. If your precarity is an inherent aspect of humanity, even if you're not in a precarious situation, just the fear that my kid could die overseas in the war, or I could get cancer

or whatever, life is random and that's scary. All of these things, the kind of commonality between all of these things and chain letters is like it offers you sort of a feeling of protection from the inherent randomness of life. Um, yeah. The first recognizable chain letters started to spread from the 1500s on across Europe. It actually does go back further than the casual slate histories of chain letters seem to say and there were basically Ponzi schemes, right? Like you would be asked to pay money to whoever's name was on top of the list in order to avoid bad luck and then you would like a race the name on the letter. Usually the handwritten letter that you received and then like add your own name to the list and send it on to other people. And like, you know, honestly, that's how

cryptocurrency pretty much work. Right? Like, this is, this is again, these are not like, we keep inventing fancier ways to do the same thing over and over again. Right. Well, to be fair, when you risk in an old scam, people really get into it. Yeah, it, it, it always works. Anyway, you know what else is a long and successful scam? Capitalism. Yeah, advertising capitalism, whatever. Here you go. Man, I hope it's a rig in coin ad.

I so do why. I said a lie. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day. A day of reckoning for the man

whose millions of followers called him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency?

You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members,

one after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town town secrets to stay dead and buried forever?

I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up, y'all? This is Eric Andreik. or wherever you get your podcasts. sorts of ways, bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or

high, and was there ever a time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, bombing, with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. I'll have guests like Sam J. To us say, Sloan, Michelle Butteau, Mac DeMarco, DJ Doug Pound, Saturday Night Lives, Sarah Sherman, and more!

Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I.R. Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcasts. Oh, we are back. Ah, good times. Sarah, do you have any crypto fans? You big crypto fan. I have zero crypto. My deal with new ideas is to wait them out for 20 years.

Yeah. Until the storm has passed and that really serves me well. Yeah. I took kind of a mixed version of it where I didn't get any cryptocurrency, but I do have a full back tattoo of the Bitcoin load. I have a back tattoo of a board ape. So, you know, yeah, you have famously been been in on the ground floor of the board eight yacht club. Yeah, definitely. They're doing well these days. I will tell you those speaking of new scams. And I have not really confessed this before. I did back in the Goop days, follow 2016, we're all a little nuts. I bought a Jade egg and I used it and I liked

it. And then I read about how because they have a whole drilled in them and are porous, they can give you, you know, horrible bacterial infections or whatever. And then I stopped using it. Yeah. Yeah. This is why I have some friends who are into sounding, which is a thing if you have a penis where you like put a long and rigid rod into your penis, but they all use like titanium rods and stuff, right? Or glass, you know, stuff that's that's non-paste, which does not matter. What is that meant to do though? Look, I'm not into sounding personally. It's a thing you like people can look that up at home for themselves, but it apparently feels good.

Take it afternoon. Oh, okay. I would not guess that that felt good, but what do I know? I was really thinking when you said that word that you like lay your penis on a drum that someone is playing, but that's what, that's more what I would do if I- That, I mean, that you're taking the sound part very literally huh that's interesting. Fascinating actually. Um anyway, so just like crypto evangelists have to had to pretend that they were building

a new global currency system that was like more equitable, you know, and that they were trying to take power from more mongering governments or whatever early scam chain letter operators had to dress up schemes that were fundamentally about taking advantage of greed as selfless acts of charity. And here's a quote from a Van R's Dale's website, an 1888 letter solicits dimes for the educations of the poor whites in the region of the Cumberlands. This letter states it as an adapt adaptation of a previous solicitation and acts that four copies be sent to friends for compliance You will receive the blessing of him who was ready to die for us

This is the earliest known shame letter an 1889 example Edd an American an American college student solicited dimes and 10 copies this letter claims to be self-terminating recipients were asked to increment a generation count at the top of the letter until it reached some preset Maximum at which time the chain was to stop. This practice continued at least through 1916, but a few years after a chain letter was launched, only those circulated which had the inflated maximum. We have two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps to build a children's ward in Australia.

The first is from 1900 and is number 173 of 180 maximum. The second highly modified was still in circulation 10 years later and is number 375 of a full radio maximum. Right, so you see what people are doing where they're saying like, this isn't a scam. You know, we'll terminate this at a certain point when the money has been raised. And there was this understanding that if you made it feel like you were closer to the end of the chain letters circulation that that would get more people to respond. So everyone would just lie and pretend like

you were, you know, it doesn't matter if you're 173 of 180 or 375 or 480, but that's just the way that it's cited human beings work, right? I mean, NPR does that in the pledge drive and it seems to work as well. Yeah, yeah, again, all of these are examples of like, or like long state, like just this is just how humans be. You know, yeah, I bought the grenade launcher in my room because I was worried they were gonna run out of these grenade launchers, you know, it's an old police one. Um, you can see them in riot.

Get an M.O. prospect police action. Mm-hmm. I did. It's funny. This is unrelated, but because a grenade launcher is not legally a firearm or any other kind of weapon, they just FedEx them right to your door. It's like, it's like buying a wig or whatever, right? Like it's completely uncontrolled.

You got to get the grenade launcher account for these ads. I mean, what could be more convenient? I would very happily sell grenade launchers on this show. Nobody commits crimes with grenade launchers, you know, they're, they're purely in a whole set of weapons to use. It would seem right. You can't take one with you into an Uber. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. So anyway, this is, this is my free ad for grenade launchers. Early chain letters were made by people who often legitimately wanted to spread a religious message. Other examples of the art form seem to have been local kind of citizen journalism, almost right, and an era where newspapers weren't super common.

People being like, hey, here's this problem. You know, like we have poor whites in the cumberlands. Let's raise money for them or whatever. Oh my goodness. But once the telegram and reliable postal service started to enable the mass transmission of these letters for the first time, things very quickly got out of hand and they became purely vehicles of like separating folks from their money. And this happened in the US and Britain before basically anywhere else.

In London, a popular kind of chain letter was called the Peripetetic Contribution Box. And it was a mix of all these kinds of impulses. The basic idea was that each person who received the letter would send a dime to the originator and make three copies of the letter asking friends to do the same thing. One of these letters was sent by the Bishop of Bedford in 1888 to raise money for a destitute women's home during the Jack the Ripper's slayings. And so it's this kind of thing where like women are being murdered. There's this this is the first famous crime spree, right? This is the first mass media crime spree, right? The first crime spree that like newspapers and like the early

news media have like adopted and are covering. And so he's like hitching in order to try to raise money for a woman's shelter. He's basically hitching on to the fame of the Jack the Ripper slangs and help make him like you can contribute positively to solving like stopping these murders if you donate money. And it works.

Like this is the first example of that I've ever found of that kind of tactic working. And it went so viral that the bishop was receiving 16,000 letters a week. Like he couldn't deal with the mass of like, that's a lot today, right? Like if you're getting, yeah, like Mr. Beast couldn't pull that off. You know? Bishop Beast. Yeah, Bishop Beast.

He, and it's like, from what I, I't found in the evidence that this guy was a scammer. He was just like, oh, people are concerned about poor women in London because of these murders. I will use that concern to try to like fund a women's shelter. And it just work. And because it works so well, scammers see opportunity. They're like, wait a second, all these people are sending dimes to this Bishop Ass mother fucker because it's like raise money for this.

What if we send copycat letters claiming to be the bishop but with a different address? Perhaps we can get some of those sweet, sweet dimes. And so like an unknown number of people make money off of this but also just as an accident. Other bishops with in towns that have similar names start receiving coins because like people are dumb, right?

Like, yeah, wild shit. It's supposed to go to the art full dog sure. Yeah, yeah, it's quite fun. Across the pond, American con men and fun racers alike also paid attention to what was happening. They like see this go down and London are like, well shit, this seems like we can make a lot of money. Here's a quote from an article, that article that I enslaved that I was talking about earlier. During the 1890s, chain letter fundraising

proliferated for everything from a bike path in Michigan to a consumptive rail road telegrapher. By July, not 1898, the New York world was pre printing chain letter forms to fundraise for a memorial for Spanish American war soldiers. Do not break the chain, which will result in honoring the memory of the men who sacrificed their lives. It shited. Upon seeing what the world's proprietor had wrought, his rivals at the New York Sun were

blunt in their assessment. Pulitzer is insane. Yeah. Yeah. They had good reason to scoff. Earlier that year, a 17 year old red cross volunteer in Long Island, Natalie Schenk had contrived a chain to provide ice for troops in Cuba, causing 3,500 letters at a time to pour into the tiny post office of Babylon

New York. We did not consider what patriotic Americans are capable of. The girls mother fredded to the press. Yeah, this is like a common thing with chain letters. Like, people starting them, especially in the era where they weren't always conments. Some people would like start them to try to raise money for causes. It's always this like, well now suddenly we have created like a massive logistical problem for our town in the postal service and don't know what to do. No one, this is like 19 and dot, right? Nobody can handle 35 hundred letters.

There's like a buster Keaton movie too. Like the full email clerk trying to keep up. Yeah. We have, we have, we have destroyed our town's ability to be connected to the world because of us. As I mentioned earlier, chain letters made a huge comeback in World War One, both because of superstitious families who would do kind of anything in order to feel like they were protecting their kid and for stranger reasons. Pro German Americans used chain letters to raise money for the war effort. And this was eventually the New York Times attacked this as a plot to clog the U.S. mail. Sometimes you'll see people report that like there was a German scheme to clog the mail. For what I've come across, I'm not sure if there was actually a plot or it's just that like

anytime one of these went viral, it caused the logistical problem. It was like a bomb going off in the post office. By 1899, this had all become enough of a problem that the US Postal Service had declared dime chain letters a a violation of lottery laws, and they started regulating shit, right? Where they're like, this is, this is a lottery, like you're running in a legal lottery, and you have to stop. We can't handle this. What are the soldiers on their ice? But what are the soldiers in their ice?

The boys in Cuba. Look, if you want to support our, troops in Cuba running that torture prison, send $50 to me and Sophie. Sophie, what's our home address? Do we have a PO box yet for people to send us money for the boys in Cuba? It's 185 to, or never telling you oh Well, I guess Ron DeSantis won't get his ice as he as he does a war crime tragic so 1899 the postal services like the shit has to stop like we cannot handle all of the fucking dime cons you people are running

and so con artists got around this by sending letters by hand, like dropping letters in mailboxes and saying, don't send this through the postal service. It won't work. The magic, you won't get the good luck. You need to send the dime and like drop it off at this location.

And this actually worked better than you'd think. One chain letter factory, because this obviously like, as with breaking into cars and shit became the purview of organized crime, right? Because it's much more efficient in the capitalist sense if you like have an organization that's putting out chain letters and reaping money.

One chain letter factory in Toledo, Ohio had 125 full time employees making these things when it was shut down by the feds. By the mail cops. Terrible job. Being a mail cop or being a chain letter writer. Well that also being a chain letter writer. I mean, were they writing this by hand?

Did they have little type writers? Yeah, I think it was type, I mean, yeah, I think it would have been type. Although I think some of them they did do by hand just because like that was the thing that worked best, you know, might have been. Now, as I've gone over this history, you've probably noticed that the history of chain letters, this isn't totally, this seems pretty familiar as people who have like grown up on the internet, right? Like there's, there's all of this, these, these things are spreading in a kind of a similar

way to how disinformation and shit and cons spread on the internet. Right? You start with questionably accurate stories of disasters and tragedies around the world. Then you move to a call to action, either to like try to get money for something or to spread various beliefs about the world. Um, and then you, you kind of the way in which you tend to get people to spread stuff and get people interested is to share often false stories of horrific violence or stuff like kidnapping, right? Shit that people are inherently drawn to. And as a result of this kind of the earliest sort of chain letter meme that is kind of directly in the chain of evolution to the stuff that

we've been started this episode talking about, are chain letters that would warn recipients about knife wielding murderers, hiding in the backseats of cars to murdering of dying women. These started to spread in the 80s and 90s, and once email became a thing, one of the first things that would spread through email were copies of this specific chain letter. And I'm going to read one early modern example of this letter. A friend stopped at the pay at the pump gas station to get gas. Once she filled her gas tank and after paying at the pump and starting to leave, the voice

of the attendant inside came over the speaker. He told her that something had happened with her card and that she needed to come inside to pay. The lady was confused because the transaction showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and was getting ready to leave, but the attendant once again asked urged her to come into pay or there'd be trouble. She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with the attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down and listen carefully. He said that while she was pumping gas, a guy slipped into the backseat of her car on the other side, and the attendant had already called the police.

She became frightened and looked out in time to see her car door open, and the guy slipped out. The report is that the new gang initiation thing is to bring a woman, bring back a woman and or her car. One way they're doing this is crawling under women's cars where they'll pump it while they're pumping gas or at grocery stores in the night time. The other way is slipping into unattended cars and kidnapping the woman.

Please pass this on to other women, young and old alike. Be extra careful going into and from your car at night. If it all possible, don't go alone. This is real exclamation point, exclamation point. The message is real. This is real. That's how you know it's real. exclamation point.

It then ends exclamation point. It then ends with the message. Number one, always in caps. Lock your car doors, even if you're gone for just a second. Number two, check underneath your car when approaching it for reentry and check in the back before getting in. Number three, always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals in your general vicinity, particularly at night.

Send this to everyone so your friends can take precaution and guys, all caps, you tell any woman you know about this. Thanks. Oh my God. I just want to point out that the thigs is not in cap locks and I appreciate that. No, it's like, you need to. Thanks. I do also, again, nowadays, because tactical influencers are such a thing. Men and women are being urged to be worried about kidnapping gangs. But back in the day, this was a more gentile time. So, men, nobody's gonna steal you in your card and get initiated into a gang, but you gotta warn the brawds in your life. Oh my God.

I love how, you know, because obviously the unspoken thing here is sexual menace in a, you know, in a racist way because we're talking about gang members quote unquote, but like, you got to steal a woman to be in the gang. Any woman. Yeah. Any woman at all. Any woman. And her car or maybe just her car.

I don't know. Like, you know, it's something. But and then it's like, it's thinking about being the woman at the gang initiation. And he's like five strangers. Like there's a flow from the AMP. And here's Jessica from the craft store. Yeah. It's so fun. I'm going to ground. See, we in Oregon were up until recently immune to this kind of thing, because nobody gets to pay at the pump. you know, gas station attendant saved us from these kidnapping gangs. We're the safest people in America, really.

That's right. That's right. Danger zone in these stories. Yeah, nobody gets kidnapped in Oregon because of the noble gas station attendant. So the internet had two initial impacts on how chain letter content spread. The first was that it allows a geometric expansion, obviously, and the number of people you can reach with a letter, right? There's just no comparison.

The second is that it allowed exact copies to spread indefinitely, which put an end to researchers being able to like study heredity with these things to an extent, or at least altered it, right? Because it just changes the way in which shit mutates. being able to like study heredity with these things to an extent or at least altered it, right? Because it just changes the way in which shit mutates. For a while in the 1990s, it seemed as if the internet might lead to a stagnation for this kind of message, but social media provided impetus for a new generation of sender to make slight adjustments on existing messages in order to build online followings or take

advantage of rubs. We see this in pieces of this and queuing on and pizegate the way conspiracy theory snowball over time due to the participation of huge numbers of people. And this brings me back to today's bullshit conspiracy theories about kidnapping. God knows how many iterations we've seen at this point, but the most prenicious family of myths

all focus around the idea that kidnappers stage some sort of item in a victim's car. Sometimes the idea is that this is being done to mark them. Other times it's that when the person stops to remove the item, you know, a shirt that's been left on the hood of their car, a piece of cheese in one version of it, criminals will leap out of a nearby video to vehicle to grab them, right? They're trying to distract you. You gotta be all always be ready.

Keep a hand on your gun at all times, you know? If you see a shirt on your car, just start shooting. Yeah. Q for a seat. She's later. The American. Yeah. That's how that's how I that's what I always say. It's worth noting that the specific kind of kidnappings that Phoebe Copus and so many other people today are obsessed with do not happen, essentially, right? Obviously you can find freak examples of strangers being kidnapped by strangers, but nearly all trafficking victims. And these are all wind up being trafficking in conspiracy theories, right? That's why they're trying to kidnap women, right? You know, like that's that's how it always happens. The vast majority of trafficking victims know their attacker.

They are usually related to their attacker, right? Or to their trafficker, I should say. Trafficking people being forced into slavery or what, or like slavery, particularly like sex slavery. This is not a thing that happens that strangers do to strangers in the United States. This is a thing that like parents do to their kids or like a guardian. It is usually either a parent who's trafficking the kid for money, generally, as a result of like a drug addiction or like a single parent who someone comes into their life and then

trafficks their kid. It's nearly always someone that the child knows, right? That's just like the way that trafficking works. And it's the same thing with like, when adults are trafficked, it is nearly always, it's either people who are migrants come into this country being trafficked in order to like work on farms and shit, or otherwise do labor for very little to no money. Or it is when it's sex trafficking, it's like people being trafficked by, you know,

boyfriend, girlfriend, by family members. Um, the vast majority of trafficking victims are adolescents or teenagers 60 to 67% of trafficking victims in the US are 15 to 17 years old. Uh, a huge number of them are LGBT or gender nonconformingforming because it like one thing that often brings people into trafficking, they are young, they do not have resources like financial resources, they are kicked out of their homes because they are queer and they are then forced at some point into the sex trade by somebody that they trust, right? Like that is when it happens, this is how it actually occurs statistically. No, Robert.

The market value of middle aged women is $4,000 a pound. No, Robert, the market value of metal age women is $4,000 a pound. No, no, it's all like 45 year old women getting kidnapped at Target. That's how it happens. Well, but you could also see, like, right? It's the kind of people who fall for this shit are the kind of people who believe in like

grooming conspiracy theories overwhelmingly. And they don't wanna hear, no, it's the queer kids that you're spreading conspiracies about are the ones in danger of being trafficked. They want to hear like, no, I'm in danger. I have a reason like all of this fear that is ever present in me. Yeah. Yeah. It's these dangerous, yeah, these dangerous looking kids who are going to threaten me, the fear that is ever present in my life because human beings more or less can't exist without anxiety has a cause and it's the dangerous, you know, weird looking kids around me who are going to kidnap me by putting cheese on my car.

And it's one of those things. We started this episode talking about Phoebe Copus, but if you do what I have been doing and you spend hours and hours coming through viral Facebook and TikTok posts about kidnapping conspiracy theories, in every one of them, you will find people talking about their guns. A representative example comes from an article I found 2017 article published by Channel 14 News, an Amarillo, Texas station. And the title of the article was, woman find shirt on car, warning goes viral. And obviously, one of these guys.

And right in the, I found a Facebook post that was like 12,000 shares. And one of the first responses was a user going, I keep my pistol in grabbing distance everywhere I go. Like, no, people are not getting traffic this way. What is the shirt going to do to you aside from reminding you of your dead lover, Jake Shellenhall?

The idea, again, is that like you put these kidnapping gangs or putting shirts and then you'll take your hand off your gun to go put the take the shirt off your car and that's when they jump out and get shot, you know? That is the thing about these, the like stupid, stupid rumors, right? Is that it's like you'll,

in the split second year to strangle, which you can't afford to lose, they'll snack ya. And the idea of having to be that hyper-vigilant, yeah, it's fascinating how we're just like selling PTSD basically. And we know it all too well. And you, well, like it's one of the things

that makes this pernicious is that like, no one will tell you you need to be less aware out in public, right? No one's going to say like when you get travel to a new city and hop in the Uber, maybe just zone out on your phone, right? Everyone will say, well, yeah, it's good to be, you know, aware. But the version that gets transmitted primarily is like you need to always be hyper vigilant because you are permanently in danger of being kidnapped and sold into fucking taken ass movie slavery, right? I'll always be ready to stop someone with deadly force.

That's a fun way to live. Yeah, you need to be the Liam Neeson, you know, to protect yourself from weirdly Algerian kidnapping gangs. If I'm remembering that movie properly. I know. Liam Neeson, who we now know once. Well, you know, if you know, you know. If you know, you know.

Anyway, although we could talk about his appearance in Atlanta, but this is all outside of the point. We're gonna keep talking about specifically how these kidnapping conspiracy theories have started and mutated, uh, and how this all ties into some other particularly toxic aspects of American culture. By the time these episodes come out, I will have an article up on my substack Shatterzone. Um, you can just find it by typing that in about specifically the way in which that in about specifically the way in which kidnapping

and trafficking as key phrases have become like super reliable ways to go viral on TikTok. There's a lot of like weird, fuck, so there's this fucking weird, I don't know how to describe this, but I find it deeply unsettling. One of the first things I found when I was looking to Phoebe Copus, I decided after I was reading about her, I wanna see what people are like saying about this

on TikTok. And I- Oh, is this that really scary video you sent me? Yeah, I find this like a type of content where they've got, take a picture of her and they use it to make an AI video of her, of like Phoebe, the woman who murdered that guy, and have her relating the story of her, of like Phoebe, the woman who murdered that guy, and have her relating the story

of her killing a guy, and like an AI version of her voice and an AI version of her face speaking, it is horrible. It's so scary. Sarah, I'm not a moral panic person. I don't think TikTok is in, I don't think TikTok is any more toxic than any other form of social media, but I also think all social media should be made illegal and the people who run these companies pushed into the sea. Like I hate it, I hate it all.

This is too much technology. I think that was the last thing I needed to hear before moving in next Georgia JD Salinger. Yeah, yes, yes. Yeah, let's all build, look, if you're listening to the show, buy a cabin in rural Montana. Learn how to, okay, actually, I'm doing a unibomber thing again. So this is why we got to stop.

Sarah, you got anything to plug besides being the unibomber. I mean, that's really the main project I'm working on. I do a show called You're Wrong About. We've talked about human trafficking on it. And it is like, I don't know, it's incredible to me, the magic that that word has, the spell that it casts over people. It's like, and it feels like it's taken the place that the phrase white slavery had in like,

I don't know, this time 100 years ago. Yeah. And white slavery is, I didn't get into this for this, but like yeah, if we were to like really dig into that history because like that was in the 1800s and stuff, like it was like a very easy way to get people riled up. Like it's all like shady fucking yellow journalism types

have always known that like yeah If you make white people feel like they're about to get abducted off the street because they're always I Think a lot of it goes does go back to You know, you think about like the Emperor in Japan like who's like wow I was born to rule this land But I also still despite all my power and my armies, feel scared all the time. And that's just like a thing that people feel. I'm going to go make all of these

pagodas to like spread this because I feel like if I spread this like this book says if I spread this specific chunk of text, then nothing bad will happen to me. The rebels will never come into my palace or whatever. And you know, then it gets translated to like, wow, I'm a white person in the 1890s. Things are great. We roll the entire world, but yet I'm scared all the time. There must be gangs of brown people waiting to kidnap me. And then, you know, to day it too. Yeah, yeah, I'm a suburban American, you know,

the most fortunate kind of person who has ever existed in the history of the planet, right? I am unfathomably safe and secure. Yet I'm scared all the time. There must be a reason for it. And it turns out that's the most profitable thing to cash it on. It's, I really, I have not thought of it this way before,

but I love your summary that like, people just feel scared because that's what we are and what we are. That's what we are. Right. And of course we are. Like we were born to be scared. It's how we've survived this long. Yes.

The extent that we have to just be like overly prone to freaking out and then and then the it but then it's like once you're in a place of relative prosperity and safety, right? It becomes like a vestigial, or like there's things to feel scared about, you know, interpersonal, whatever you're doing with your life, but like, that this is also why we have like our great summer movies where it's like living in normal life.

And then you have to fight a dinosaur or a magic truck or whatever else Steven Spielberg has thought up for us. I do love that you gave Steven Spielberg credit or the Stephen King book about the possessed evil truck. Oh, I'm thinking of the different truck. Yeah, they both, they each got a truck. Oh, the Stevens. They've got, they've got a direct line to our amygdala's, the Stevens. See, we do. Yeah. Good stuff. I mean, I feel like, again, for every powerful impulse in human beings, there's the good version of tweaking it and the evil version. The evil version is obviously spreading conspiracy theories about kidnapping.

The good version is being Stephen King and just doing mountains of cocaine and writing novels that people love. And some of which you don't remember evidently. Yeah, and I was thinking about this recently with regards to the satanic panic, because you know, I think about a lot and how it feels like one of the aspects of the satanic panic is that if you have a religion that forbids you horror media, you can't watch horror movies, you can't consume scary stuff except, you know, yeah, if you just can't have horror fiction, then like it's gonna show up in your religion,

it's gonna show up in check tracks and sermons and your beliefs about what's actually happening because it has to come up somewhere. Yeah, this is why like the horror movie, like people who are actually in the horror, right, tend to be like the healthiest folks because they found it out with for that. Yeah, I love horror and it certainly makes me much healthier than I would be otherwise. This is why John Carpenter is the ideal person. Like, that's, there you go.

Perfect man. That's why so fan I are saying the Wicker Man later today. Absolutely. Paragons of health. Paragons of health. And you can be a Paragon of health. If you listen to Sarah Marshall's podcast, you're wrong about. It's true, you will be. You will be. That will solve your problem. That fear. Listen to it. All of the fear that you there's ever presents in your life, it'll go away. The instant you start listening to Sarah's podcast. So check that out. Another way you can make the ever present feeling of

anxiety that is really just the death motive in your life, never leaving you is by subscribing to Sophie. What is our thing called where people don't get ads? You can subscribe to cooler's and Media, our AdWry subscription channel. Yeah. Excessively an Apple Podcast, Android version, coming very soon.

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Yeah. Do not let her eat that cheese. And warn her and warn her about that cheese. The car cheese. Oh, that's the episode. All right, that's part one. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com.

Or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. in my new podcast, Icedees Daily Game. I'll be dropping some daily wisdom and personal insight that I believe is essential to achieving success in business, love, life, hustling, whatever. I'll be coming to you every single weekday with a fresh new quote that speaks directly to me and I hope to you as well. In five minutes or less, I'll break down why these words matter

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