It Could Happen Here - Private Prisons, Finance Ghouls and The Bezzle, with Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Robert sits down with author and activist Cory Doctorow to discuss his new book, the Bezzle, and how finance monsters have turned American prisons into an even crueler institution.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call zone media. Welcome, everybody, to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, the slow crumbling of the institutions that make up our society. And that includes not just the good stuff that's become the bad stuff, like, for example, Google search. But it includes the stuff that's always been bad and has gotten worse, like life inside the prison industrial complex, which is partly what we will be talking today, because our guest is the great Cory Doctorow, activist, writer, author of a book called The Bezel, which is a fiction novel, but deals with some very non-fictional stuff in relation to how finance ghouls have changed life for people behind bars.

Corey, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. It's a delight to be on again. Yeah, yeah. It's always wonderful to have you. I just finished The Bezel. It took me, it was one of those about a day, in part, in part because I just like didn't want to stop reading it. Like I just kind of blasted through.

I picked it up in the morning on a walk and then was done with it at about like 9 p.m. So I found it pretty compulsively readable. Amazing. That's great to hear. With the first one, I knew that I had something going on when I woke up at 2 in the morning and my wife was sitting up in bed next to me and I said, what are you doing? And she said, I just had to find out how it ended. Yeah. And you said the first one, this is the second book in a series based on a character, Martin Hinch, who's a self-employed forensic accountant. I do want to let people know right at the jump, I actually have not read your first Hinch book yet.

And they don't have to be read in order. Yes. Yes. That's what I was going to point out. Before we get into the stuff about the plot of this book and how it relates to some very real things that are ongoing, I wanted to talk about a not-so-stealth advertisement within the series for a guy that we're both a big fan of, Stephen Bruce. There's an extended digression where Martin is sending books to a friend of his in prison. And you talk a lot about Stephen's Taltosh series, which was a huge influence on me as a young person. I could definitely see, I think, an influence on this series as well. Yeah. I mean, Steve is a wonderful writer and everything he writes is amazing.

That particular series, you know, he started when i was 13 years old i'm now 52 i just i just had dinner with him in minneapolis he tells me he's two books away from finishing it yeah yeah he had planned the whole thing all those years ago he is a zelazny protege yeah and also uh Yeah. And also a giant Fritz Leiber fan. And it's got that wisecracking Robert McGee kind of, or Travis McGee rather, kind of affect those books. And also the stuff that I love about the best of what disparagingly we could call men's adventure fiction. Yeah. Which is that at its best, and Maria Farrell just wrote something really good about this on crooked timber at its best that stuff gets really geeks out about a lot of stuff that the the bad version of it is the kind of james bond version where it's like yeah you know this is what the status watch is and this is what the

status martini is and this is the what the status whatever it is and that you call that the gourmet version right where it's like you know what all the best of everything is and and uh you know how to how to signal you know your verblen goods to other people how to how to signal that you are posh and upper class but the good version of it is the is the gourmand version which is like if you're going to eat cardboard pizza this is the best cardboard pizza and if you're going to you know like the the very best gas station toilets are and the you know the the one thing that you should always do if you're staying in a flop house is right and it's just that kind of um it could be like street smarts, but it's also very, uh, I want to say self-indulgent, but that's not the right word.

It's, it's, uh, it's very, uh, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of self care in it. There's a lot of like deliberate, like, oh, this is how I'm going to live my life so that it's as good as possible. And I enjoy every, all of the finer things as much as I can. This is the thing that I do when I'm making a burger so that it's a 10% more delicious every time, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's interesting. I came across the first book in that series that I read was Dragon, which I came across a strip cover from my uncle who worked at a bookstore. And that's his like military fiction book in the series,

which is very much in line with the like boys adventure stuff. But as the series goes on, it increasingly trends towards like Russian revolutionary literature too. There's a little bit more of that, which I think had an influence on me. Well, Steve's a Trotskyist. Yeah, yeah. The thing about communist fantasy writers, there's a few of them, there's, you know, China Mayville and Steve and a few others. Well, Shatterley and so on. Is that the one thing that they can always be relied upon to do is get the ratio of vassals to lords right.

You know, that the number of peasants in the field is always vastly larger than the number of lords in the castle. And they all have a life and an interiority and a reason for being there that's not just being scenery or cannon fodder. Yeah, yeah. It's something he does well. And I think that's not just being scenery or cannon fodder. Yeah, yeah. It's something he does well. And I think that's enough of a digression. I just always love having a chance to talk about Stephen Bruce's work. Let's talk about The Bezel because the basic, I mean, I will try not to give away more than is in like the Goodreads summary, but the basics of this story is that you've got this

guy, Martin Hinch, who's this forensic accountant. And as a result, he's friends with some people who have, you know, really succeeded in sort of the pre.com bubble tech industry, I guess you'd say. And you take us with, you know, he goes with one of them to a place called Catalina Island, which is a real place that was founded by one of like our nation's early plutocrats who had a bizarre obsession with there not being like fast food available on the island. Yeah. He had a lot of bizarre obsession.

This is William Wrigley. The gum guy. Chewing gum fortune. And his first obsession was chickle trees and which you need to make gum. And his particular obsession was owning every chickle Forest in the world, which he did. Which meant that if you wanted to make gum, even if you were one of his competitors, you had to pay him for the Chickle. So there was no gum that wasn't Wrigley's gum in some important sense. This made him, as you might imagine, very rich.

He bought the Chicago Cubs. There's a reason the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field. And they would have their spring training on Catalina Island, an island that he bought. He loved Westerns. And one of the people who lived on Catalina Island was, or summered there rather, was Zane Gray, the great Western writer. Yeah. And there were a bunch of Zane Gray movies that were made on the island, including one where they brought over 13 bull bison because they were needed for the movie. And because they didn't know a lot about animal handling, particularly, they did not know that male bison do not ever come into contact with one another, except to have a violent dominance clash, which is how the 13 male bison all ended up escaping. And then Wrigley in one of his other obsessions thought it was un-Christian for these bachelor bison to be on his Island.

So he brought over 13 cows and, and created the bison invasive species thing. He also didn't know that bison operate in harems, which was another thing that he was just badly wrong like it is true that like being a billionaire lowers your iq by 30 points and being the son of a billionaire lowers your iq by 40 points yeah and and uh you know wrigley had all kinds of aesthetic ideas in the same way that like um you know uh when when, when Ford built Fordlandia and in Brazil, uh, uh, a planned community that was an identical copy of Dearborn, Michigan, including

the South facing windows, because he wouldn't let his architects explain that South of the equator, you want North facing windows. Yeah. You know, he said, oh, well, when, you know, like he came up with all kinds of weird rules for, um, rubber planters, uh, rubber harvesters in the Brazilian jungle. And Wrigley came up with his own rules for um rubber planters uh rubber harvesters in the brazilian jungle and wrigley came up with his own rules for people living on his island and one of them is no fast food and this turns out to be consequential in the story because the the protagonist of the story who's martin henge who's this you know two-fisted hard-fighting forensic accountant who busts finance

scams and his pal are are on the island in the party scene while his friend waits to vest from yahoo where he's been imprisoned by dint of having sold them a company for millions of dollars which he can only realize if he can sit tight and not murder any of his colleagues while they buy and destroy every promising startup in silicon valley using the money from the royal family of saudi arabia that was funneled to them by Masayoshi Son and SoftBank, they encounter a Ponzi scheme. And the Ponzi scheme is grounded in what is an actual practice of people bringing fast food to Catalina Island. Like if you go to the K-12 school and you have an away game, everyone brings back a sack of burgers for their friends because it's

forbidden fruit. It's exotic. And this turns into a Ponzi scheme to sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island by various means. And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're actually selling is the right to sell, the right to sell, the right to sell burgers. No one wants the burgers, right?

They want the downline. And this is why Ponzi schemes always implode. And what Marty realizes is that this Ponzi scheme is going on and that it has been cooked up by this guy whose parties they've been going to, this self-licking ice cream cone, and then you destroy it, you smash it. He's waiting for this economy to collapse once he's extracted every penny from the island, which will add 1% to his net worth. And so they do a controlled demolition of it. They foil this guy's plan. And this kicks in motion the real action in the novel, which is about the private prison system. Yeah, yeah. And I love that in preparing to like read this chunk of the book where I learned quite

a bit about the private prison system. I also learned a bunch about Catalina Island and this wealthy madman's insane dream. I appreciate that about your books. Yeah, I mean, Catalina Island, we could go on. Marilyn Monroe was a 15-year-old child bride on Catalina Island. The CIA was founded on Catalina Island. The channel between Catalina Island and the mainland is the deepest channel known to humanity. it in iron that is rusting and that we have no way to remediate and that will someday rupture and kill every bird downstream of that channel.

And also lots of fish. Catalina Island is this very fraught place. This very beautiful place. Very weird place. It's one of my favorite places to go. We just booked another trip there. And everything about it is amazing and also terrible, but also beautiful. interview show where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a

chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs

and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron,

host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

Yeah, and I appreciate the way that you write that. you kind of wrap us into by first establishing this character, this friend of Martin's, who then winds up in a California Department of Corrections facility and taking us over a period of time as it goes to the way I think most people think prisons still are, right? The kind of the vision of like prisons that was formed from movies we watched in the early 2000s and the late 90s, where, you know, they can be pretty ugly places but like you have family and they can come and visit you right there's a big room where everybody gets together with their you know we saw we arrested developments maybe the most before this all changed most recent kind of touchstone on this and also it's a place that has like a library and not

just a library but like there are what comes with a library is opportunities for people to like better themselves, to learn things, to build skills, to potentially take some more agency of their situation, right? That idea of like the jailhouse lawyer who becomes informed and all that. And that world has really gone away to a significant extent. It's not completely gone everywhere, but certainly a lot of that has been pruned away. The ability of prisoners to have face-to-face contact with their loved ones and the ability of prisoners to use a library is something that is a lot less common now than it used to be. And it's because a lot of these kind of attitudes that have characterized finance for so long are increasingly becoming common within the companies that run these facilities.

Yeah. And, you know, maybe this is a good place to explain what a bezel is and how this moment relates to what a bezel is. So I really think the title bezel is a banger, but I didn't realize until I started touring this book that if you say it aloud, it sounds like B-E-Z-E-L, which is the rectangle around your phone screen. It's actually B-E-Z-Z-L-E or Z-Z if you're a Canadian like me. And that is a wonderful term coined by John Kenneth Galbraith to describe the magic interval after the con artist has your money, but before you know it's a con. And in that moment, everybody feels better off. And one of the great bezel moments was the moment between the crash of the dot-com crash of like 2000, 2001, and the crash of the great financial crisis,

the housing crash. And in that period, all the money that people put into so-called investments and into the market, and that made them feel better off, made them feel like they had a pension, made them feel like they had savings and so on, all that money was already gone.

So this is one of the things about a scam, is it feels like the moment that you lose the money is the moment you realize it's a scam, but you actually lose the money the minute you give it to the con artist. Yeah. The con artist might let you keep some of it for a little while, but, but they can take it away from you whenever they want.

That was a moment of kind of a giddiness where none of us really wanted the dream to end. We knew that once the dream ended, we would all be poorer. Although in reality, we're all poorer right then. One of the things about that moment is it was the moment when another long con came due. And that was the long con of the California Three Strikes rule. So there had been a couple of quite ghastly murders of young people,

a teenager and a child in California that were weaponized by some fairly cruel racists to pass a law in California that says that if you were convicted of three felonies, you would go to prison for the rest of your life with no chance of parole. And, you know go to prison for the rest of your life with no chance of parole. And this is California, which is a place that's quite allergic to higher taxes, famously the Home Proposition 13, where we can't raise our property taxes unless something like 70% of us go to the polls and specifically vote for it, which is why our cities are so cash strapped. And so in this place where you have these anti-tax extremist types and you have this increasing tax burden associated with locking up

an ever larger fraction of the population for the rest of their lives you have this this you know unstoppable force in this immovable object on a collision course with one another, because at a certain point, you're just going to have prisons that are so full that you're going to have to do something to relieve them. You're going to have to build more prisons. You're going to have to reduce the cost of operating those prisons. Something's going to give. In the end, what ended up giving was a Supreme Court case that ruled that just being in prison in California violated your Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. That every California prison basically constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment. And California went through the five stages of grieving, which I know they don't replicate. It's not real.

It's not really a neat description of exactly what happens when we grieve. But they certainly went through a period of denial and bargaining, including mooting at one point, sending prisoners to Arizona. Yeah. So sending California state prisoners to Arizona and paying Arizona to take them off their hands. And as all of this stuff was going on, some grifters saw a great opportunity. And that opportunity was to cut costs in the prisons and facilitate moving prisoners further

and further away from their families by replacing all of the services in the prison with a tablet that you would get for free. So remember, the iPad comes out in 2008. Steve Jobs is touting it as the future of the world. Media companies are going crazy. They finally found their daddy figure who's going to save them from tech by siloing everything in an app that isn't part of the web. And all we can hear about is how tablets are the future. And all we can hear about is how tablets are the future.

And this sounds quite futuristic, right? We'll put tablet, we'll give every prisoner a free tablet. It's like one laptop per child, but for prisoners. And those tablets will replace the library and in-person visits and phone calls and music and TV and continuing education. And all of it's going to cost, and it's going to cost a lot more than you would pay outside of the, that outside of the prison for the same services.

So, you know, four bucks a minute for a poster stamp sized video instead of a free zoom calls. Yeah. Music for three bucks instead of one. And then of course, these companies are very grifty. And so they're constantly restructuring, going bankrupt, being bought, buying one another. And every time that happens, the company changes its name and

says, oh, we're no longer the same company. We no longer supply all of those services. We are wiping out all of your data and you're gonna have to buy it again and so you know if that's music it means that the song that you paid three dollars for that you uh bought by by working in the prison workshop for 25 cents an hour is gone and you're in prison for remember this is california the rest of your life and so you're gonna have to go back and earn more money to get that that song again but also the five dollars your kid paid to have the birthday card that they wrote for you scanned because you can no longer get parcels or mail your family have to

pay to have their letters scanned or they have to pay to send you email and so your kid who's growing up with the principal breadwinner has paid $5 to have their handmade birthday card scanned. That goes away too when the prison changes vendors. And it's a kind of perfect parable for the indifferent sadism of capital, like the degree to which the pursuit of profit drives people to be far more cruel than mere ideology yeah yeah that that's so important because like prisons were not nice before they were not humane before but someone who is simply trying to run a government prison facility would not think of the idea of doing like a shell game yank away of people's music after letting them buy it and then make them buy it again. That's like that's not something that like a bad prison guard comes up with.

That's only something that somebody from somebody from finance comes up with. from somebody from finance comes up with well and and you know you it it helps if the way that you're running these prisons is by employing guards through a staffing agency and so you don't even have to contend with the rising costs associated with staff turnover when prisoners go bug fuck crazy because you took all their shit away right um those guards are not your employees and it's not your problem the whole thing is is kind of uh running at several layers of of uh in direction and remove it's what douglas rushkoff calls going meta you know the um don't drive a cab found uber uh don't found uber invest in uber don't invest in uber invest in uber derivatives don't invest in uber derivatives invest in uber derivative futures right like go meta like

get further and further away from the useful activity so you are insulated from the consequences of whatever it is you do and that's such a it's part of it's like a recipe for breaking things right because the people who are closest not that they're always good at it in the case of prison guards, but the people who are closest to the useful activity tend to know how to make things work, right? Whereas the further away you get from that, the more likely your ideas are to break things that you wouldn't have even thought of. And again, but for that kind of person, everything you break is usually an opportunity for financializing something else. Yeah. The extent to which finance is the true

banality of evil is hard to overstate. We've heard a lot when you read about the Holocaust and World War II, you hear a lot about the cruelty of Nazis and no one's going to say, well, the Nazis weren't cruel and the ideological cruelty of Nazis. So for example, there were moments where rather than transporting troops to decisive battles, they were shipping Jews to concentration camps on those same trains and losing battles so they could murder more Jews, right? But up the road from Auschwitz was another private concentration camp run by IG Farben called Monowitz. And IG Farben were war profiteers. They were gouging the Wehrmacht on war material that they were manufacturing with slave labor. And they bought thousands of slaves

from Auschwitz, preferring women and children because they were cheaper, and they worked them to death. And the lifespan of a slave in Monowitz was only three months before they were worked to death. It was half of what it was in Auschwitz. The conditions were so bad at Monowitz that the SS guards who were seconded to it from Auschwitz wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty of Monowitz. At the end of the war in Nuremberg, 24 IG Farben executives were tried for this. Their defense was that they had a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize returns. And 19 of them were acquitted on that basis. Yeah, God.

And this is, you know, before the Chicago school guys had really like fully taken over. So this idea that like that was really the only responsibility that a business had, even above a moral responsibility, was much less established. Like, the more you get into how many, particularly of the money people, got off at Nuremberg, like, it's maddening stuff. Yeah, indeed. And it is, like, I think an accurate way to look at the Holocaust from the perspective of those guys is the mining of populations, like mining them to death. That's really how a lot of this, like, because a huge chunk of, especially the early stages of Nazi oppression of, like, starting with German Jews, but going beyond that as they conquered more land, was the appropriation of businesses and property, right?

Like, that was, it was mining human beings. And that attitude is persistent, right? It's not just a thing that happens in Nazi Germany. It happens whenever you let people who don't have any sort of human concern, take control of every aspect of life. take control of every aspect of life. And this is some of the structural stuff that's going on in the book. So my editor on this book is this great guy, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, who's been my editor since my first novel. He and I met on a BBS in the 1980s. So I've really known him most of my life. And Patrick, when he gave me the editorial note on my first novel, he said something like, the way that science fiction works is you have a world that is like a thought experiment world,

and you have a character who's a microcosm for that world. And they are like a big gear that's the world and a little gear that's the character. And if the microcosm meshes correctly with the macrocosm, then as the person spins around and around doing their plot stuff, they spin around enough times that the world, the big gear that they're meshed with, makes a full revolution so you have a this microcosm macrocosm thing often when a book doesn't work it's because the microcosmic macrocosmic correspondences

aren't sharp enough there's some way in which those teeth aren't meshing one of the things that this book tries to do and that the martin hensch books generally try to do because they're all about these these finance scams these high-tech finance scams set in different eras from the 1980s through the 2020s, is that they try to create a series of these similar correspondences between small scams and big scams. They use the small scam as a kind of setup or a frame or like a cognitive tool for understanding the much bigger scam. And so that small scam, that Ponzi scheme, where you have a person who is setting out just for shits and giggles to make some money by destroying a bunch of other people's lives

and viewing those people as not as people, but as things, as a means to an end, not as people but as as things as a means to an end not as an end uh unto themselves ends up creating this sadistic brutal pointless and deliberately unsustainable situation that he knows is going to hurt all these other people and the way that he's able to do it is by simply not considering the people who are enmeshed in the scheme as fully people entitled to their own sort of moral consideration. And in the same way, that's like a microcosm for the kinds of decisions that are made when people go on to found these prison tech companies and these other companies that do these ghastly things. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about.

It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists

in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love.

Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. And it's also very accurate to how an unfortunate number of just like regular people in society and in government think about the victims of these schemes like when you when you try to talk about how unfair and how much worse this situation has gotten it's like well they're prisoners they're being punished you know as if as if that makes it all okay yeah it's kind of a it's kind of a like a much more extreme and therefore much more easily spotted version of caveat emptor or, you know, not your, not your keys,

not your coins, you know, these ideas that if, if something bad is happening to you, it must be because you did something bad, right? The kind of providential ethics. And,

and I think that the work that that does for people is it helps them put their own anxiety about their own future to rest. Because if you are worried that something bad might happen to you, and you can convince yourself that the reason that something bad happened to someone else is that they had a deficiency, right? They committed a sin. They were foolish. Then you don't have to worry about it happening to you. You know, I, I, um, a couple of times in the last decade, I have been, uh, the victim of various kinds of con and I am also someone who's written a lot about cons. So I've been successfully fished once and I had a phone scammer talk me out of my credit card number once.

And I always write about it when it happens. And I write about it in part because I want to make sure that people understand that, you know, you're not too smart to be conned. Anyone can be conned and so on. And I think that's an inoculant against getting conned. But I also do it because the reactions are kind of sociological

study right if you want to see into the minds of tech bros who justify the terrible things that they are doing or planning to do or fantasizing about doing or working on to other people under look at look at their fraud apologetics where they say, you know, oh, that was just a business and, you know, you had caveat emptor or you were lazy or you were foolish or, you know, like you did something deficient and that's why it happened. And so you deserved it. And that means on the one hand, it's never going to happen to me because I don't deserve it. And on the other hand, if I ever do it to someone else, that's fine because if they fall victim to it then

they must deserve it the the old con artist uh uh saying that you can't cheat an honest man yeah version of this yeah and it's i i mean it that's like it's such a limited view of it right because it's it's true that like there are some cons that you can't trick someone into unless they have a little desire for some larceny right but like an increasing number of cons are just like a company using your bank's phone number calling you and telling you you've been defrauded and you give them information because you're not used to the or or somebody calls using the voice of your child and beg and says that they need a ransom payment right that's not you're not there's not like a dishonesty in your heart

because you don't want your kid to be kidnapped. You're just not ready for what tech has been able to do, you know? And while there are some of those cons where they, you know, they're playing on your cupidity or your dishonesty to make money off of you, even in those instances, it is downstream of a system where it feels like you can't survive unless you're cheating. Right? Like, one of the things, and so multi-level marketing is actually a theme that runs through all of these books.

It sure does. The next one is set in the 1980s, and it's about a faith scam. faith scam. It's an early PC company I made up called The Three Wise Men, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi who use affiliate marketing through congregations to prey on their own faith groups. And one of the things about these Ponzi schemes, these pyramid schemes, is that they take the only capital that working people have, which is social capital, the relationships they have among one another.

other women in your life who help you look after your kids or to the your co-religionists who you can turn to if things go really bad at work or or with your family or whatever and and that turning that into a uh a transaction that you can milk you know turning those people into a downline who who have to recruit other people to to make you whole so that you can feed your own upline, is just hustling. It's just your shot at the American dream. It's Spike Lee telling you that investing in shit coins is building black wealth. Yeah. Yeah, it is like the fact, and I think low key, this is one of the top couple of problems that we have in this society because it feeds into everything else.

I think that's probably why it runs through so much of your work because the scam economy is behind, and it's increasingly becoming everything, right? increasingly becoming everything, right? And there's this kind of pernicious effect where the more people are victimized by this, both the less they trust other people and the more they begin to accept that like, well, this is just how you get by in our society, right? Why shouldn't we take away prison libraries and replace them with more expensive Kindle that we can yank away at any moment. Everyone's always nickel and diming me. I'm always getting more money taken away from me by these same people. And I'm not even in prison, you know? Right. Why shouldn't there be junk fees in prison if there's junk fees everywhere else? If your

local water company that's owned by your city is sold off to uh you know plug a hole in the budget because you can't raise taxes and then they start charging you a convenience fee to pay your your water bill with a check and then a different convenience fee to pay your water bill with a credit card and a third convenience fee to pay your water bill in person with cash and then you realize that like they're that none of these are convenience fees they're just they're just fees yeah it's just more money yeah yeah it's i mean we're in we're in a pretty infuriating situation here and you get to that in the bezel you really get that across well as this guy is trying to deal with the and and it kind of brought home to me the horror of having someone you care for in this situation and seeing their avenues for any kind of relief edged out, chipped away at for the profit of some guy who will never notice the money in his bank account. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, unlike Steve Bruce, I, well, like Steve Bruce in some of those volumes, I told this story from the perspective of a fairly powerful person who's got a lot of agency. Only because it gives you the opportunity to tell a story that at least holds out the possibility of some relief. I'll leave it to the reader to find out what actually happens at the end. And, you know, there have been successful prisoner uprisings that have been led by working people who are serving long terms. But for the most part, those uprisings, we never even hear about them. You know, there was a prison labor strike before lockdown, I believe it was 2018 or 2019. There was a national prison labor strike, and it barely made a dent in anyone's consciousness. It was, you know, ultimately one of the largest strikes in modern American history. You know, thousands and thousands of workers were on strike, and we didn't even hear about it because there's such control over the narrative about prisons and prisoners that's run by the carceral system. And so, you know, by telling this story about someone who goes into prison already a millionaire and who has a friend on the outside who's kind of a hustler and, you know, a pal and who

is someone who knows how to finagle the system, I can spin out a yarn that takes you like back to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the big gear driving the little gear takes you on a 360 degree tour of, of how fucked up the system is rather than just the, the ant's eye view or the worm's eye view that most people get because they aren't even able to explore all the avenues and run into their dead ends because they're just stuck where they are. Yeah. Corey, this has been wonderful. I want to again, uh, let people know your book, the bezel is in stores. Now you can purchase it wherever fine books are sold. Do you have a preferred URL for buying buying it the dash bezel.org is fine but but wherever people want to

get it yeah it's a national bestseller for the third week running which is very good that's great whoever feeds into the usa today bestseller list you apparently that's wonderful yeah well cory doctor do you have anything else you wanted to to get to before we roll out today? reproduce it and sell it if you want and there's no drm there's no tracking there's no you know ads there's no anything it's it's you know black type on a white background you'll never get a pop up asking you whether you want to subscribe to my mailing list or whatever yeah and the uh the email version of it you can get it as an email list the email version also no. You can get it as an email list. The email version also no tracking. I can't tell when you've opened the email or anything. I keep no statistics. And I just it's a letter in a bottle I write and throw into the ocean every morning. And it's great. That's so much fun to write. It's a great letter in a bottle. You've been talking writing a lot. I should not talking

a lot about AI lately and kind of the how that all feeds into a lot of this, this stuff you've been covering about, or the stuff you write about often about, you know, vessels and scam economies. And I've really enjoyed getting your take on that, because I think you're one of the one of the people who hasn't lost their minds over all this stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we're really like, so that we hear so much about AI disinformation. And the people who have like most fallen prey to AI disinformation are bosses who've been convinced that AI is good enough to fire you and replace you with. And, you know, it's like, it's not true. It doesn't mean they won't do it. Right. But it's not true. Yeah. That's, that's

actually kind of the worst of all worlds right technological unemployment without without actual replacement it's just uh it's just another bezel it's a yeah it's a it's that long moment where you think you've zeroed out your labor force costs but uh you haven't realized that you're no longer productive because the chatbot keeps you know as in the case of air canada just like telling people they can get refunds they're not entitled to. And then regulators come along and smack you around and fine you for your chatbot having lied to people about their bereavement flight discounts and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to that moment hitting, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to that moment hitting, I guess. Because where we, I mean, I do kind of think we are sort of nearer to the bursting than we are to the peak of the bubble right now. But I guess we'll see. Well, remember, the market can remain solvent, irrational rather, longer than you can remain solvent. So I've been predicting the collapse of the London housing bubble, for example, for a very long time. We're nowhere near it. Yeah.

So that is my, that is my humbling lesson. It is definitely a bubble. It is going to burst when it's going to burst and is very, very, very hard to predict. Yeah. What will burst with it?

Yeah. Jeez. Well, Corey, thank you so much for being on the show uh again everybody check out the bezel um wonderful book and uh check out cory's other wonderful books like walk away that's the episode have a good one thanks robert it could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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