Modern Wisdom - #312 - Gabrielle Bluestone - The World's Biggest Scammers

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Gabrielle Bluestone is the Executive Producer of the FYRE Documentary, an author & journalist. From failed festivals to fake blood tests, the grifters and scammers of the world seem to be having their time in the spotlight right now. Expect to learn how Billy McFarland the founder of Fyre Festival has got himself into even more trouble since he's been in jail, why Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos made her voice lower, what we learned from Mike Bloomberg's Presidential Campaign, whether you can influence your way to a best selling product, why we're so obsessed with these car crash individuals and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Hype - https://amzn.to/3amiUvR Follow Gabrielle on Twitter - https://twitter.com/g_bluestone  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Gabrielle Bluestone. She's the executive producer of the Fire Festival documentary, An author and a journalist. From failed festivals to fake blood tests, the grifters and scammers of the world seem to be having their time in the spotlight right now. Today, expect to learn how Billy McFarlane, the founder of Fire Festival, has got himself into even more trouble since he's been in jail. Why Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos purposefully made her voice lower?

What we learn from Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign, whether you can influence your way to a best-selling product, why we're so obsessed with these car crash individuals, and much more. I find it so compelling to follow these sort of stories on the internet. You'll have those people, friends from school or just someone that you know who their life just seems like a slow-motion train wreck, but you can't stop watching and it feels like the individuals that we go through today are kind of the the premier league players in that world. And now it's time to learn about the world's biggest scammers

with Gabrielle Bluestone. Gabrielle Bluestone, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. What have you been researching for the last few years? I have been researching why people scam online and why we fall for it. Lots of examples of that to go through, I feel like. Yes, well, this all came about because I was the reporter who broke the Fire Festival story. And for your listeners who don't know what that is, that was this luxurious music festival

that was advertised as the party of the century. It had some of the world's most beloved models and influencers backing it, a lot of money put into it, and when the ticket holders arrived, it was supposed to be on this beautiful private island flown there by private jets with luxurious catered food from celebrity chefs, and when the attendees arrived, they found a gravel pit next to a sandals resort that ended up being more luxurious than the festival itself. With instead of these beautiful hotel rooms, it was FEMA tents and a key of furniture.

And so I said about trying to find out how the organizers led by Billy McFarland who was fire festival CEO, how they got away with it and why it worked so well. And I started to realize that it wasn't just them. These scams are going on in pretty much every walk of life, whether it's in the tech industry, in the media, on social media, even the way that we, you know, a regular social media user is presenting themselves to our friends. Like we are all scamming each other and accepting what it is as reality even though we know better. It's a really fascinating psychological profile as

well as a business story. It's kind of just come about as well. Like most people didn't aspire to essentially be con artists. You know, you'd have the traveling con artist snake oil salesman, right? Going from town to town and grifting and then they'd get found out and then they'd go on to the next town. But you are right. There's an element of this sort of two lives that we lead. The one, the front facing one that we show on public social media and then the, the real one that's going on behind the scenes. Yeah, I don't think that's happened really ever before.

Certainly not at this scale. And I think even the most honest people are guilty of it to an extent, right? Like most people are not gonna show the lows of their lives on social media. They're gonna put their best face forward. And even I'm guilty of that, you know, if I'm having a boring day,

I'm not putting that on my feet. I'm putting the highlights, and then presenting that to the public as if that's every day for me. So I think it starts on that most basic level of grip all the way up to the people who are photoshopping their faces and bodies, who are getting plastic surgery and pretending that it's natural, who are purchasing luxury good shopping bags on Etsy and then staging photographs as if they have been doing these incredible

shopping trips. There's so much just not even to scam. The only thing they're scamming is our perception of them, right? There's so much of it going on and then all the way up to fake tickets to a music festival that never existed. Talk me through what it was like breaking that story. You'd done your research and then you pushed a button and then all hell descended on earth. Yeah, so it actually started a bit earlier than that because I was, you know, I'm a millennial. I was part of that target audience that they were trying to capture.

And, you know, going to meet Bella Hadid wasn't really something that I was looking to buy. But then I saw a high school classmate of mine talking about his artist's past on Instagram and all the benefits that were going to come with it and you know, the special food and the special treats that come, like the artist's partner supposed to be this huge party with Kendall Jenner that people were doing. So I took a look at it. All of a sudden I was like, oh my God, am I missing this big event that everyone's going to go to?

I started to feel the FOMO that had been baked into this marketing campaign. But when I went to look at the website, it looked like someone might have made in a high school coding class. It was so low rent and so agonistic compared to what they were advertising. If there was really all this money behind advertising, you know, if there was really

all this money behind it, you would think that their products would match the marketing. And so that kind of like tingle, that spitty sense where I was like, something is not right here. And it was all very, you know, you think of the story of Cassandra. It seemed so obvious to me that there was something terribly wrong here. And there were people who knew what was going on trying to warn people on social media. I think people were scared to publicly speak out about it because they were afraid of getting sued and getting blamed

for the festival's failure. But it was all out there in the open. Any one of these ticket holders could have come across it the same way as me, right? It didn't require this incredible investigative ability. And then it all came crashing down on social media as people landed on the island and started to see what was going on. So at that point, my editors allowed me to move forward with the story because even they were like, you know, it's a music festival, okay,

it doesn't live up to all of its claims that's life. And I was like, no, it's a music festival. OK, it doesn't live up to all of its claims that life. And I was like, no, it's like way more. So finally, when the chief sandwich tweet came out, they were like, all right, go, publish. And that was kind of like off to the racist from there because Billy McBarland did not stop scamming. Even after he got arrested, he was out on bail and he launched a second set of felonies, also targeting people

who wanted to live that life that they were seeing on Instagram. So he was selling fake tickets to the Met Gala and to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. And he was targeting the same people. It was the same email list and they continued to fall for it. It is mind blowing. Well, if your selection effect to find your market was, do you want to go to this product that has these particular brand values? You've already selected for a very particular group of people who have a fair bit of money and spend a lot of time on Instagram. And probably I'm interested in the MetGala and the Victoria Secrets fashion show. And like, was it backstage with Miley Cyrus

when she'd stopped doing backstages like five years ago? One of the things that you go through that I thought was so interesting in the book is what Billy's got up to since he went to jail? Can you detail the laundry list of shit that he's been doing since then? Yeah, I mean this guy just does not stop it. Unrelenting. Yeah, so after he got busted for the second set of felonies, I think he got off pretty lightly. He was sentenced

to six years. When you said it could have been 75? Yes, so I mean the u.s. judicial system they will stack all these charges so it was very unlikely that he was ever going to face anything like that and a lot of the charges end up running concurrently but six years was still pretty good i mean during his time to think he had hired uh... a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a whole litany of mental issues uh... but specifically stated that he was not an anti-social personality disorder, it wasn't like a sociopath or a psychopath.

And the judge challenged that contention in her sentencing. She was like, I don't know if I believe that. She had this phrase that was like his fraud, like a circle has no end. But then granted him a relatively lenient sentence. And so I think for a normal human being, you would feel very lucky and maybe reform a bit. What Billy McFarland did was smuggle a recording device

into prison, which he was then caught with. He had been initially sentenced to serve at his time at a prison in upstate New York, which was great for his family and his girlfriend, because it was not too much of a trip to visit him. And there were celebrities there, you know, Donald Trump's former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced there. Billy McFarland was apparently scrabble buddies and played basketball with Mike, the situation

sorentino. What's he in jail for? He's out now, but he was serving time for tax evasion. And so you know, it was like the Instagram VIP list in prison until he got busted with a fake pen that had a USB in it. And he told the authorities that he was so eager to get started on paying his $26 million or restitution that he was going to start writing a memoir in prison and the proceeds of which he would give to his victims. And he was uneironically going to title it Prometheus, God of Fire. The authorities were not impressed by that explanation.

And so he was sent to solitary confinement, which is no joke. And we can have our own conversation about whether that's ever justified, but After that he was sent to a new facility in Ohio, which was you know, a definite step down from where he was and also happened to be the nexus of a COVID outbreak that was so bad that the National Guard had to be called in that was so bad that the National Guard had to be called in. And so he tried to get compassionate release, which was unlikely in the first place, but he was not out of contention because he had this serious infraction on his record.

And then he decided to launch a podcast. And the thing that was interesting about the podcast was that for once he was no longer the marketer, he was the product. And he said that the marketer, he was the product. And he said that he was giving, he had co-owned it and was giving his share towards restitution according to court documents, he has not paid any restitution at all. But he was put in solitary confinement for participating in this podcast and his partner on the podcast, I'm linking on their main, and I think it's like notorious LLC,

something like that. They run a series of hype houses in LL. Like they are the Billy McFarlane, not in the scammer way, but in the business sense of influencers in their market. And so when Billy was put into solitary, they weren't campaigning for him to get out. They were bragging about their engagement and how well the New York Times story about it was doing and how the podcast had shot up above Joe Rogan

and you know it was more popular than Kanye. So it was an interesting role reversal because for the first time Billy was the influencer, he wasn't the guy working the influencer. And so I think he recently got out of the solitary again. He had caught COVID in prison. How did he do the podcast? Was that what you needed to pen for? No. So he was going to dictate his memoirs. I believe the podcast was just recorded over a prison phone. So he was on Jordan Harbinger's show. Billy was on the Jordan Harbinger show calling in from and sure enough at the start of it, it's like, this is a call from the United States correction, da da da da, press three to reverse charges. So I knew he'd been gassing, but I didn't know

that he'd managed to, I mean, fair play, fair play for doing up. So, I think it might have been in coordination with him. Like Jordan was the host of this podcast. Oh, okay. And then they actually repurposed that footage for the ABC special with Wippy Goldberg. I forgot the name of it. But so now he's, you know, he's the product finally for the first time. So that wasn't allowed doing a podcast from prison's also not allowed. So you got in solitary again for that? Yeah, the specifics of that are a little hazy. I know other inmates have done prison podcasts with no problem.

I'm not sure what exactly the justification for it was just that that's the fact. I mean, solitary confinement is no joke and especially in the time of COVID a lot of this stuff stopped being funny. But it is remarkable that he has continued to get in trouble and he's just somehow unable to kind of stop. I firmly believe that once he's out of prison, he will launch something new and I think people will go along with it. The thing, I've had this conversation so many times with people and I've finally got the exact person that I want to have it with and that's you who produced the

Emmy nominated fire festival documentary on Netflix which everybody that is listening to will have watched because it's phenomenal. What I realized upon watching that documentary is that we as a society celebrate success so much that we don't actually mind how people get to success. If two different versions of this university existed, the first one where Billy McFarlane was a prick and did all of this nasty stuff and con people and was forcing models to get into the war when they didn't want to and kind of playing this Playboy Live song, doing loads of sort of just grimy stuff. And the Five Festival didn't work.

And in another version of the universe, all the same stuff happened before, but the Five Festival hadn't been a total chit-chow. It had been, let's say it was acceptable and Blink 1.82 didn't pull out and maybe there was tons of problems, but there wasn't so many that it was a big deal. In that second version of the universe, Billi McFarlane would have been hailed as a marketing genius. He would have been the golden child, this guy that managed to wrangle millennials,

he understood how things worked, he was able to manipulate them and move them in the way, okay, yeah, maybe the festival could have been a bit better but that's operations, we need people that can market and sell, right? That's what we're after. And what that told me was that the means justify the ends in a way that it's like, it doesn't really matter how you get there as long as it works. So yeah, that's something I've thought about so much since then, that the only thing that Billy did wrong was running event that didn't work in the eyes of the public And you know the other side of that is I firmly believe that had they had the bands go on that the people who bought tickets would have played along They would have been posting like they were having the time of their life because who wants to admit that you

Spend all this money and aren't enjoying yourself right? They would have found the right picture. They would have edited the water a little bluer. And I think that speaks to how we all use social media. One thing that really stuck out to me in that documentary was Mark Weinstein, who had been hired as a producer to kind of try and help save it in the end, was having the worst time of his life. But he would post these beautiful pictures

of the Bahamas on his Instagram and all his friends were very jealous and it was so unreflective of reality. But then also I think he raised a really interesting point and I think this has long been true but it's more obvious and evident than ever in social media. Nike sells itself as this, they sell themselves as lifestyle brands and so we kind of ignore the fact that their stuff was made in sweatshops or that these companies that are supporting different social justice movements, their executive boards don't reflect the values that they are preaching on social media. Uber, for example, created a playbook.

They deliberately broke laws. They would come into cities and just completely ignore any ordinances or any kind of things that they were supposed to observe because what was going to happen, like they would just raise some money until they got kicked out and they had a playbook where they would mobilize their users to then campaign against the laws that were limiting them. So they're celebrated for that, even though they've never turned a profit.

So a lot of it comes down to the way that these things are marketed and not what they actually are. Do you think Ub is a grift? I mean, it's a real company, but I think that our view of it as this unicorn company that is bringing value was absolutely a gift. I mean, they have destroyed taxi industries. They resolutely refuse to pay their workers, what they're worth, or to provide them with any kind of benefits.

Like, people are really suffering, and they're celebrated as this game-changing company. But I think they're game-changing in a negative, what, in a positive way. Did you see that just in London now, they lost a lawsuit that says they now need to treat their drivers as employees, so they can't just have them as self-employed agents, which was the work around they had for tax and PAYee and national insurance and all of that other stuff.

I was not aware of that, but I think that's a very positive change. Yeah, that was, I think that's one of the reasons why they're able to be so competitive, right? The other companies have got all of these burdens, like having to actually properly pay the staff and having wages and holiday pay and things like that. Yeah, what's JuSero? I'd never heard of this until I saw your book. So this was a startup that really capitalized

on this new kind of healthy lifestyle trend. I think that you see very much online and juice press and these companies that was supposed to be a way for you to easily get fresh fresh juice every day in your home. And they raised hundreds of millions of dollars for this and it was hyped as the next big thing. And then it shut down almost overnight because a Bloomberg reporter discovered that it was actually easier. So part of the business was a machine. And then the other part was a

subscription service with the juice in these bags that you would put into the machine like an espresso pod. And it turned out it was actually easier to open the juice bags yourself with your hands than the machine actually was. It was such a waste and such a useless product that this video, just simply revealing this, ended the whole company. There's a lot of that, yeah. And this had it gone, it wouldn't have gone public by this stage, but it was probably in startup

to have had some funding, was selling a lot of products. Yeah, I don't recall the specifics about how far they got towards an IPO, but I mean, you saw the same thing with re-work, right? And what brought re-work down was the fact that they had to put down on paper the actual value of the company. And that company was shrouded in this new age mysticism. I mean it was an office space regaining company. There was nothing mystical or even technological about it. But because Adam Newman was so charismatic and because he got an investor

who was willing to give any kind of money with Maya Sun and I forget the name of the funds now I'm blanking on it, but you know funded by the Saudis there was a lot of money floating around they were able to sell it as this global revolution that was worth billions of dollars. And then when it came down to it, it really was not worth very much at all. What's your favorite Adam Newman story? You know, I think it speaks to why people invest money with these kinds of people.

There's a very famous anecdote after he had obtained office space in the Woolworth building, which is an iconic building in downtown New York. He brought a couple of his employees up for like an after hours visit to see the space. And I guess there were these like half empty bottles of beer on the floor. And he told his employees to drink it and they did. And then he told us, you know, it was an unsecured construction space and he told his employees who were drunk at this point to go close to the edge and they did. They would have literally followed him off the ledge of this building

if he had asked for what? You know, it's really kind of incredible. The downfall of we work, there are some amazing YouTube documentaries that have been done, anyone that wants to go and check out more about that. I also did a podcast with I'm blanking on the guy's name, but an awesome author that wrote an entire book about that. One of my favorite stories from the last few years,

the biggest gift, or one of the biggest gifts, was Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Can you take us through some of your favorite parts of that story? Yeah, I mean, this is another example where investors were in VCs especially and especially I think because they aren't necessarily investing their own money, they're investing other people's money and even if they lose money on these investments, they're still making a percentage on how much money they're handling, right? So they win no matter what.

And so they tend not to invest in the product or the company, they are investing in the founder. And so Elizabeth Holmes crafted this persona, like Mark Zuckerberg, she was an Ivy League dropout. She deliberately lowered her voice and kind of faked it to have a more mysterious persona. She almost exclusively wore black turtlenecks because she wanted to be more like Steve jobs and so these like really professionally wealthy people fell for it hookline and sinker right you had like the Walton family that owns Walmart giving her hundreds of million

You had Henry Kissinger serving on her board of directors hundreds of millions, you had Henry Kissinger serving on her board of directors, and even the media fell for it. There was like a fairly faunting New Yorker profile of her before John Carey, the Wall Street Journal, was able to kind of expose that these blood tests that she had been touting never existed, nobody had ever seen them. And I think it speaks to just how, she once she had one of the right names on board, right? Once there was a Kissinger or a Walton associated,

I don't think anyone else did any due diligence. They saw that, oh, this person's doing it, so I'm gonna do it and just jumped on the bandwagon. It was almost like a billionaires' fomo. You draw an analogy between, I think, COVID, the Tesla stock price and some of the personalities that we're talking about here. It kind of goes back to what we were saying before, but turned up to 11 in Silicon Valley,

especially in the VC world. These unicorns are chasing after these billion dollar valuations. It's so sought after that people are prepared to forgive all manner of sins in the desperate attempt to chase these wins. And it's because the ability to generate cash has now been completely decoupled from what the business can actually deliver to the market and is purely based on market sentiment. Yes, and on how much of the market they can hold themselves, a lot of the valuations of these companies are not, most of them are not reflections of what their actual income is or what they're actually doing.

It's how much many other people have put into it. So it's all, I mean, a part of my language, but it's all bullshit. And it's, you know, this even dates back to Billy McFarland. He was, by the time he got to Fire Festival, and I think one of the reasons he was able to get people to give him north of $26 million for this thing, was because he had a record that looked on its face to match what you would expect of someone in that world.

He had started a tech startup while he was in college called Spling that was intended to be kind of a Google circles Reddit hybrid that went absolutely nowhere. If you read the book you can you'll hear kind of my exploration of how he conned all his college classmates and you know camp friends into pretending to be users on the site just to juice up the numbers for investors. But he walked away with a couple hundred thousand just for that. And when it shut down, rather than being seen as a failure, he was suddenly viewed as a successful startup founder

because he had gotten the money. What happens after you get the money? People don't seem to really care about. What is the single thread or what are the commonalities that you have found since researching all of these different people, the Adam Newman's, the Elizabeth Holmes, the Jarls? What is it that you found as the common character traits between them all? Most of them tend to be incredibly charismatic and I think it comes down to marketing ability

and I think that includes the Elon Musk's and the Donald Trump's as well how good are they at marketing and as consumers I think that we have started to collectively accept hype in lieu of the real thing. We're taking that marketing and running with it without ever questioning how real any of it really is. What I find really interesting, I come from a nightlife background, so I've run a lot of club nights over the last 14 years.

And all that we're playing with in my industry is hype. That's it. Because you can be a different promoter to me and you can start a club night in the same venue that I run, but two days later with similar DJs or maybe even the same DJs with similar drinks prices, with similar looking decor, with a similar looking brand. So all that we are competing on are the intangibles, because the tangibles from the actual product, the experience, the venues, the same, the entrances, the same, the staff, the same, the drinks, the same, even the glasses, you're drinking them out over the same. So it's all about the intangibles.

And that really sort of gave me a black pill on hype, it's like an early black pill on it, because I saw how vacuous most of the marketing that was being done around this stuff is that you can build people up. And there are so many natural cognitive biases that we all have that we all fall for and that's obviously what all of these different people are tapping into. They're just doing it on such a huge scale with so many millions and millions of dollars on the line? And I think an interesting element of nightlife too and granted it's been a year or so since I've been to a club. Me too. Is that it really revolves around influencer marketing too? It comes down

to the promoters and what models they can pull in or what people with social media followings they can get to advertise it. And so it becomes associated with those faces as well. And then another thing that's interesting too is, I grew up in New York City, which is very nightlife, heavy, club heavy. And a lot of places will advertise a celebrity who's stopping by. And you know, realistically speaking,

you're not going to meet them. They're going to be in a VIP area separate from the club goers. You know, it's not, you're not going to the club with them, but it allows you to pretend on social media and that you were. There's like a lot of I was at the party with dot, dot, dot, I was at the party with 50 cents with Jarrol with whoever it might be. And that actually happened to me once when I was a very young Jar Rule data a night at this club called Stereo and you know he's do you know for like a more high school kids in that club would probably want to admit but yeah you know I wasn't surprised to see him pop back up with fire.

Yeah it is interesting that sort of that low key flex that people want, they want their state is to be legitimized by being around other people who are also successful. And this is what we're chasing and so on and so forth. Why do you think it is that we're so compelled by these individuals? I did. There's something so fascinating about an Adam Newman and Elizabeth Holmes and a Billy McFarland.

And when I watch the documentaries, like yours, about them, I have the same emotion. I can't describe it. It's one of those ones, you know, we need like a German word. I need to, there'll be a German word for it. It's not Shardom Freud. It's not me taking pleasure at somebody else's misfortune. It's more disbelief that there are people that can do that, probably in my less gracious moments, is a bit of admiration around their capacity to do that. I think, God, how stupid are these

people? But I'm one of those stupid people that probably would have at least been bought in. I remember seeing the orange squares on Instagram and thinking, oh, that looks interesting. I wonder what's going on there. What do you think it is? Why are we so compelled to watch these people? Part of it, I think you tapped on that a little bit, is that there's this weird element where people don't tend to feel a lot of sympathy for victims of fraud. I think it's like a human psychology that you look at someone who fell for something and you kind of think, well, I would never fall for that. And there is a begrudging admiration for the people that can pull that off.

I think it's the same reason that we love watching cult documentaries or reading about things like that. These people are incredibly charismatic. They are very interesting and fun and engaging to watch. I think if you're watching it with that mentality, I wouldn't fall for that. Like I would probably see through that. It becomes more of like a fun experience than watching someone commit a crime, which is really what it is. But also, you mentioned that the orange squares, you can see the way people react to that, one of the most fascinating things about that campaign to me

was not the people that participated in it, but the influencers who saw it happening and started posting orange squares themselves to me was not the people that participated in it, but the influencers who saw it happening and started posting orange squares themselves because they didn't want to be perceived as not being part of it. And so they actually had a lot of... So they got free extra influencer cloud from the former of influencers that Fokjerry hadn't put on the campaign.

Yeah, and you know I've read this is actually a real issue for some companies. I think Evian was one of them where influencers who want to look like they are working or being engaged by these blue-shaped brands will post fake advertisements because they want their followers to perceive them as being on a certain echelon of influencers. I mean, it really is a wild west out there. That's so crazy. Is there anything that the companies can do? Can they sue an influencer for doing free advertising for them?

I haven't seen that. I have seen some companies go after influencers for not properly advertising for them. I know Snapchat and Spectacles did that with one influencer. There's a little bit of that. But you know, there's not much, there's not much recourse, right? And even for influencers who aren't labeling things as ads in the US, like the government should ostensibly have some kind of way to stop it or enforce the fact that these are supposed to be clearly labeled as ads, you know? But they can't, the most they can do is send a strongly worded letter that an influencer can promptly ignore.

So yeah, there's there's really not much anyone can do. Didn't you say that Kylie Jenner tweeted at some point that she she was using Snapchat less and then wiped one billion off Snapchat's valuation the next morning on the stock market. Yeah, I mean the cardousians are their own insane case study in watching the markets they can move and the perceptions that they can create. The book also looks at Kylie Jenner's billionaire status,

which according to Forbes, which bestowed that status on her, they say that she had actually submitted fake tax forms to pretend that she was earning more money than she was. You know, we're talking about the difference of a couple hundred million, but that perception in the public was so important to them, and obviously generates so much money for them that they were willing to allegedly, you know, scam a magazine. What are the Jenna Kardashian stories did you look at? So this

isn't in the book, but one that I've been fascinated by recently is what happened with Chloe Kardashian maybe a week or two ago, in which a very normal, unedited photograph of her was posted on the internet. And a parent, it's not clear who posted it, they're saying that it was maybe her grandmother. However, it was, this picture got out, and you know, they keep a very, and this actually is in the book. They are so protective of their image that they actually work with paparazzi agencies to do staged and edited photos of them. So a lot of the pictures that you'll see of them are actually prepared on their behalf. They're mental-accandid, but they're very much part of a photo shoot

to embellish their images. And so when this real photo of Chloe got sent around, her attorneys started issuing cease and desists to Instagram accounts, to Reddit threads and boards, which had the opposite effect, you know, we call it the stri-zand effect of all of a sudden that's all anyone could talk about, but it was so important to her that people not know what her real body looks like, that her lawyers would spend Easter weekend doing this. I mean, it is kind of incredible. Yeah, especially given that that's the accurate representation.

I would love to see the way that this is translated into litigation speak. You represented our client's body accurately and that is against her brand values. Like, what? And also, if it's a grandmother, that's such a grandmother thing to do. Yeah. No, so they did it as a copyright issue.

They unintentionally verified it as real and by saying that it was their real photo you know they would issue copyright takedowns on all the social media platforms and one funny way that I've seen some people get around it is by tracing the photo because they drawn like a drawing is transformative enough that they can't come after it with a copyright claim. Shit the bed. What did you learn about white, chlorine, and jewel? Yeah, a lot of things that we think that we like are really just the results of effective marketing campaigns.

So I started tracing this with the rise of apparel spritz, which is a beautiful, easily photographed drink. Then I think, if you're being honest with yourself when it comes down to it, it kind of tastes like a flat capri-sund, like, it's not that, not that good, but it became the drink of summer and everyone was ordering it and restaurants were pushing it and all of a sudden, you know, I felt prey to it and reading about the marketing campaign was kind of a wake-up call for me where I was like, I actually don't like this at all,

but I, you know, I joined up with the crowd. I felt the fomo. There's a really interesting 1950s experiment by Solomon Ash, where he put a bunch of people in a room and showed them a bunch of straight lines, and they were asked to pick the line that looked closest to the ones on the screen. What the people on the study didn't know was that there were plants in the audience who had been instructed to pick the most obviously wrong answer. And you wanted to see how many people would go along with it. And 75% of the audience picked to the obviously wrong answer because of peer pressure, because everyone else was doing it. So, yeah, that's how I ended up drinking apparel spritzes and then white claw. You know, that was a traditional, apparel was a traditional campaign.

You know, they did bus wraps and magazine advertisements as well as social media. White claw was a purely social media push, right? And it blew up. You can actually track the sales to a viral YouTube video that featured, you know, a young light frat guy talking about how there ain't no laws when you're drinking claws and the virality of that video pushed this drink into the public consciousness. I think the sales of spiked seltzer like went up like 400% or something crazy like that. I don't recall the exact figure, but you saw it like demonstrable results from that. And now everyone's just drinking it. It really is incredible. What a marketing campaign can do.

I've got, so I haven't had a drink for about a thousand days, because I was taking a break. I've got a case of white claw delivered by the UK marketing office. I've got one in the kitchen. I shit you not. Hey, Chris, you look like the sort of guy that would enjoy your white claw. I'm like, we're English. We don't know whatever you're referring to, whatever brand values you think you're responding

to my brand values with. I don't know what you're talking about. I just see it in country music, meme pages that I follow. But yeah, what's the same as, is it Mitch Lobb? And Mice Lobb? Yeah, what's the same as is it Mitch Lobb? Em I'm a mix of a lot of yes, sorry. Um, I actually don't know much about that.

It just looks the same. You know, it's kind of the whiskey row country music, Nashville kind of that whole world. And what about jewel is jewel the same as white claw? Cause I thought that was, I thought Joel was like the leader in interchangeable nicotine vaping. A while they were, they kind of disappeared almost overnight in the US at least. I believe like between 2019 and 2020 and that company just imploded. I turned out they had, they've been accused by former employees of knowingly selling tainted pods, you know, the nicotine industry is its own problem. But you know, you see these things go viral like someone shows it on social media and then,

you know, 10 more people go into it. And I don't know, it's a little disconcerting. Yeah. Is there, are there some companies or some agencies that are all pulling the strings? Are there a few big players behind the scenes in terms of ad agencies? Or are these in-house marketing departments in smart companies that are just looking out with a good meme or marketing campaign? I think it's a combination of both. I was lucky to really get to delve into everything that happened with the Fire Festival.

So, and that goes down to the internal communications that they were having with their PR firm 42 West, who have rep to people like Rihanna and really massive stars. So they really know how the publicity game is played. And to see the way that they were spinning those things in real time and to read those communicates was definitely very eye-opening.

What was it like? You know, like, nobody is, it's never like, how can we tell the truth? It's like how can we take a nugget of truth and transform it into something completely different that will allow us to maintain plausible deniability? And you know, there's a lot of emails in the book that I won't try to recount here now, but in terms of, you know, how they were going to make the public believe that the models had some input or some involvement beyond this commercial that they had been paid to film, or how to trick the public

into thinking that certain artists were involved. There was a whole line of inquiry into Roping Kanye West into it. You know, they had people working on Christmas Day trying to craft these press releases. So that machine really never stops. What did you learn from Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign? Well, I think the short answer is you can only buy so much. You know, that he put hundreds of millions, I think, of billion dollars into a very short live campaign that won him one territory, not even a full state. But it also shows you how much credibility you can buy. I guess also the extent of influencer marketing because you have to have people I guess that are either believe in the brand

or willing to pretend they believe in the brand. A lot of people took money from the Bloomberg campaign to act as an influencer, but then we're so lackluster in their presentation that Twitter actually started flagging a lot of them as bots because people were just so uninterested in You know putting personality into their social media promotion, but he had you know thousands of people on the payroll His only job was to tweet about him or to you know upload things on Instagram And then they actually hired the company behind Fuck Jerry who did the fire festival marketing to

Unroll a meme campaign about Bloomberg so for a while you would see these, you know I think the format at the time was like hey, it's Mike Bloomberg calling and they'd be like respond You know with something funny and it would be like a screenshot of their conversation And yeah, I mean, it was, it definitely brought him to the forefront of it. And then I think his performance and the debates kind of tanked any momentum that might have been built.

But even Bloomberg himself was kind of scanning people. He had promised all his employees that no matter what happened, he got a lot of legitimate political operatives to come on and work with him as well, because he had promised that whatever happened with his campaign, they would remain employed through the November elections, whether it was

with another candidate or with the Democratic National Committee, and then just didn't do it, right? He like fired all of them and told them that they'd have a special pipeline to apply, but nothing ever came of it. And there's actually a class loss, class action lawsuit against him now from his former campaign employees.

I would be such a shit grifter like that. That is so bad because I can't, I'm not good enough liar. I feel far too guilty about doing those sorts of things. And this is, maybe that is part of the attraction that we look at these people and we think, oh my God, maybe they are, maybe there's a kernel of truth in there. And if we can just wipe away all of the muck off Billy McFarlane, he must be a genius deep down. It can't all be grift. It can't all be just lies and front

because I wouldn't be able to do that. The vast majority of people wouldn't be able to do that. So maybe that contributes to it. The other thing is, you highlight something really interesting with the Mike Bloomberg affair. When influence is obviously influence, it ceases to be influential? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think when you can see the wizard at work behind the curtain, that takes away

from the allure of it, for sure. But another thing is, I actually had an opposite experience to what you were saying. There must be some truth under there. The book details kind of my introduction to this influencer named Danielle Bernstein, who goes by the handle we were what and she is immensely popular. And I went into that experience thinking that I knew who she was because I had followed her on Instagram, I knew her brand. I felt like I understood her and what I found was so opposite from the values that she was peddling on Instagram. Talk about that. How was it?

Well, you know, she had, we had gotten in contact because she had known the Fire Festival people and had declined to participate in it. And I was intrigued, you know, what she saw that made her decide not to do it. And so she was going to do an interview with me. We had set it up. And then she also asked me to appear on her podcast. And I thought, you know, why not? It's great research. So I went and did it.

And afterwards, we made arrangements to do this interview. And then when it came time for the interview, she was like, actually, I'm so sorry. I'm going to do my own book. I can't help you. And then these scandals with her started to come out one after another, where she was accused of taking samples

from small indie brands and then reproducing them for her very popular clothing line. And it was just this pattern of taking things and then presenting them as hers on the internet that I think I fell into and I think a lot of these brands did. And it really made me realize like, wow, I was totally duped by that persona.

Wow, so it wasn't that you thought there was a kernel of truth, it's that you thought it was all truth and it turned out to be mostly lies. Yes, yes. What does on the internet no one knows your afrode mean to you? I think that it is easier than ever to present a version of yourself that has no reflection in reality, whether that is by changing your image, by posting about things, you know, you saw, you see a trend, I think,

in the US of people posting about social justice or posting beautiful graphics, but then not living that out in their actual lives offline. You can create whatever persona you want. And you know, the phrase, the old New Yorker cartoon was on the internet, it was a New Yorker cartoon was on the internet. It was a dog typing.

It was on the internet. No one knows you're a dog. I really believe that for the most part on the internet, no one knows what you're lying about or whether it's real. One of my favorite stories in the book, actually, is an influencer who wanted to convince her followers that she had gone on a vacation to Bali. And so she went to an IKEA and took all these beautiful photographs

on the IKEA setups. You know, they have those rooms that they make up. And none of her followers realized she deliberately left some of the furniture tags showing in the pictures. And nobody noticed. The internet, I'd despair at the internet sometimes. That's another thing, touching on the social justice issue. It seems to me that a lot of people on the internet would rather have malicious or non-believing compliance than truthful opposition. So they would rather have somebody make the mouth noises or the phone signals that say that they're a part of whichever

movement it may be, even if they don't believe in it, sooner than be neutral and be truthful with it. Yeah, and I think part of that goes along with the FOMO getting caught up in the trend too, and I think a perfect parallel to fire, and the influencers who weren't involved posting the orange square was when you saw all the influencers start posting black squares. And, you know, brands were getting in on it. And there was, I forget her name now, I think Danielle something on Instagram who did like a three-week check-in or a month later check-in with all the brands that it posted a black square to see if any of their marketing materials featured models of color or if they had anyone on the executive board

of color and the vast majority had zero change, zero reflection of these values that they were professing except for this one performative square. And I think that's the big part of it is how performative we are online. That's the word over the last year or so that I've heard more than any performative communication and It's dangerous coming from someone I told you before we started I was on love Island season one I was the first person through the doors and um, if you're not careful if you play a role You can bury the person that you are under so many personas that you don't know who you are anymore

And that's a really dangerous position to get yourself into because you don't know who you are anymore. And that's a really dangerous position to get yourself into because you don't actually have any opinions anymore. You don't really know what you think. You don't... All that you're doing is trying to do the thing that you think the person that you're talking to wants you to do. That's how you live your entire life as this kind of second order removed version of you sort of this marionette and you're pulling the strings from above, trying to get things to work. It's super, super dangerous. And this is why deception online is so much easier because you can type something in. The words said in the way, there's no nonverbal communication, there's no tone, there's no cadence, there's not

nothing. And you have minutes or hours sometimes to prepare the response or the statement or the press release or whatever it might be, to come across and precisely the way that you want it to. I think a lot of people are quite bad liars, based on my experience. I've had some people on this show, he is one for you. How have I not thought that we can talk about this? Have you heard of a guy called Brian Rose?

No, who's that? He's the founder of London Real, which is a podcast, big podcast, been around for quite a while now. Um, Brian's initial business partner, guy called Nick Gabriel, has just done a podcast episode. Now Brian did a bunch of live streams on YouTube

with David Eich, the conspiracy theory guy. He did those at the start of the COVID pandemic and did some phenomenal numbers, like broke some records with it. But very quickly got the live streams taken down by YouTube. They said that he was pushing, they were talking about 5G and you know, you don't need to know anymore as soon as you hear that. And no matter how much truth was or was not in the live stream, at that time there was a lot of misinformation going around about COVID and YouTube had decided to take a pretty hard line approach to remove any content that it thought contravened, always giving misinformation around COVID. So then Brian decided to start the Freedom Fund, Freedom Platform Fund, which was, you're going to love this, Gabrielle, this is so you, he starts

his freedom, this Freedom Platform Fund, which is him saying, big tech censoring us because we're telling the truth, they don't want us to be able to. So he attaches himself as this kind of like the vanguard of free speech activists, right? Talking about, I thought we had a little thing called freedom of speech. Some people decided to remind him, dude, you're in London now. We don't have that. We don't have the second amendment. There's, you know, the first time I'm sorry, there's not, there's none of that here. So, he releases this freedom fund, he generates 100,000, 200,000 all the way up to a million. He gets a million in backup funding just from his fans. And every time he says, we're only going to do 250,000 and then they hit the target.

And he says, well, that one's done. And now we need, now we actually need to be able to use live stream capability. Long story short, it turned out, he'd purchased a white paper out of the box, like daily motion live, back end. So he'd said he was getting custom built servers, distributed across the blockchain to not be able to be taken down by anybody,

and it was just someone, someone's white, white label, user as you wish video streaming platform that he'd put a front end on. So that turned out to be Bollocks and he got called out a lot on YouTube for that. Now he's running for the mayor of London and has been for quite a while and he's going around in this tour bus and he's doing all of these vlogs. And today I got sent a video of him doing Sadiq Khan, who's the current mayor of London and Brian's calling him out and saying like, you're not the thing, I'm everything. And it's always very, he falls over himself when he's talking as well.

He's quite slick when he does interviews, but he obviously is struggling a little bit with the politics side. So you uploaded a six minute long livestream of him hitting a punching bag a couple of days ago, like quite badly as well. It didn't look like it wasn't Floyd Mayweather. And then this morning, I got sent a video of him doing lengths of butterfly stroke and said,

"'Cedeek, I know that you won't debate me in person because you scared, so why don't we have a swimming race? And then he does a, and then he does a length of butterfly and turns around to the camera and says, like, let's go. At the end, it is, it's such a grift. It is so bad. And what we've seen, and this is something that seems to be a common thread between all of the people we've spoken about today. Their ability to pivot and change direction incredibly quickly like a pinball, so Brian was all about getting the information about, out about COVID, then he was all about freedom

and free speech and then he was all about being the mayor of London and then he was all about psychedelics for a while and plant medicine and then he was all about being the mayor of London, and then he was all about psychedelics for a while, and plant medicine, and then he was doing a triathlon, and then he's doing this, and then he's doing that. And, um, yeah, this ADHD inability to focus on one track at one time, I guess that's the digital equivalent of the snake oil salesman going from town to town, because as they move on from the last grifty project onto the new one, you actually think, oh, well, maybe maybe he's changed now, or maybe this is new and this is different and this is a different grift. But you should have a look at some of the videos about Brian, you will adore them.

I will, but I have to say, I hate to bring it back to Donald Trump, but this is literally the Donald Trump playbook, right? He made it, he was never a good businessman, but he convinced the world that he was because he was on the apprentice. And then he drew people, they know how to capitalize on outrage, and they know how to say what people want to hear and, you know, stoke this excitement, right? So whether it was the Berder movement, you know, accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya, that's kind of how he made his name in politics. You know, and the most recent

grift of his right is he left office. He was pushing this idea that the election had been stolen, which it clearly was not. You know, there's There's no rational way to say that that happened. He started scamming his own followers. He was fundraising off of this lie saying, we gotta save the US. We have to save the government, donate money, we'll do the right thing. And that's why all these people storm the Capitol

on January 6th, because they truly believed that Donald Trump was going to be alongside them, you know, ushering in this revolution. But what they didn't know was as part of this fundraising effort, there was like a very small box that you had to deliberately uncheck because it made your donation a recurring donation. So all of these like die hard Trump supporters realized that they were getting filled weekly or monthly and it just did not stop. He bankrupted like a number of his followers. And there's really no, I mean, some people are getting refunds, but there's not a lot of recourse for that because they didn't opt out. So I see a lot of parallels in those stories. a lot of US politicians sadly are following suit

You know there's one woman Marjorie Taylor Greene who recently posted a video of herself doing chin-ups as like a challenge to the liberal politicians It's getting really absurd. Yeah, I'd heard about that although I haven't seen it. It's annoying. Is it? Well just her form. I don't think that's how you're supposed to do. Oh, dear. Um, yeah, it's, um, it's so bizarre. The cult of personality now has overtaken the thing, especially in politics, right? Like, I'm okay. I'm all right with businessmen have always supposed to be charismatic frontmen for the rock band that is their company. I'm kind right with, businessman have always supposed to be charismatic frontman for the rock band that is their company.

I'm kind of okay with that. Politicians are supposed to be statesmen like, I don't, I want the most autistic nerd who understands everything down to the finest. Yeah, you're not a rock. Yes, I want the finance minister to live in Excel. Or he just, he goes to bed with Excel, he wakes up with Excel, that's all I want the finance minister to live in Excel. Or he just, he goes to bed with Excel, he wakes up with Excel, that's all I want.

And it would appear now because using things like Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok for these fourth wall break, views, perspectives into people's lives, like we'll probably know the president's dog's name. Like, we're not supposed to know that. That's not supposed to be important. And all of the time they have, they have an Instagram account, by the way, major on champ. No way. Well, I mean, I didn't know that, but that's precisely what I mean. so the guy that's in charge of managing that because it will resonate with the voter base better to have this personable, that person could have had a job doing something

that actually adds some value to the country, you know, doing something that's actually going to move the economy or whatever it might be, they could do something that isn't taking photos of dogs, right? And I'm all for photos of dogs, but not of the president's dogs. Like just they should be left in the basket. Where do you think this goes? Rolling it forward. Is this a snake that's going to eat its own tail? Is it still going up? Are we close to the precipice here? I don't know. I mean, this is a continuation at what you're saying about, you know, how we should pick politicians reminds me dating back to when the first presidential debate was televised between Nixon and Kennedy. And it's said that the turning point in that is that Nixon was very sweaty and unattractive on TV,

whereas Kennedy was, you know, Matt and had a little makeup on and looked good. And that was really like a deciding factor in that election. I don't, I think the genius out of the bottle in that sense. But as consumers and as voters, maybe we can try and be a little more critical and aware of what values we're supporting and espousing. I know that going into writing this book, I wasn't aware of what values we're supporting and espousing. I know that going into writing this book, I wasn't aware of how deeply affected by these things. I had become and I literally wrote a book about it

and I'm still following for these things. You know, I'm gonna fall for an Instagram scam. I know it, but I can try and be better about it. And so I think we can all try to be a little more critical, maybe. A little bit more savvy and cany online online perhaps. Yeah, are you agree? Yeah, I agree. If people want to check out more of your work and keep up to date, where should they go? You can follow me on Twitter at G Bluestown, a G underscore Bluestown or on Instagram at G Bluestown,

and my book is in all major bookstores. It will be linked in the show notes below, as always. Gabrielle, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, this was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed our discussion.