It Could Happen Here - This Country is Cons All the Way Down Ft. FoldableHuman

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Robert Evans and Dan Olson (FoldableHuman) talk about the overwhelming growth of cons and scams in daily life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and

influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, it being bad things happening here. Here being, you know, wherever you are. We're talking specifically about wherever you are. I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts of this podcast. one of the hosts of this podcast.

And with me today is a guy I have a lot of admiration for, probably my favorite YouTube documentarian, which I guess would be the fastest way to sum up who you are and what you do, Dan Olson from the channel Folding Ideas. Dan, hi. Hi. How you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Now, Dan, you and I have like a topic of shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted to talk about is your name on the internet is Foldable Human. Yeah. I don't feel like I could fold you very well. I don't feel like I could fold you very well.

No. Okay. So back in high school, I used to be like, I was a really small guy. Like I was a really skinny guy. And do you remember the, you remember all the ads from the 90s for exercise equipment? I do remember some of that. Yeah. So the tagline that they always used for like the as seen on tv exercise equipment was that it folds for easy storage ah and being being dumb ass kids you

know it's like one person in our friend group like has a car but there's like seven of us and so someone's got a ride in the trunk and it's like well dan gets to ride in the trunk like we're gonna stick dan in the trunk because he folds for easy storage because I was a small guy. And so it, so I don't know why when I was like busy, like trying to brand the channel, like, you know, a decade ago, I was like, I had this phrase that I was using with students that I was interacting with was like, well, let's unfold that idea, you know,

but like, that was kind of like on my mind. So I was like, ah, well, we'll like call the channel, like unfolding ideas, unfolding.

Didn't really like just sound good. So I was like, well, folding ideas. And then, well, aesthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human. I don't know. It, it then, well, aesthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human. I don't know.

It, it just, it, it came to me and it sounded good and it was nowhere on the internet. There was like no overlap. So I'm like, all right, we're good to go. SEO locked in. That's an example of a thing that I, you know, we're talking, we're going to be talking a lot about stuff that's unsettling about our modern era and how the internet has sort of altered human dynamics. One of the things that I think is kind of neat about it is its ability to kind of preserve and amber aspects of you from the deep past. Like I have one of my emails,

like my personal email is a Gmail that I got back when you had to get an invite to get a Gmail, right? Like right when Gmail first became a thing. And it's like, I'm not going to say it on here because then my email will get bombarded with shit. But like, it's like a stupid joke that doesn't really make any sense. And every time I give it to someone,

they're like, why is that your email? Because I was like 12. Like, I don't even remember why I set this thing. It's just this like moment of something I thought was funny when I was prepubescent, frozen in amber forever, because that's, the internet does that in little ways for each of us. I definitely abandoned my original something awful account

because I'm like, you know what? Maybe not that username anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So you are. So, Dan, if people are not familiar with you, and I'm going to guess a significant chunk of our listenership is kind of one of the biggest touchstones for you recently was you put out a video about the NFT craze that a lot of people have credited with helping to kill it. Me Among Them. It's a wonderful, wonderful video. Line Go Up was the actual title.

Line Goes Up, yeah. Yeah, Line Goes Up. Very good breakdown of how they work, why it was a con. And you've been doing, you know, I think kind of the first really – the first time I became aware of you was you did a Flat Earth documentary, which is very good. You know, I did an article recently on like A.I. Kids books that was partly inspired by an investigation you did into these kind of audible slash Kindle grifters, the Mickelson twins. So you do that kind of thing, right? Like you kind of run across things that are troubling or confusing to you, and then you investigate them to a pretty impressive extent and put together very clear video investigations. You know, that's, I think, in a nutshell, probably pretty accurate. Yeah, that's kind of where the channels ended up.

Yeah. It's been a few different things over the years, but that's kind of the phase that it's in right now is this kind of like, I don't know, like, yeah of kind of online grifter culture and sort of its intersection with like different weird cultic milieus. Like there's kind of a cross, especially like with NFTs, a real big crossover betwixt the two. Right. Like it's kind of I think a lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam culture in the United States, because by any sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this, there are more scams and more fraud than at any right now in the United States than at any point previously. And basically from all sides,

like phone scams are at the highest rate they've ever been. People are getting like, like, I think the statistic I've got is that in March 2021, I think is kind of when that peaked at like 4.9 billion robocall scams, which is like just kind of an outrageous increase over where it was a few years ago. The rate of like fraud against elderly people seems to be at an all-time high, at least in terms of dollar amount. One of kind of the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed. And it's often through various email scams that are kind of based on getting trust or frightening them that like someone else is trying to scam them. And so they need to give in from it anyway. The thing that the quote that I came across was a regulator talking about this and being

like, yeah, I it's, it's no longer like smaller, even medium dollar cons. People are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. And then there's kind of like fishing attacks are at pretty close to an all-time high. I mean, I'll send you, there's a graph that I came across in a,

what was the source on this? In a Comparatech article that, I mean, it's send you – there's a graph that I came across in a – what was the source on this? In a Comparatech article that – I mean, it's just a straight line up from January 2029 to like the end of 2022. And so I'm kind of looking at all this, and there's a couple of different causes, right? Like some of the stuff the SEC did under Ajit Pai gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI-powered tools have been a big part of like why phishing attacks have increased so much. But then like you've got like the degree to which the elderly are being conned, which is like this – kind of at this intersection of a few different things, how much more online old people are today than they were 10, 15 years ago for obvious reasons. Population bubbles, multivalent dynamics.

Yeah, but kind of the commonality is that scams are all around. We're all kind of being assaulted by scams all the time. I just grabbed my phone phone and of my last 15 text messages, maybe it's like your pickup is available, a couple, like three, four with actual friends,

and then Interact, you just received an e-Interact transfer. Hi, long time no talk, just got your money. Okay, we'll send soon. 389 can now be routed to your institution. Submit why. The Canada Revenue Agency has sent you money.

Your verification code for visa transfer is, and it's like, it's like just. Constant. Constant. I hadn't even, because like. I'm not going to be shocked at all. If I get a phishing text message during this conversation, like between my email and, uh, and like my text messages or just phone calls, right. I get every day I get two or three calls from scam likely, you know? Yeah. Um, my, my good friend scam likely. Yeah old buddy he's always got a always got something

cooking um but yeah it's and I this kind of like I started focusing on this more a couple of months ago because you know I had vaguely noticed boy it's just like nothing but fucking scams coming into me through my phone these days um and then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank. And it was one of those things like everyone else, my cell phone lets me know when like a call is from scam likely or when it's from like, you know, and it had the name of my bank on there. It was the right number, you know. So I pick it up and a human being is on the line. And they're like, is this, you know, Robert Evans? And I'm like, yeah. And then they're like, we've seen some like fraudulent activity on your account. Can we ask you a couple questions?

And that is, I've gotten that call before legitimately, you know, it's not a weird thing for your bank to be like, hey, let's talk about these charges. Are you in the country right now? It's like, no, I'm in New York. It's like, okay, so we're seeing activity out in New York. That's it. Yeah. Did you just buy something in Florida? No, I never go to Florida. But so, yeah. So, and I didn't actually get to see where they were going with this.

Nothing suspicious had happened. But like after they say that, I'm like, okay, yeah. Like what's the charge? And then my phone disconnects, right? Like it's, you know, again, where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle of nowhere. So like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them's, you know, again, my where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle of nowhere. So like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them back, you know, and I get on the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what's what seems to be up? And I'm like, well, you guys called me saying that like that there was some possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about.

And the lady on the other end is like, no one here called you. Like, I'm looking at your record. I can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have any record of that. And I explained what happened. And she, like, goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like, so that was a scam. This is something we've seen more and more lately. They're able now to actually just spoof our banks. And my bank is a significant-sized institution.

They're able to spoof our phone number now. And so you can't tell through the caller ID. And like, it was this whole thing where like, obviously I know don't give certain things over the phone, even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but it was just like, well, shit, like, what are you like? That's, this is now well beyond the thing where like you're getting called and someone's offering you, you know, to make a bunch of money, you know, holding a Nigerian prince's wealth or something. If you send them your bank account, this is your bank calls you and your phone tells you that it's your bank and a human being who sounds just like the bank teller, like it's it's gotten so and I think kind of the broad, obviously, each of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is a worthy story and a separate story in a lot of ways.

But they also come together in this like, well, you know, it's not it's not like weird at this point to note that everybody seems angrier and everybody seems paranoid and you hear more stories about like people opening fire on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around and there's you know that story obviously there's guns and stuff that's also connected to that but i wonder how much of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers at all times. Yeah, I think that's a good observation. Like, just we're seeing this erosion of public trust in reality. Yeah. And some of that is, like, deliberate and political.

like deliberate and political and a lot of it is just coming from like the fact that technology has enabled spam in unprecedented new vectors and the fact that you can like that you can automate

bombarding people with noise is just kind of it's eaten away at all of us because it's like how do i how do i trust anything i mean so like and this is the thing is it's like okay so i've been i've been keyed into this and thus paranoid for like a decade now so if i get a message that's like you know like that from my bank if it comes in, then it's like I don't interact with the original thing that it came from. I then go like on the website.

It's like, all right. I like call my bank to to to inquire about it. Like never. It's like I never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in. Yeah. If you're if you're dealing with your bank and it's like and it's like but is that level of paranoia healthy and it's like that takes that also takes effort that means you have to have the foresight to be like do not panic see the thing process it consciously go somewhere else and like you know uh activate a different channel you know

if they contact you through text, you know, go through like email or like live chat. If they contact you through email, call them on the phone, not with the phone number that was at the bottom of the email, go to the website. And it's like, that's effort. That's effort.

I don't even have that much energy in me sometime. And a lot of other people just like absolutely don't. And that leads to like just exhaustion vulnerability you know all of the things that that feed into like paranoia distrust etc etc etc etc and it's it's relentless like uh online advertising is basically useless at this point oh yeah because like you if if you ran if you ran a legitimate ad you know unless you have the money to run like a real proper you know basically tv commercial uh like banner ads i haven't i i've seen like, I don't know, one legitimate banner ad for like a car company in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or, you know, liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse. number one, it's led me to the situation where when I see an ad on social media in particular,

but with any sort of like print in an online ad, my assumption is it's probably a con, right? Even if it's like, oh, wow, that shirt looks nice. Well, that company is probably not going to ship me that shirt, right? Or it won't be right. Like, yeah, it'll be fucked up in some way. That photo is absolutely not from the company that is running this ad. Yeah. You just, you assume, you distrust as a first measure a first measure, you see, you see a banner ad, you see the aesthetics of advertising and the assumption is that it's like, ah, that's gonna, you know, that's gonna get me to sign up for some subscription. That's going to be buried in like recurring payments that I will never be able to cancel. And it's, it's interesting because I mean, I'm not sure if this has been your experience,

but like I can acknowledge, I think I morally have to acknowledge like part of my success financially as a creator has been as a result of that. Because one of the things that we've seen in the ad market is that text ads, ads for print and shit do not work, do not function in any way shape or form and a lot of like random inter-settled ads don't work well but creator ads work well and so there's money

in it right because people listen to like people have a degree of like okay well this is like number one it's just like the process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is different from an article. But like the ads work better because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you have on Twitter. Yeah.

A human that I can confirm exists has at least taken a look at this. Like this is not at least like not a complete con or whatever. Right. Yeah. Or if it is, then like, then the, the,

the host has also is, has also been kind of like conned by that or whatever. Like it ends up, yeah, we're in this together. Like it ends up being at least like a little bit sort of, sort of distant, distanced from that.

You know, like the, the fricking um you know like the the freaking you know uh buy buy a square foot of land in scotland and and become a lord and that whole thing is like a scam being run out of china yeah um yeah i mean one of the one of the kind of like weird ironies for me is it's like okay so line goes up came out well the crypto ecosystem was in its like biggest ad blitz ever you know they had the super bowl ads coming up just like a month later actually like weeks like weeks afterwards and so um you know like the vast majority of the like uh uh mid-roll ads that ran on that video were crypto.com were FTX were Binance. Yeah. And, and the ad rates that they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying to run on crypto relevant videos was

insane. Yeah. It was like, it was like 2011 all over again. 2011 was the only good time to be in digital content creation. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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there's like a lot that's um unsettling about that i think one of the things that is like most frustrating to me is the degree to which it's meant that we've we've gone backwards like there was this people who like study tech and kind of the way socialization around big tech works talk about this thing called the trow of disappointment, right? Which is when you get a new technology, everybody we're in like the hype phase for like AI right now. Right. And then at a certain point, it becomes clear which aspects of the hype were right. You know,

the degree to which the technology is capable of doing things that, that kind of the evangelists were claiming and to which extent the hype was wrong. Right. And what areas is, is the tech always going to fall short? And that's called like the trial of disappointment when people start to realize, and then, you know, things kind of

are supposed to level after that. Pets.com is not in fact magic. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You can't just keep shoveling money into this shit forever in the hopes of exponential returns. Or as a consumer, like at a certain point, I can remember the time when phones were exciting and I was, especially as a journalist, like really interested every new year at like what new things they're capable of. And then after a couple of years, it was like, well, every phone is like,

there's no difference now. There's no excitement in getting a new phone. It's just like, well, this, my old phone is broken, so I need a new phone. But like, I'm not like, wow, the new capabilities of this device. But I feel like there's another, I don't even, I don't really know what to call it, but there's also this kind of thing where we, the internet helps to create, or is the method through which is disseminated a new

labor saving device. And then the scams reach such a density that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal right um like that's that's i i feel like there's like a that's at least one of the things that i've noticed especially with like digital communication with just communication in general right my smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all the time and now my smartphone like it obviously i still carry the damn thing everywhere but like my text messages are mostly scams and my emails are mostly scams and most of the calls that i get are scams like yeah yeah i've actually been finding myself drifting back towards email as a communication medium just because the spam filters are uh

better you know mature and sophisticated And for the most part they work like there. Yeah. That it's like, ah, I can actually, people can actually reach me by email. Uh, that's pretty cool. Um, and you know, like there's, there's a whole tech, like really kind of the big thing is there's this whole technological element to it. And you know, when you, when you sort of pitched the, uh, the idea the idea of this conversation with the first two places my brain went to were john romulus brinkley the uh goat testicle doctor yes yes yes and pioneer of new media radio and and of course uh and marshall mccluhan yeah like those, those were the, those were the two things that my brain immediately was like, this is, this is sort of like relevant to it because like Brinkley was, he was a

pioneer of radio. He, he absolutely, uh, advanced sort of the format of like what radio could be and how you could use radio to not just extract money from people but get them onto your side such that after they have given you their money like they're they're not just they're not just your your victims you're you're not just rolling into town and selling them some some snake oil and then like skedaddling as fast as possible, you have made them into your fans, into your followers. And, you know, the way that he did that

by connecting his scam to like a sense of identity, you know, that he wasn't just this fake doctor, he was also effectively a pastor. Yeah. Yeah, people who would defend it after there was no longer any chance of them, like after it had been sort of proven that the thing that he was promising was not real.

Right. Yeah. Like once there was no more, it's almost like, you know, that play the music man. Yeah. Yeah.

If you're, if you, if you at home or not, like, I'm not a huge musical theater guy. This is a pretty famous play, but like the basic idea is this guy tells everyone, this con man comes to town,

tells everyone he's going to make like a big band and raises money for it. And his plan is to like take the money and run. It's kind of what the monorail sketch in The Simpsons is based on to a significant extent. And if I'm remembering correctly, I shouldn't have brought this up maybe because I'm actually not that knowledgeable

about musical theater. But my recollection of the way it goes is that like he falls in love or some shit and feels bad. And, you know, they wind up he winds up becoming not a con man. But like I think the modern version of that is he just he gets people to like adopt as a religion the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubas and shit are on the way. the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubas and shit are on the way. And like, you know, then they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up in the center of town for telling them that we're 10 years into this and he hasn't started a band. Anyway, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the other one, McLuhan, you know, his famous postulate, the medium is the message, which remains a radical observation to this day, is just it's this assertion that the medium itself is more important than any given message on it or even the like the combined weight of the individual messages. Now, I think in some regards, McLhan kind of went like overboard with that because he said that it's like content doesn't matter at all and it's like ah i think content matters but the point still stands that like the medium itself the like the invention of radio the invention of television the invention of the internet the invention of social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger impact than any given thing on it, because that's the thing that ultimately we warp our lives around, that we restructure our homes

around, we restructure our physical environment around, we restructure how we spend our days, like our time usage gets warped around the medium itself. And thus, the medium becomes the portal for information to travel through. Absolutely. And it also, I mean, I think there's an extent to which that is true of kind of the way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people, and I think there are a lot of things that people, a lot of, especially when it comes to, like, radical politics, that people adopt because somebody who they had come to already like expresses those politics, right?

And so something that maybe never would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able to get purchased with them, because, like, a dude that they, or a lady that they had a parasocial relationship expressed this kind of stuff. And it just, it's not that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like people are, you know, little robots. It's that this is kind of the way influence works. It's the same reason why like your, you like people often wind up believing similar things to their parents or similar things to their friends group. You know, if your friends are all saying like, you know, on the positive end of things, if you're, if you grow up, like, like I did, uh, I don't know about your high school, but if you were like, I was just thinking the same thing, like my vocabulary in high school was, you know, there were some words. There's a slur that starts with F that was like every third word out of not just my mouth, but everyone I knew knows.

The movie Superbad captures this to a significant degree of fidelity, to be honest. That's just the way shit was in like the early aughts. And then, you know, the people I hung around with, suddenly there were more people who were openly queer and suddenly people weren't talking that way. And I stopped talking that way the and it's it's not like, yeah, I can I can go to my the subreddit for my show and see people being like, yeah, I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't think that's bad because I think anarchist history and politics are useful, even if you're not an anarchist. Right. It's valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. understand that history. It's often undertold. But this is the same dynamic, this thing which has benefited me and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that I think should be more widely known. This is also why there's more Nazis, right? Like it cuts every which way.

And so McLuhan, you get these new mediums, you get the internet, you get the subdivisions of the internet, like you get social media, you get email, you get, you become prime targets for grift. out like the negative impacts of social media and just like the the the effect on like self-esteem self-perception of just being exposed to other people's curated idealized version of themselves so constantly uh you know it's like this that's already, you know, impactful in potentially negative ways. And that's when you're dealing with like real people. And but then you add on to that, that it's like, oh, you go on Instagram and like you can be following a bot and not even know it, you know, you're, you're getting, you know, and the algorithm is going to float this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down these, like in these addictive infinite scroll feeds, uh, you know, you don't have the filter of pre-interaction to, to gauge those things. So like, so like I follow you on Twitter and I know that if I see like, Oh, Robert Evans has retweeted this thing that it's like, okay. So like, he like I follow you on Twitter and I know that if I see like, oh, Robert Evans

has retweeted this thing that it's like, okay, so like he's taken a look at it. Uh, and, and it's been through like the filter, uh, the filter of his brain. Uh, and so I can probably just like, you know, take my trust in that thing up like one notch. Right. But if I'm just like scrolling down the, like the algorithmically curated, like this is what our computer has determined is similar to things that you have already looked at. It's. It's just it's so much more fraught, but there's it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh, I trust this thing. I trust this platform. And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment is yeah this like i trust these algorithms these algorithms do a really good job of like oh i watched dan and so the youtube algorithm introduced me to like a bunch of

other really good creators cool uh oops i watched one video on flat earth and now my my recommends are full of like covid denialism and anti-maskers and you know the trucker movement and and all of these other like wedges to just sort of slowly rot my brain yeah it's it, it's, it's like kind of the way our parents told us, uh, or dare or whatever told us drugs worked, you know, when we were little kids where someone's like, Oh, you want some pot? Here's some straight up heroin, right? Like you want some of this too? Like you want some crack cocaine? Um, no. And I, I, it is, you know, you were talking about like, yeah, you see, you follow someone and you see them share something. And if they're a trusted source for you, you know, it bumps it up a notch.

And even that, you know, that's the way it like it works for me as well. But there's a degree to which I find it like problematic, especially because like we all fuck around on the internet too. I had a thing go crazy viral recently where like someone posted an obviously photoshopped image of like a Logitech controller at the bottom of the sea and was like, look, the controller survived. And I like, I shared it to make a joke, right? And the joke was that like, well,

the joke was that like, well, the controller we're going to find out was one of the more functional things about that terrible sub. And that was and I even posted underneath it. This obviously this is not a real image guys, but like, then I saw like, I wound up finding P it,

it went, the posts that I did of it went so viral that like it, it wound up like screen capped and in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about. And they, it was only the first post, not the one where I was like, obviously this is fake.

And like, it was a joke. I, you know, it was, it was a, it was a, it was a shit post. I didn't. We were, we were banting online.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how many people now think that literally there's a Logitech controller that they found at the bottom of the sea because of that. What is, what are the ethics now of like making a, making a, a jibe, a jape as like somebody who's got like a following like where does that come into and like i don't know and i don't i'm certainly not like clear on it because

i seem to be incapable of not shit posting um i spent too much time on something awful as well but it's so it's so hard to give up i i miss it i miss the days when i could just make like tasteless jokes on ret on uh on twitter and you know, a couple hundred people would see them and go like, that's funny. And now it's like, ah, if I'm a little too ironic, someone's going to be like, oh, crap. Are you serious? Like that happened? And it's like, no, no, that did not happen. That did not happen. This is fake. I am telling lies for comedy purposes. It was a bit. I was doing a bit. No, and that's like, you know,

something awful, which is kind of the, it's like the, oh crap, now I've forgotten a very basic science term. You know, the big puddle of boiling goop that life came out of. The primordial ooze. Oh, primordial. It's the primordial soup of digitalial, it's the primordial,

primordial, of digital culture. That's what something awful was. It was a forum website that gave birth in various ways, some direct and some indirect to 4chan, to Reddit, to Twitter culture, you know,

to all of these different, to anonymous, to all of these different like things have, you can trace a lineage back to something awful. And the motto of that website, as written by the terrible person who founded it, was the internet makes you stupid. And at the time, what that kind of meant was, and if you're younger, or if you just weren't very online in the late 90s, early 2000s, you may

not remember this long period, but there was a fairly long period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever happens online doesn't matter, right? Yeah. Like it can't matter. Probably fraudulent. It's almost certainly like made up. You can't trust anything online. almost certainly like made up. You can't, you can't trust anything online. And real people are not on the internet, right? Like it's kids, it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who run banks aren't online, you know? Like the idea that the richest man in the world

would spend all of his time shit posting was absurd. Like, so. He really should be busier than he observably is. He certainly, it seems like, and although I guess so should I, um, if I'm, if I'm being fair, um, but yeah, it's, um, there's this, uh, this degree to which digital culture is still very much a huge chunk of it. Like we all want it to not matter. We all want a place where we can just shitpost and bullshit.

Because shitposting and bullshitting comes out of, like, the very same impulses that, like, determine a lot of how we interact with, like, our friends, right? You know, we all need some times where you can just sit down, have a couple of beers or whatever, and, shit with your with your buds you know and it's not it's not being recorded it's not going up any everywhere forever you can just kind of like talk this is the it's it's a field almost social experimentation is a huge part of maturity of growing up of becoming a person uh and i think we all get kind – there's a degree of like the accessibility of the internet that makes that impossible to entirely get over even though it is demonstrably untrue. What happens on the internet matters quite a lot and you can have a real significant – you can influence your own life in very negative ways by saying the wrong thing on the internet at the wrong time. Yeah. Welcome.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I mean, lots of people have observed just this fact that it's like on Reddit, you can you're not on Reddit. you can, you're not on Reddit. I mean on Reddit too, but, uh,

you know, on Twitter, like once, uh, you know, once a month, uh, Twitter elects some 10 follower anime profile pick with, uh,

who, with, with a single tasteless joke and makes it the, the fulcrum of reality. Yeah. And it's like, that's a, and the thing, I, I don't think this is actually that far off topic just because like, it's like that's a and the thing i i don't think this is actually that far off

topic just because like yeah it's this warping of reality this warping of like what is real what is trustworthy what are the like impacts of things and the fact that like you know 10 follower account can become uh can become international news. Yeah. Has to sit alongside the endless bombardment of dick pills and global leaders. Like, I had this joke that I was trying to formulate over the weekend of, like, World War II with Twitter, where it's like, you know, just a joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bot would observe this like, ah, it's like, you know, two posts in a row. Like, it's like the USSR has rolled into Berlin. Stalin has unfriended the precedent. I hope this doesn't

mean anything. You know, that it's like that you have like, you have international politics happening in the same space as fake international politics, as the same space as just like this endless bombardment of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality, and spam. And no one knows what's real anymore. No one knows what to trust. And no one knows what's real anymore. No one knows what to trust. And the instinct in a lot of people is to just give up trying to parse the difference. And that makes us, like, increasingly vulnerable. Yeah.

And I think a big part of what's kind of at the core of the problem here is what you've said here, makes us vulnerable. The degree to which this can be weaponized is really significant. Like, you know, one of the things that we saw that I think is kind of low-key, a significant moment in sort of info conflict shit is this last weekend, last weekend from, you know, where we're talking now, weekend, last weekend from, you know, what we're talking now, there was a mutiny by the Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine and southern Russia against the Russian government. Or at least that's what it appears to have been now, right? This is Russia. A lot of this is really weird. So I'm not going to say we know, we don't, we certainly don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going on there. but yeah one a couple of things happened very quickly for one uh folks on the right and there were also a lot of kind of like

shithead left people who adopted this too decided that liberals were cheering on the head of wagner um evgeny pregozhin because like they believed he was a reformer and that like they'd all fought this guy who was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin so much and they've convinced themselves that he's you know going to fix Russia and he's like no no I didn't see that like look I I love calling people out when they have shitty takes specifically on this specific war because I've been covering it since 2014 but like I didn't see that and none of the people talking about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it. And it happens all the time, right?

Sometimes people will like take a post that has like 30 likes and be like, this is what the left is saying. But like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't see a single post where someone was like, Prokosian's going to like fix, you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No one was saying that. They just invented that this was going on. And part of it is that the way Twitter works now made it a lot easier for disinfo to spread

from this thing. There was very famously a guy who is absolutely a con artist, just started sharing a bunch of videos from there with bad commentary that was inaccurate. And Elon Musk was like, this is the guy I've come to trust about. We can say Elon Musk. Yeah, we can say Elon Musk. I don't know. It's a problem, Dan. See, you beat me to Elon Musk because I was going to say this, like the con artist was, but then it turns out that he was just retweeting that guy. It's like he got, of course he got involved anyway yeah uh yeah and it's the i don't think this the solution was not because we lived you know our parents and grandparents

lived to the day where most people would be like well you know folks who are in politics maybe need to care about this i might want to get the broad strokes of it but like random people you know shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these international relations. And that's how you get shit like the Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on behalf of the U.S. government, where most Americans are like, what did we do in Guatemala? I didn't know we had guys in Guatemala. And that wasn't great.

But also this new thing where if you are a personality, if you are in media, then you are obliged to be a part of every big thing that happens everywhere. Even if you are demonstrably incompetent at that, and everyone is demonstrably incompetent at that past a certain point, you know? Yeah, and that's been, oh boy, that's been a lot to deal with. And going back to the original thing that started this conversation, that's part of how so many of these cons perpetuate is that like people are only competent, including famous people, including people with followings in limited areas. And once you get out of your area of competence, it's easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of people who trust you because of the things you were right about, then they can very easily get fooled when you get fooled. One of the big hazards there is that, and this is a longstanding observation, is that hucksters, con artists, are going to be more willing than anyone else to pretend to be

up to date on it. They have no compunction about being, it's like, oh yeah, I know. I'm a, I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and Russia and Belarus. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so they're, the reason it's a con man is because it's a confidence man, because they get your confidence because they act confidently and give you reason to give you reason to trust them and they have no moral compunction about lying to you uh and and they are always going to be faster uh with with the take faster

with the confidence statement faster with the solution faster with the, with, with a call to action to buy their book or dick pills. Yeah. And it's, it's the, and often I think part, one of the things that's made this all so much harder to catch and so much more durable is that it's, it used to be as obvious. You used to be able to see like, okay, well, this guy's a con man, but like, I'm not a person who can be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability. So I immediately recognize this guy as a con man, or I am not a person who can be conned by Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian. So I'm not vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the cons are downstream of the following and of the fame. And so a lot of people are getting taken

in by con men and maybe, you know, the fact that person's putting in a link for their, their supplements, you know, on every viral post, you don't buy their supplements, but they'll come up with something else for you. Once they get you in, once you're in the funnel, um, or even if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel, you know, and that, that really wasn't the case. That wasn't the case with, you know, you go back 10 years, talk about like Young Living, right? Or some other like multi-level marketing company where they're selling, you know, essential oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting

random people to spread their business without paying for shit. And now you can do that. If you're a con man and you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and you're on the Ukraine shit, you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them, frame them in whatever way is likely to get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you gain 200,000, 300,000 followers in the space of a night or two and your ability to scam people and get money out of them has increased several times. You know, the con is downstream of the platform, right? So, you know, that's, you get this guy and maybe he's shilling thing X or thing Y, he's got a couple, you know, whatever different con he has, but regular people can be in the business of spreading his platform, of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to the con.

Maybe they're not the kind of person who's ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine at a moment when it happens to be the opportune moment to do that and they go crazy viral well then that guy is able to triple his following and you know and have people who are not interested in his con spread his shit which gets him followers which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of the con is yeah it's it's all a sales funnel. Our daily lives, we have built our society into just like a giant nested series of sales funnels. Yeah. I don't know, Dan. That's bound to be a solid foundation. I don't see where to go wrong. It seems like that'll go well for us. How do we, you got any ideas on how to fix it? Or should we just state a problem and then run away i mean the easy thing to do would be to uh restore trust in our public institutions um

you know uh if we could uh uh have sort of like i i don't even want to say like a unifying cause but just a a sense of common of like shared commonality and and trust in like our local uh our local society you know strong like not necessarily strong families but like strong family units constructed or natural or however you want to like define or construct those but like local with like good infrastructure around us so that our physical spaces are, you know, appealing and comfortable to live in and, and provide us a sense of like enrichment and, and fulfillment, you know, the easy stuff, uh, just, just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media. And, uh, and then I think we're good yeah yeah so that's that's good so if we fix

everything then we won't have any more problems that's great we're we're on the same page now i mean it is really like and this is there's it's also there's also this kind of like problematic element of when you're like well we want to like a problem is that there's zero trust in institutions objectively a problem because it means that when say the c the CDC is like, hey, guys, there's a plague. We should probably do this and this and this. It immediately becomes a culture war thing. And so you can't actually confront serious problems the way that you need to be able to confront them. It's just not possible anymore.

Um, likewise, uh, like, but the other issue is that like, well, for significant chunks of the population, there's never been any good reason to trust, you know, the institutions because, you know, they're marginalized groups and whatever, you know, when the institutional trust was higher, like the government was there's a significant extent to which we need new concepts of like what an institution is and should be like we need. It's such a ground floor problem because like, I don't know, we're never getting back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like, that's just not going to happen. You know, like whatever the way forward is on us having less overcoming the anti-vax, anti-science shit around medicine. It's not getting everyone to love the CDC. You know, that's just not ever going to happen again. Yeah. And part of the complexity here is that it's really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, OK, well, the solution is like strong central institutions. the solution is like strong central institutions.

And it's like, that's not correct at all either. Because like, I mean, my go-to example for that would be that it's like, look at the LDS church, look at Mormons. They have a very, very strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a lot of their lives. And yet Mormon communities are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and, uh,

and MLMs, you know, like Utah salt Lake is like the, the, the locus of MLM culture. And so like, it's not the, the sort of like strong man,

like, ah, this is why we need strong, like, you know, strong leaders is, is not, isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort of like answer to gravitate towards. Yeah. That's, that's, I don't know. Um, I don't actually know. Part of the problem is that like, there are little solutions,

right? There are little things that you can do. Stuff like advocating for a more functional legal definition of what an auto dialer is and what counts as illegally flooding phone lines with cons and stuff. Or restricting the ability of people like bill collectors and stuff to utilize, you know, the phone system and some of the ways that they do like, and that can make stuff better. Just like, you know, at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in the con space. Some of its ability to automate and push it to people at scale will get reduced.

At a certain point, that will happen, right? Because it happens with everything. You know, AI is not unique. This is, it's, you've heard the Red Queen hypothesis, right? Yeah. It's kind of a way of like, it's kind of like a way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's this point in Alice in Wonderland where, you know, the Red Queen kind of like traps Alice in this situation where like she's, the Red Queen kind of like traps Alice in this situation

where like she's got to keep running as fast as she can. But it's like a situation like a conveyor belt sort of situation. So no matter how hard she runs, she never gets ahead. Right. And that's kind of the way that like the evolutionary arms race works. Right. Like, you know, one one animal develops a defense against a predator and the predator develops a way around it and like the the the like that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons i think actually like technology just moves too fast now for us to to be able to keep up right like we're not we're not just standing in place we're consistently falling behind and i don't know i don't know what we do here uh i mean yeah so like there will there will

be technical technological solutions to specific manifestations i mean a big one like in there like to not to not bant is that you know the uh uh at a the legal system the governments like governments need to do something about the robo calling and the text messages because they're rendering a vital piece of like civic infrastructure unusable yeah people don't trust their phones anymore and that's that's bad um because it means they stop using it you know it's like there's, yeah, there's very real like consequences. And we need to be able to trust that we're talking to people who aren't just trying to get our money. Yeah. Yep.

Well, Dan, you got anything you want to plug at the end of this here uh your youtube channel folding ideas everyone should check out if you have not already yeah the youtube channel that's going to be the big one uh i'm still on i'm on socials at foldable human though i'm trying to wean myself off of them because they're broken and being broken on purpose yeah and uh they're bad for my soul so i I still, I'm addicted. So I still keep coming back, but I'm a lot less active than I used to be. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear you.

I was too busy getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter. No, yeah. Dan, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm looking forward to your next video, your next investigation, whatever that happens to be. Folks should check out, if you haven't, Line Goes Up, your documentary on NFTs. You should check out Contrapreneurs. It's, I think, what you called your Mickelson twins documentary.

Check out everything Dan has done. Thank you, Dan. And that is the episode. You can all go home now and deal with the fact that your bank information just got stolen by somebody in Macedonia. It Could Happen Here is 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. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals.

You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite

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