Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Credit Scores

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why credit scores are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Credit scores. Known for being numbers. Famous for being scary. Nobody thinks much about them, worrying, but otherwise no. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why credit scores are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of credit scores? Credit score go up. Credit score go down. You can't explain that. I don't know. I mean, I find it very odd. We'll talk about it, but almost. Yeah. I think my credit score is actually fine. The thing is what I remember learning is that if you don't have debt sometimes, like if you don't take out multiple credit cards and don't have debt or have loans and stuff, your credit report actually suffers, which I always found strange because I felt like I was very responsible with money. But it was like, oh, no, you need to, like, if you want to improve your credit score, you need to, like, actually open up

more than one credit card and actually, like, accumulate a little bit of debt and then pay it off. Like, you shouldn't just be using your debit card all the time. You should be using your credit and then paying it off. And it's like, but, okay, what? The principle behind it is, like, it shows you're good at paying off debt. But also, like, if you never accumulate debt, That is bad? Okay. What? Yeah. Yeah. And we'll, for a couple reasons, we won't get deep on like, how to improve your credit score. But the biggest reason is it's kind of boring and it's kind of what people think. Yeah.

If you never generate any debt in the form of credit cards or car loans, mortgages, etc., you just kind of don't have credit. And you can't really improve it in any, like, hack way. Or, ooh, I found a trick. way. You basically just need to not leave a bunch of outstanding debt all the time. Right. But also the debt of, say, a mortgage is fine. Just keep paying it every month. It's what people think. It's, yeah, exactly. It's like if you're making payment, like, it's not so much that you want debt. It's that you want to take out credit and then pay it on time. And then that makes credit score go up. Yeah. And then there's also a myth that like if you leave a little bit of actual debt on a credit card that will ultimately help your credit score. That's not true. You're just

going to end up paying interest to a credit card company. Don't do that. You should not purposefully incur debt. Yes. And then not pay it. Or take out more, you know, like take out loans just to improve your credit score. Like it's just like just use a credit card for payments sometimes and then pay it off on time is usually sufficient. The other programming note is finance. are a highly personal topic. We will approach this from a place of love and care if you feel like your credit score is bad. That's okay. And I have a good one because my family is deeply terrified of debt, pushing me to never, ever have it ever in a way that's been positive.

And then also they put my name on a credit card when I was a teenager, which is like the one trick in the U.S. where you like develop a form of credit for your children. it's also just kind of suck to me that like when you get behind the eight ball you get like a scarlet letter for right where it's like yeah you know i i have a lot of sympathy for people who like get into some financial struggles you get behind the eight ball and you're trying and then maybe you like manage to like start treading water and then but you have now like a scarlet letter that makes it really hard for you to rent yeah yeah it feels very putative i i don't i'm not i'm not really a fan. I'm not going to come out on this podcast and be like, I love credit scores. This episode's mostly a few giant takeaways about big, broad, amazing things about that entire system, and knowing more about it made me feel less bummed about the topic. Because going in, I was like, is this topic basically the devil himself?

Like, is this basically the way that money turns us all evil and sad? And not quite. There's actually positives to it. Okay. And the final mega takeaway is about the kind of myth of social credit in the country of China. Oh, okay. So there's a lot of, like, giant top level stuff this week. There's not a lot of like, here's how you get to $8.50 in the United States.

It's silly. We're not, we are in no, in no possible way, are we financial advisors. If anything, you should actively avoid our advice, if you want. want to succeed in terms of finances. We can't offer you no good advice. So do not listen to us. Take your earbuds out, throw them into the ocean, and run away. That's right. We have no good advice. All of my investments are in Snoopy rookie cards. Yeah. But I recently learned that doesn't exist and isn't a thing. So I am kind of concerned. I bought a 1990s, a Garfield mug with Garfield and a parachute that says, hang in there. And then I found out it probably has

lead in it. So that's like, those are my financial decision. So please, yeah, we are not, we're not here to, we're not here to advise. And no joke, there's apparently Garfield merch from the 80s and 90s made with like lead paint. So don't drink liquids out of it. Yeah, I did drink some liquids out of it, so I probably, that's another reason not to listen to me, because I might have ingested some Garfield lead. Oh, no, Katie, no. Darn you, Jim Davis. Exactly. It was a while ago.

I'm sure I'm fine now. Yeah, you seem good. Yeah. But yeah, and let's get into this. Again, it's a very global episode, and then also the U.S. will come up a lot and China will come up a lot. and let's get into it with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called I'm talking about numbers and stats we're giving you metrics and facts that's very good your range is improving I think it's such a funny origin story if this show turns me into a professional singer by the end you know

Slowly. One stinger at a time. You are actually training yourself to have a full operatic range. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be great. I'll be at the Met Opera. Yeah. And they'll be like, how did you get to Carnegie Hall?

And I'll be like, now practice and tell you what. Yeah. I was making a podcast. Yeah. Hush money. And that name was submitted by Chris. Thank you, Chris. We have a new name for this every week.

Please make them a silly and whacking bay as possible. submit through the Discord or to SIFPOT at gmail.com. He also said that was partly inspired by the Theraman episode in the recent past because good vibrations has an electro theremin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the first number here is 1956. 1956 is when a couple of businessmen named William Fair and Earl Isaac created a U.S. business called Fair Isaac and Company.

Yeah, having the last name Fair does kind of put you an advantage in business. It's like, oh, yeah, that seems fair. Yeah, especially Bill Fair. He sounds like he'll pass just laws or something, you know? Yeah. It's great. And they did not invent credit scores. We'll get into that in a little bit.

But they offered specific techniques for analyzing and scoring risk in financial deals. And then between 1956 and now, they became the dominant source of credit scores in the United States and a source of credit scoring or other financial ideas. for allegedly almost 120 countries. That's a number from the American Bankers Association. Fair Isaac and Company, better known as FICO. Oh. And they now go by the name Fair Isaac Corporation.

I see. Fico is doing something in almost 120 countries in the world. I'm a person who doesn't question acronyms very often. I just accept them. I'm like, FICO. It probably stands for financial. income credit oh yeah i one million percent would have guessed that and i would have thought it's like a uh fDR new deal alphabet soup kind of very official program sure yeah no it was like

two guys said i have some extra ideas about measuring credit great and it just anarchically and through business became the dominant system yeah okay that's it well the other Quick U.S. number about them is more than 90% because more than 90% of Americans have generated a FICO credit score. But also, tens of millions of Americans are estimated to not have one because you have to hold some kind of credit, which could become debt, to do it. And the weird way it works in the United States is there are three dominant companies called Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Those companies receive information specifically about your lines of credit. So not your bank accounts, not any just like assets. It's specifically credit.

And those companies, apparently they gather all of this information and then your lenders want to give it to them because that helps them ding your credit score if you screw over the lender. But basically they gather it and also gather it and list it slightly differently from each other. Then they all run it through FICO's same formula, but different input in the same formula means marginally different credit scores. That's why you have different credit scores from the three different U.S. reporters of it. They're just like kind of different calculations they're doing. Yeah, and the differences are boring. Okay. It's all very similar, and it's all based on the length of your credit history and which lines you have and how well you pay them off. I also could

not find good information about why the U.S. credit scores are on a number range from 300 to 850. It seems to be arbitrary, and it just developed that way over time. Cool. We won't really linger on these kinds of things because they're U.S. specific and equally boring in other countries. Right. You're telling me I can avoid a math lesson. Aw, nuts.

It's great. And don't believe someone if they say you can rapidly improve your credit score. Every real estimate I found was at least a year. That's the number for how to. start to improve your credit score. You need to do a different thing for at least a year in terms of your payments. Okay, but but you can't, but don't listen to Alex. If you buy Katie, if you buy Katie coin and Katie protein shakes, um, your credit score will go to nine billion, uh, in the course of just a few minutes. Oh, mine's only 8.50. It's way below nine billion. Oh,

Yeah, I've turned it up to $9 billion. That also, I partly remembered what the top score is in the U.S. Because there's a new album by the rap duo Clips, and one of the tracks is called Fico, and they have a lyric about making their credit score $8.50 or bust. Yeah. Accurate to what the U.S. scale is. Yeah. Well, I can get you up to $900, but you do have to buy Katie coin.

As long as it has Cookie's picture on the front of it, you know. Yeah. It's got. It's physical coins. It's got Cookie's face on one side and Cookie's butt on the other side. I mean, it's all digital, but still, like you can, you get a digital token where you can see the dog face and then the dog butt. Yeah. Yeah, the back is an NFT, a non-fungible tucas.

And that's great. So, yeah, your credit score, it just, you just like slowly laboriously. improve it by paying all your lines of credit, if you can. Our bonus show this week is about the one exception for a credit score changing rapidly. We'll talk about a bunch of recent U.S. rule changes that yo-yoed people's credit scores based on the government doing something. But that's the entire government making a choice. You can't control that either.

So your credit score is broadly out of your hands in the sense that if you run into major financial trouble, you're just in financial trouble. Yeah. And if you want to improve it, it'll just need to be a long habit and a lot of financial success. Right. Well, that's kind of it. It's the boring thing people think. But this is just you saying this.

I won't believe it until it comes out of Joe Rogan's mouth. Oh, it's me, Joe Rogan. That's not an impression of him at all. I was going to start to do one. No, Joe Rogan's here. It's like he's here with us right now in the room. But yeah, the numbers are quick because we have giant takeaways about this topic. And the first one is takeaway number one.

A heroic U.S. abolitionist invented credit scoring almost 200 years ago. I'm so conflicted because on one hand, I mean, I'm in favor of not slavery, but on the other hand, credit score. question mark? Yeah, this was sort of tangential to his abolitionist movement, but also he networked with people all over the still developing less than a century old United States. And so that also helped him set up all of this idea. It's very interesting. Okay.

His name is Louis Tappan. All right. T-A-P-A-N. And Louis Tappan lived mostly in New York City and in Massachusetts. from Massachusetts originally. So he's a Yankee. Very much a Yankee. Basically, the aspects of his life that fed into this are he was a businessman and a fundamentalist Calvinist and an abolitionist.

And so those factors made him the inventor. Calvinists, of course, worship the little boy who has that cool tiger as his thing. No, isn't it like the thing with Calvinism is like heaven has already decided who gets sin or not. But people who act good are more likely to be the ones that are the ones who are getting into heaven. Yeah. And even more so his big thing was literalism with the text of the Bible. And so one way that translated for him is that when he got into business, he refused to do deals in anything but cash. He said there's words in the Bible that say credit and owing money is bad. So I will never do that.

So he's not like eating shellfish mix in textiles or, and he's like trying to make a woman out of, by like pulling his rib bone out of him and be like, all right, love me. Ribbone, you are now a woman. Yeah, yeah. And it's also the hilarious problem of all textual fundamentalism where you're still interpreting it no matter what. Right. So, oh, well. You mean the Bible wasn't originally written in English? And also that just every word is always interpreted in all situations.

Right. Whoops. Sorry. Sorry, Lewis. But anyway, yeah, in the 1840s, he invented creating a private business to score people's credit. And that's been the influential decision for all of this. It's driven by private enterprises making money by offering this service. Right.

So, like, was he, like, why did he come up with this? Was he, did he work at a bank? Like, was he in the position where he was given out loans? He mostly, as a businessman, got interested in this because he repeatedly lost all of his money. Oh. Through scams and also at least one financial panic. Well. Which is rough.

Did he, like, put his own business into his own, like, credit score machine and it came out really bad? I think it was more that he wanted other people to have bad credit if they are unscrupulous. I see. To protect people like him. Right. So to protect you from being scammed by someone with bad credit. Yeah. And it was profoundly influential for all of history.

He's not famous for it and he's more famous for something else. Key sources here. There's a feature for CNBC by reporter Trina Paul who interviews job. Lauer, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. We're also citing a Time magazine feature by reporter Sean Traynor, a few digital resources about U.S. financial panics in the 1800s, and then biographies of Lewis Tappen from PBS and from the New England Historical Society. One brief step back in the past SIF episode about credit unions, right?

Credit unions are a kind of bank. We briefly sketched the entire history of banking. and the first modern type banks developed in the Republic of Venice in the 1300s. Hey. And what's now in. Hey, book of banking. Yeah, yeah. Family style bowl of money.

It's very funny for me to be doing the Italian stereotypes given that I live here. And I know that Venetians do not speak with a Sicilian accent. And also I know how to somewhat speak Italian. But it's just, you know, why. Their city's about to sink anyway. They won't catch you. They're too busy remaining above water. I'm afraid to go there that I'm going to be the one that when I step in on Venice, like, that's when it's going to go down.

It's going to be my fault. Yeah. Yeah. You'll be a parable about wealth. Like she spent her life accruing Katie coins and then she couldn't take them with her when she drowned in Venice. Right. The legend of Katie. Actually, I probably can because it's a digital wallet, Alex.

you can take it with you anywhere. But Ibidus was like a huge commerce hub. Like it used to be extremely wealthy. Because it was near these ports and stuff. You just had these really wealthy families conducting their mercantile business there. And it was very, very financially powerful. Yeah. And they also became super financially powerful by inventing the key moneymaker of banking,

which is to leverage two, tools at once. There's one service of storing people's money to protect it, another service of lending people money. And then the banking insight is, why don't I use some people's stored money to be lent to other people? And then I can just spin up a bunch of finance and money with that trick. It makes sense. Nothing ever bad happens because of that. So we're all good. Yeah, like we talk about on the credit unions show, it's the best and worst thing in the history of modern society like it makes so many good things possible and then huge crashes yeah exactly i mean yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not coming out here as anti-bank it's just it is it's like when you

learn how banks work it's a little like you watch uh you know it's a wonderful life for the first time you're like oh really ah dang that seems geez george that seems a little sketchy but no i mean it makes sense right like you're you're putting in money that you're not using at that moment. Someone else could use that money at that moment. As long as the bank keeps its head above water and it's a trustworthy bank and it makes good on its promises, then yeah, it makes sense. Exactly. If it's like run well with enough regulation or thoughtful people, it can be great. Right. And the thoughtful person here is Lewis Tappen. The specific astonishing year is 1841.

So about 500 years after the invention of banking, still nobody had developed credit scoring. And in 1841, Lewis Tappen invents the first credit scoring business and also helps win a U.S. Supreme Court case to free the slaves on the amistad. Okay. Well, I mean, that's, wait, so he's simultaneously, yeah, so he's. Completely separately, just very busy. Right. Like they seem like very different things that he's working on at the same time. So he's a lawyer? He is a business person who helps fund the lawyers. I see. Okay. And so he's kind of most famous in American history as a figure in the Amistad case, which I'm sure not everybody's heard of. It's a very like APUS history thing. There's also a movie adaptation of the story in 1997. What happened is in 1839, a Spanish,

slave ship called the Amistad, carrying 53 African people who were enslaved intended for sale. The ship left Havana, and then these people achieved a revolt and killed their captors. Nice. And then the boat, they brought it to Long Island Sound. It's a Spanish boat. They're Spanish people who think they own the African people. But this leads to court cases starting in Connecticut about either returning these people to Spanish ownership or giving these people. to the U.S. government to ship them back to Africa, but with the intent of making them free just in Africa, because also the U.S. didn't want black people around.

Yeah, so they were still racist, but they're like, look, I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at slavery and then cut to a classic community meme of like, you can excuse racism? And Louis Tappen also couldn't excuse racism, but he had a couple other people funded a series of legal cases in a bunch of Connecticut courts and then in 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court. And amazingly, they won. The U.S. Supreme Court freed the Amistad prisoners. And Tappin was a big enough part in this that he's played by actor Stellen Scarsgaard in the movie. He's one of the couple of key people who funded that whole good. thing. I got to look up which of the Scarsguards that is Stel, Stellen Scars.

Oh, Barron Harkinan, and the old guy. Oh, okay. He's the older Scarsguard. Yeah, Daddy, Scarsgard. There's a lot of Scarsguards, I know. Like, isn't there like 10? Sounds right. Yeah. But yeah, and so Lewis Tappin's mostly famous in history for that. And while he's extremely busy winning a global news intensely racial, Supreme Court case, he also found an entire business that he calls the mercantile agency. And this was totally revolutionary. He hired a staff of people to work as correspondence

and crisscrossed the eastern United States gathering information about the creditworthiness of lenders and borrowers and companies. Just like writing dossiers on everyone doing business that they could get information about. So he's like, people should not, We should not be able to own people. Also, I'm so, so tired of being scammed.

Yes. Yeah, he got into this because he repeatedly lost all his money. In his youth in Massachusetts, he scrimped and saved and then invested that in cotton mills. There were a lot of textile-type mills in Massachusetts. Then scammy people got involved in the mills, drove them bankrupt. He lost everything. Second scam is that he joins his brother, Arthur. her in the silk trade in New York City, but in ways I couldn't find a lot of details about

fellow merchants screwed them over, like just not paying them and stuff. Right. And then the two of them rebuilt a new fortune, lost it all in the national economic panic in 1837. One big myth about American history is that the Great Depression is the main economic collapse, but there have been a few dozen across the last 200 years. They happen all of the times, such as the Great Recession of George W. Bush. Yeah.

And so Tappan said, I keep losing all of my money all the time. And also to survive this 1837 panic, I need to start taking loans and accepting credit for the very first time. Even though I believe the Bible says that is a horrible sin. Right. I'm just like I've lost all of my money so many times. I just have to change tack. I have to do something. Listen, God, I'm really trying to follow the letter.

letter of the law here but uh you know what like if instead of calling it alone i call it called an i o you you didn't literally say in the bible you can't do an i o u so so so tapin says the economic panic stinks but also i'm like a very experienced businessman also approaching credit with fresh eyes and so my idea is what if we protected people who are seeking credit by rating the creditworthiness of everybody his expense was paying a bunch of correspondence to gather all this information and then his revenue was businesses and individuals paying for access to the information so this does i mean this doesn't seem like this was originally to punish poor people but more to protect some business people from other business people

Yes. And that lets us go ahead on loop in. Takeaway number two, credit scores have mattered a lot more for institutions and governments than for individuals across almost all of history. And really to this day, we think about credit scores a lot as individuals because we have one and we need to get like a mortgage. Yeah. But as far as the broader economy and its whole deal, giant institutions, this matters a lot more. And the origin of this was basically business to business transactions and a little bit business to governments because some governments, especially in the past, were screwy with money. Yeah. You wanted to know.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like, all right, so I'm starting to kind of like, I see the utility of the credit score, especially when you're like trying to prevent jammy businesses from being able to to take advantage of people. Yeah, every time you have some kind of institution, but you don't try to compensate for the inequalities that happen when you're poor, it gets messed up. Yes, and this all started from private enterprises gathering the information

and selling the information. So there wasn't so much public interest in it in the first place, and that has helped lead to it not necessarily being great for individuals. Right, right. It was just businesses thinking about businesses the whole time. And by the way, takeaway number two is inside one. We're doing both of once. Takeaway number two, key sources are a feature for Lappons Quarterly by writer

Aleni Shermer and then also recent reporting on the United States government because it didn't make big news because there was so much chaos and authoritarianism going on. Oh, really? Why? Huh. But in May of 2025, the United States' credit rating went down. White House God. And then, like, on page seven, credit score stuff. Yeah, yeah, as we tape, most of my feed is pictures of the demolished about a third of the White House. Apparently, that just happened.

White House gone. Yep. In May of 2025, the United States' credit score got worse. Huh. Like, the whole country, the government, the credit score got worse. Okay. Interesting. There are like a few agencies such as Moody's that rate the credit score of giant governments, and it's not on the scale you're on.

The rating of the U.S. went from AAA to a lower rating called A-A1. It's just like your number. It's an arbitrary scale in system. I mean, I'm familiar with AAA batteries. I'm not familiar with the A rating system. Like, is it true? Yeah, it's kind of made up. Yeah, okay. And it's a made up set of letters and numbers, but it's based on real things such as vast national debt.

In October 2025, CBS News reported that federal debt reached $38 trillion. Also, there were a lot of claims around a organization called Doge set up by Elon Musk in a vaguely illegal way in the government. Yeah. And apparently that organization promised. missed a lot of budget benefits by the end of September 2025. We are now finding the government's probably spending more money. And either way, we aren't totally sure because they did their cuts in such a chaotic way. Turns out when you like rip everything up from the roots and then you expect it to function

and then you also start spending a bunch of money on vanity projects in Argentina that like Maybe you're not actually controlling spending, you're just kind of creating havoc. Yeah, well, we'll think about it. We also recently gave cash assistance to Argentina that costs more than the entire previous budget of an organization called USAID that gave cash assistance to all sorts of people all over the world. Also, USAID, like US farmers were being compensated for their crops to give to USAID that we then gave to people. And so the U.S. farmers would benefit from that. Obviously, people around the globe would

benefit from that so you don't just have a bunch of crops rotting for no reason. Anyways, White House gone. Yeah. And so governments and businesses kind of need a credit score to be good more than you do. Because you are just one person. If you need just one car, you could get a crummy used car, or you could just like make it work in some way. It's not good, but it's much more damaging and devastating if the entire government or a giant business has to pay a lot more interest on loans because they show up to set up a giant, giant, giant loan and their credit score is bad. So when the, when the US government's credit score slips down, what are the consequences to the U.S. government? So like they, you're saying the interest rates,

change? Yeah, they basically need to spend more money financing the debt they already have. I see. And it's more difficult for them to get loans from like other countries or from giant international banks. I see. So this would be beneficial to people that hold U.S. debt potentially. Yeah, that too, yeah, because it seems like they'll just keep getting interest on it or it'll keep being more valuable to them. But it's bad for generally. everyone else in the country. Yeah, so that's pretty bad. Okay.

Yeah, it means interest payments will take up a larger portion of the national budget, and it usually means the government will cut programs and all of the things it does for us in order to deal with that debt. It also might mean the dollar, our currency, might lose value. And it's very complex in a way I just won't get further into because I'm not enough of an economist to exactly what's a problem with a country having a worst credit rating. But Eleni Shermer writes about a general principle that businesses and governments need to make a lot of their money from exploiting the money that they already have. And the biggest example might be

U.S. universities. Apparently, there is a theory that the entire system of U.S. colleges and universities is approaching a cliff where their credit score will really get slashed because they have too much debt. In one decade from 2009 to 2019, in just that one decade, the institutional debt of U.S. colleges and universities rose by more than 71%. That seems like a lot. Yeah, they reached more than $336 billion in debt as of 2019. And then it got worse to an extent we don't really know.

when the COVID pandemic began, universities finance a lot of what they do with their endowments and with good credit ratings. They'll do a lot of lending out money or borrowing money based on that. But collectively, there might be sort of a cascade of them having worse credit ratings. As banks say, it just really seems like you can't pay this stuff off. And then if that happens, they'll need to slash basically everything they do for students or faculty or the community. in order to just finance and deal with their debt because they won't have a good enough credit score. Well, that doesn't seem great, Alex, I'm going to say. And it's a little of a theory, but we'll just kind of see.

And either way, all of us think more about our FICO credit score than like, hey, is the giant university in my state doing okay? You know? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't want this to come across as like, oh, let us pity the giant institutions. They deserve more pity than someone who is struggling to find a place to rent because their credit score is low. I mean, like, it's just the scale of things is quite huge. Like, once you get enough money, like things like debt and credit work in a kind of different way. Like, obviously, like, what you're saying, there's still consequences.

But, like, for the little guy, like, if you have a bunch of unpaid debt, like, it's not necessarily, like, you're not. going to get nearly as much leeway versus like an Ivy League school or something. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's two different versions of the same problem. And like you say, it plays out very differently for you versus something giant. But they're like thinking about it too. And the U.S. in 2025 and probably increasingly over this year or the next year, because as we tape, there's a long run in government shutdown that it seems like would impact our credit score? Like, the United States is having credit score trouble. So if you are, too, that makes sense. You're okay, you know? Like, you're not morally bad or something.

No. You're ideally doing better than the United States government at your credit score. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we like to be very punitive about, like, someone's like, oh, like, you're on food stamps and yet you bought a candy bar, naughty, naughty. And then you have these like, like, yeah, Yeah, it's a government shutdown, but we're going to, like, buy two giant planes that cost millions of dollars for Christy Nome. So, like, don't feel guilty about your candy bars, guys. Like, Jesus. Yeah, yeah. So it's not just us having credit scores.

There's a lot of groups. Right. And back to the origin of this, these giant businesses and governments have credit scores because that was the original purpose when Lewis Tapp and stuff. the mercantile agency. His mercantile agency immediately made a lot of money because businesses really wanted this service. He founded it in 1841. Within three years, he had 280 clients across Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. Started expanding his network of correspondence all the way west. Within 10 years of founding the company, he had thousands of correspondence. He'd offloaded the data data subordinates. Eventually, they merged with a competitor called the Bradstreet

company, and they are still a credit reporting business under the name Bradstreet and Dunn. Wow. Like Lewis Tappan's idea was so good, the business still exists. Yeah. It is wild how much longevity some businesses have in the U.S. Yes. Yeah, and like Equifax Experian TransUnion are almost niche in credit scoring. It's really Moody's, Fitch, Bradstreet, and Dunn, a bunch of firms you probably never heard of doing the importance credit

scoring for the giant things. Yeah. You know, like that's kind of what makes the economy go. I always feel like Equifax is like a horse faxing sort of business where it's like if you have, if you're a horse person and you need to fax some documents, you use Equifax. That also made me think of Shadow Fax, Gandalf's horse. Yeah, Shadow Fax is like, Gandalf, your credit score is terrible. How much pipeweed are you buying per month?

It's like Gandalf, I can't give you a mortgage. He's like, no, no, I'm Gandalf the White now. I'm up to Gandalf the White. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. Here's a tower. Yeah, yeah, sure. Oh, redlining. And I'm sad.

And I'm sad. Yeah, like I said, Lewis, Happen specifically developed this because of his background. He'd been screwed in business many times. He began to come to credit with fresh eyes after the panic of 1837. And then the other, other reason he started a business for credit scoring is that he was heavily involved in abolitionism. And you wouldn't think that would lead to it. But the thing is, especially in the 1830s, both these Tappan brothers organized a lot of abolitionism in the country. Like they funded the work of William. Lloyd Garrison, who was an important abolitionist newspaper printer. They were so heavily involved in abolitionism. Pro-slavery mobs attacked their silk store and broke into Lewis Tappen's home in 1834. Oh, geez. Wow.

Just for their politics, not the silk business or whatever. Right. Right. And so as Tappan continued to doggedly try to push abolitionism, he develops a national rolladecks of thoughtful and literate people in America and says, hey, if I need to hire a bunch of people across the country to basically spy on businesses and tell me what they're up to, why don't I just hire the abolitionists that I know all over the country? Huh.

Okay. Like, I'm ready to launch the first credit scoring agency because I have a list of the addresses of people I trust all over the country because we have similar politics. Right. It's like, all right, guys. So for the first half of the day, we are going to be focusing on freeing human beings from slavery. The second half, do you know how to use a spreadsheet? Basically.

Yeah, and it could even be like, it's not quite gig work because that wasn't the concept, but it was like I can even give some income to my fellow abolitionists by hiring them for some work, helping me report on the credit of businesses in their area. Man, it's like cronyism except like the standard is people who don't believe you should be able to own another person, which, you know, I can't complain about. Yeah. If I just started some kind of web business that need a generic freelance labor, I would reach out to people I know from comedy and podcasting and stuff because I think they're cool and I think they know how to use a computer. It's on the level of ethics and morality as abolitionists for sure, comedy and podcasting. Like, you know.

Like we always say the most important job. Sure. And then it led to this amazing, almost factoid thing where as Tappan launches the mercantile agency, some of its first correspondence were future presidents. And two of his early correspondence in rural Illinois were a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Huh. And a struggling veteran of the Mexican-American War named Ulysses S. Grant. They helped develop some credit scores in the 18th.

Oh, okay. All right. That's all I need to know about them. Yeah, there's no more to their biography. And yeah, and then, as far as how that metastasized into you having a FICO score or your country's version of it, let's get into takeaway number three. Modern credit scores for individuals can function like a privatized and digitized second layer of citizenship. What? What? Basically by accident, the system for checking whether businesses are credit-worthy merged with computers and digital databases to become credit scores today. Everything's computer, Alex. That's what our president said. Okay, so you're saying it's a second layer of citizenship with having a credit score. Yeah, there's an informal thing that really started in the 1980s where,

People who fully migrate to a new country will find that even if they become a citizen, they might totally lack a credit history in a way where it's not formally part of citizenship, but you'll find that you have become a person who's fully part of the society of this new country except that you can't get a loan for anything important and whoops. Right, which is, yeah, that's not great. Like also renting, right? Like it can be difficult to find a place if you're, if you don't have a credit score. Yes. Yeah. For all sorts of crucial ingredients of life. Yeah. You need to have a credit history. And we accidentally made that hard on immigrants. Key sources here are essays for The Guardian by Kai Gu and for the Paris Review by Jasper Nathaniel. Also writing for Theconversation.com by two professors of finance at Mississippi State University. Their names are D. Brian Blank and Tom Miller, Jr. Again, this started as like a business to business service.

And from the 1840s all the way to the 1960s, it was a bunch of tiny businesses doing credit reporting and credit information. Apparently, in the 1960s, the U.S. had more than 2,000 credit bureaus. And then here's a description from Professor Josh Lauer of what happened next. All the files were in filing cabinets on papers and cards. But then huge credit agencies come into a town and buy up all the local credit bureaus with all of their information and then computerize it, end quote. And the one other change was federal deregulation. So then just from the 1960s to the 1980s, in those 20 years, the U.S. went from more than 2,000 credit reporting agencies for people to three. That, yeah.

Just the three of Equifax Experian TransUnion. They all merge together. Yeah, mergers. Mergers never result in anything bad, right? And kind of the worst part is just the giantness of those companies made them kind of faceless. And also because the information's digital, they really invented the concept that that company might know everything about you. Oh. Because before when it was a bunch of tiny credit reporting agencies with paper records, if you're an

immigrants and you just came to them, they would say, yeah, I probably don't know everything about you. Like, you're not in the file cabinet yet. Sure. Like, right. That makes sense. So you could begin to build credit because nobody expected to universally know your deal. Right. So in terms of knowing everything about you, it's like just in terms of all your spending is what they, all that data is what they have about you. Yeah, all your credit based spending. Right. So when I buy with my credit card five jars of peanut butter and a watermelon they're like all right we know this girl is a freak like there's something wrong with her even though it's like I just really like peanut butter and sometimes I want to wash it down with a nice watermelon the the freak part

kind of relates to our last takeaway oh cool it's more opening the credit card and then specifically whether you're paying it off is what they know. I see. So they don't know that I'm doing that at the grocery store? That's our hope. Yeah. That's God willing, no one knows what I'm getting at the grocery store. Because everything digitized, but it is unfortunately not universally all-knowing,

it creates really weird recent immigrant stories. One of them comes from Kai Gu, writing for The Guardian. And it's a personal essay about being a child born in Malaysia and then his family emigrates to Los Angeles. And he said they came with huge amounts of legal and social support. Like his father had a stable full-time engineering job that gave him a work visa. The family was already in touch with a mostly Thai church congregation that looked out for them, housed them, put them together with similar families. Also, both his parents spoke fluent English. Both of them had bachelor's degrees from British and Australian universities, respectively, that are like valuable degrees in the United States.

They also had $20,000 U.S. dollars on hand in cash. However, quote, these advantages amounted too little because their FICO credit score was a big fat zero. Thus ensued a chicken or ag conundrum. To build a score, my parents needed to create a reliable history of U.S.-based payments, mortgages, retail installments, credit cards. but institutions wouldn't trust them with these financial obligations without an established score, end quote. Right. Yeah, I mean, that seems not super fair.

Because usually, like, when you're a kid, you'll, like, open up your first credit card. Because I'm trying to remember, like, is that often done with, like, the help of the parents so that these financial institutions are, like, at least I know if this stupid kid defaults on their credit, like the parents are kind of roped in to it, and they have a good credit score. Yes, and this story also basically applies to natural-born U.S. citizens who are children, where it's an actual useful tip to have your parents open a line of credit that involves your name so you begin to have credit history. Like, it's even kind of a second layer of citizenship if you're born here to citizens.

You still need to, like, do the additional step that. not everybody's financially aware enough to do. I've also heard horrible stories of kids who get taken advantage of by family. Like they'll have a family member who like opens up credit in their name are irresponsible with the credit. And so the kid like comes to be like, all right, I'm an adult. Like I'm 18 now. I'm going to try to open up a bank account and a credit card.

And it's like, no, you're screwed actually. Yep. Not like there is a smooth way for someone to get out of that. situation. There are certainly ways, but it's not like for an 18-year-old who's just like starting their life. And it's like, actually, your credit score is terrible because you had an aunt who opened a line of credit in your name, or you just don't have any credit. So, yeah, it's crazy. Exactly. It's a thing that began as a positive and still positive to this day attempt to make business transactions more trustworthy, sort of metastasized into, now that we

have digital technology, we can put everyone in a database. And anyone who's either not in the database or was marked as bad by the databases stuck. And before it was digitized, it was totally different. Like individual businesses kind of had to deal with you as a person, because if they didn't deal with people as individuals, they wouldn't have customers. Right. Like a department store or a brand of car or a car dealership kind of had to work with you because there wasn't an omniscient seeming digital database for all this. And it is solvable. The other immigrant story here, writer Jasper Nathaniel talked to refugees in 2025 who fled Gaza to the United States. And refugee Camel Musilat is asked like, what's going well for your family in America so far? And the number of

one thing he was most proud of achieving so far is that his son was able to establish a credit score in order to get a car loan. It was very, very, very difficult, and he's rightfully proud of his son navigating that labyrinth. Just like escaping a genocide to be faced with like this just sterile bureaucracy. But do you exist financially? Yeah, right. Like, come on. Right. Oh, my God. my god and so and so that's why a lot of people don't like this topic and get sweaty about it because on the other hand it's done a lot to make the economy better and everybody's lives better yeah like these these mississippi state professors blank and miller junior describe it simply quote a major goal of the credit score is to expand the pool of potential borrowers while minimizing the overall default rate of the pool in this way lenders can maximize the number of loans they make and quote. And that's all true. It's really boosted a lot of people's lives, this entire system. It's just become digital and inscrutable, too. I mean, it's like any technology, right, where it can have a lot of benefits. But if you don't

have the social architecture established that is designed to protect the vulnerable, then they're going to get screwed by it, even if it's helpful in other situations. Exactly. And that gets us into our last mega takeaway. But also, Wow, Three Takeaways, number stats. We should take a quick break before our final mega takeaway about China. All right. I'm going to take a quick break and make some questionable purchases online and hope Peter Thiel doesn't notice. I'm buying a jet for my favorite member of the cabinet, you know?

They deserve it. We'll treat. Well, treat. Right. We're back and let's wrap things up with a final mega takeaway number four. Most claims about social credit scores in China are myths or gases reflecting our dystopian fears about our own country. Yeah, so I think there's like this general thing where often there's kind of a, I don't know if this is a word, but an exotification of Asian countries where it's like...

Exoticization or something? Exotization? Yeah, something like that. It is the idea that like various Asian countries are going to be so strange and so different. Here's this wild story that makes things seem really strange and dystopian. And of course, like there's obvious criticisms to be made about the Chinese. government about generally any country society and stuff, but whenever you hear like a really wacky story, especially if it's like, you know, here's this like weird foreign country and

here's this really weird thing that they do. It's always good to like apply a little extra scrutiny because sometimes these are just kind of presented like kind of as fodder of like look at these weirdos all the way over in Asia. Exactly. And our buddy David Bell, who's the head writer of some more news. He's done a lot of amazing writing about how... Not familiar. Katie writes for it too. He's done a lot of amazing writing about how news about China, if it's about like the entire

government they're doing something, it might be true. But if it's about like something weird happening, it's always fake. It's just like a weird blog that dumb Western media ran with. Yeah. Yeah. And with this social credit myth, the two key sources are an amazing show from a UK outlet called The Spectator. It's a podcast interviewing China Watchers. It's called Chinese Whispers. It's hosted by British Chinese reporter Cindy Yu. And the other source is a book called Money,

The True Story of a Made Up Thing, written by journalist and Planet Money co-host Jacob Goldstein. And I don't know if everybody's heard of this myth or this claim. There's a claim that in modern China, like the People's Republic of China with the Communist Party there, the claim is that Chinese people are ruled by a system of social credit, wherever one essentially has a credit score number for their entire value as a person, like their fundamental character. I have kind of heard this idea. I sort of apply the David Bill principle of like if I hear a really weird news story about

China or another Asian country, I'm just like, I will, if I'm going to believe it, I'll need to like look into it more because often it's just like, even when it comes to like North Korea, right, which obviously there are serious issues with their authoritarian government. But then we're not satisfied with the already bizarre reality of that and then just add like stories to it because it's like, no one's going to fact check this because like it's North Korea. It's a crazy dictatorship. So who's going to like check to see if these things are actually true? Exactly. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I have heard the stuff about social credit. I know like Black Mirror did some episodes on it.

I don't think it had anything to do with China, but they did sort of like, what if in the future we had this? Exactly. Yeah, the Black Mirror example is an episode from 2016, which they called Nosedive. The character played by Bryce Dallis Howard essentially lives in a social media version of social credit. Like a Facebook version of Chinese social credit is the inspiration. Like what if Chinese social credit, but through American text? companies. Yeah. Like what if your Reddit karma ruled your life? Yes. Yeah. That's the fear in that

sci-fi show. And it's driven by the way China has been reported. There are claims about everything from a child's university admissions to a person seating on flights being altered by some kind of social credit score maintained by the government. Driven by spies or snitches reporting to the government tiny infractions like they didn't take their trash out properly. They weren't nice to a dog on the street. These myths are wild about People's Republic of China government database. Yeah. And it's rather it's rather dehumanizing, right? Because it makes everyone in Chinese society seem completely insane. Yes. And what's actually happening is Western media is wildly misreporting four different real things that are not the myth we just described.

Right. But there's four different real things going on. And the first one is the real bad thing that the People's Republic of China has an authoritarian one-party government that surveils people and restrict speech and does a bunch of bad things to you. Yes, that is... Like, that's real. That's pretty objectively true. And it, like, again, I think part of it... what's frustrating about these these like sort of red herring stories is like there's plenty to

criticize that's very real yeah it's a bad time a lot of the things there yeah and it also almost makes it some kind of social credit system unnecessary like if there's a law against specific political speech yeah why would you also develop some kind of three digit number about whether people are good or bad yeah exactly the government would just jail you for saying the wrong thing without a number. It's also bad in terms of like when you, when for, I mean, hypothetically, if you as a citizen are trying to identify hallmarks of authoritarianism in your own country, it's better to have really accurate information about what that actually looks like rather than sort of like

old wives tales. Exactly. We'll get it to that more in the U.S. in a second. Uh-oh. The second big source and the most justifiable for the West developing myths. is that a few cities in China at the city government level piloted out a version of social credit. So you can see where the myth springs. Like a city tried it.

Sure. Right. Another real bad thing. But in the early 2010s, the city of Swaining proposed a social credit point system with deductions for political speech that's not allowed. The city of Rongcheng proposed one involving deductions for littering and J. and other infractions like that, and also the city of Wenzhou proposed the most comprehensive idea for a pilot of it in 2014. However, none of this really came to actual fruition ever.

The national government of China only started acknowledging that any of it existed in 2016, and as soon as 2019 ordered it all to be shut down, because every attempt to pilot it was wildly unpopular, also in most cases the city didn't get around to staffing and funding setting it up. Yeah. So you can see why the media said this is terrible because it is, but also none of it like happens, you know? They had the wacky idea to do it and it did not pan out well because such a thing would

be very difficult to impose. Not impossible, but yeah, very hard to get people to buy into that. Exactly, because like the version not involving your money would involve a lot of security cameras people or AI is monitoring those it's right it's such an enormous undertaking to do yeah i mean like there is there is definitely like i think that the the fear of sort of like a snitching culture is i don't think that's necessarily a completely unfounded thing like i mean you know we know in like nazi germany like little kids were like brainwashed uh by the nazi party to like report their own parents for stuff. So it's like, yeah, I mean, those kinds of things can happen. We just have to be

accurate about, you know, when they are happening. Along with that, the third thing here is a confusing trend that a lot of people don't understand if they, I guess, don't follow Chinese society and government where various businesses and enterprises will try to match the trends coming out of the one communist party in a way that they think will help them. gain favor. And so apparently a few businesses launched what are essentially loyalty programs and points programs that are only positive. But if they did that during this brief piloting of some social credit in cities,

then the business like called it social credit or tried to like follow the trends. And apparently a similar thing has happened with China's Belt and Road initiative where the government of China's done what's called Belt and Road, where they invest in massive infrastructure projects all over the world. And then some Chinese businesses that just wanted to do that kind of business called that Belt and Road in a way that led the West to say, oh, this is a giant, giant program across all of Chinese society. Just fake it till you make it just for the job you want sort of energy there. Yeah, and it's also like weirdly comparable to Elon Musk deciding to run around in his own version of a MAGA hat because he thinks that will

benefit him financially right when a unscrupulous one-party government installs itself in the United States or everyone saying things are this is like smart AI enabled stuff right like trying to take advantage of a trend where it's like this is a smart toilet brush and then you know uses AI and then you look into it it's like no that's also a good parallel yeah like it's some of these Chinese companies calling it social credit because that's a trendy phrase in the country. And when you look at it, it's basically airline miles or something. Like, it's not actually. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then the final thing here is an actual program that's different from social credit, but sometimes called similar names. Cindy Yu describes it as a

quote, Yelp organized by the government. If people know Yelp, that is a website for rating businesses. The People's Bank of China, the Central Bank and Communist China, has organized a robust national database of creditworthiness that also factors in a moral component. But about 90% of the listings are for companies. And it's very business to business, like the origin of credit scores in the U.S. What are sort of some of the morals that they try to rank? One of the biggest ones is food safety and failing to maintain that. I mean, we have that, don't we?

So we kind of have it, but in an anarchic and not centralized way in the United States. Like, you basically need to Google whether a company is unscrupulous and we, like, find them or something. China's basically set up a Yelp for all of that run by the central bank and the government in a way that might make sense. Like, it's kind of justifiable. And also, they just have a much bigger series of major recent food safety scandals to deal with in a way that drove people. wanting to support it and set it up. Right. But I thought in the U.S. we had, like, food inspectors.

Is that not done by kind of local governments? Both countries have food inspectors, and this is basically a thing where you can go to a database that says this company, on top of their credit with finances being good or bad, is also shh-y about food safety. I see. Like, it's all one thing. All right. It's like if you're, it's like if a business's credit score said they don't pay back their

loans and also we found sawdust in their bread rather than just they don't pay back their loans and if you go and extensively Google you can find out about whether there's sawdust in their bread. That's extra fiber is what I call it. The biggest scandal that drove this in 2008 there was a scandal with infant formula and milk powder. The firms either added extra chemicals to decrease the nutritional value or accidentally make them unsafe or both like to save money a few kids died and hundreds of thousands of kids got sick so scandals like that drove public interest in the government doing something like this yeah i mean i think i can see like the usefulness of that as long as it's not that that that power is not you know abused

in terms of judging businesses like as long as it's things like food safety and it doesn't there's not mission creep into like are your politics uh align do your politics align with ours or something like that And that is the tragedy of this Chinese government, Yelp, is that apparently that's happened. Yeah. Like, there's also negative scores for politics and stuff. Yeah. Sad slide-liss will sound.

So, like, the key thing is it's almost entirely business to business. But that and the other three things have all added up to Western media saying, China established the nosedive episode of Black Mirror. Right. And everyone walks around with a number applied to them that dictates their whole life. And that is not. That is not quite true and also kind of distracts us from the actual problems in China. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I think it's important to actually have news that's accurate. Hot take. Yeah. Increasingly hot take. The last thing about it is that when these stories are told in the West, it seems to mostly be just a reflection of our own fears about our own country. And also specifically how our system of financial credit. scores could screw us. Because since the 1980s, Americans have been worried about the digitization of all their records, potentially allowing an entirely financial totalitarian system here.

Yeah. There is a internet meme where it's like whenever the U.S. is doing something screwy, we're like, oh, we don't want to be like the Chinese. When it's like China has nothing to do with it, it's always like, here's this weird thing we're doing in the U.S. And it's like, oh, man, this is, this is almost as bad as the Chinese. And then the Chinese are like, we don't even do. What are you talking about? Yes. Like, apparently, Cindy, you and other China watchers have reached out to sources in China for these kinds of stories.

And the people in China say, what's social credit? I haven't heard of it. Right. Like, what are you, what do you mean? Clearly, they're going to get dinged if they mention it. And meanwhile in the United States, way back in 1985, a computer scientist named David Chom. who has a Ph.D. from Berkeley was a world expert in cryptography in the 80s. He published an essay outlining what he called a system to make Big Brother obsolete, end quote.

And his theory was that if we totally digitize all financial transactions, no one will have freedom or privacy anymore. Because any government could do the legwork to catalog and spy on that information and know everything about you just through your money. I don't love that idea. Having a regulatory oversight is great, but it should be directed towards businesses, not just towards individuals. Yeah, and he disliked it so much he tried to invent a way around it. In 1989, he built a startup with a product called Digi Cash, which was essentially the step before the blockchain and cryptocurrency. It's anonymous digital money. Yeah.

This was very popular with tech heads. In 1994, he got invited to speak at a conference by Tim Berners-Lee, who helped build the World Wide Web. He almost convinced Bill Gates to build digit cash into Windows 95, but it just never quite got enough consumer adoption because people with their wallets expressed the belief that they didn't care about their privacy and credit cards are easier. Right. And also, like, isn't one of the issues with crypto. and a lot of like digital currency now the lack of regulation and insurance against you know like it's the same problems is the problems that like banks tried to solve like with and the government tried to solve with like regulations and basically ensuring that the bank can't just be like I've got

your money now and then I'm just going to shudder in a couple months and you'll never see it again where it's like, I feel like crypto is like encountering those issues, and it's like having to reinvent the wheel to make up for these problems. Exactly. And the key difference with DigiCash is that Chom's system ran through banks, just with encryption where the bank can't see what's being done. And then Libertarians proceeded to run with his ideas and build it totally outside of banks as cryptocurrency.

Right. And then it has that problem. I like privacy, but I also don't think we can necessarily just trust a business to be scrupulous without some kind of regulations. Yeah, and because we don't have that privacy, the next step that would easily establish social credit in the United States is extra monitoring of the content of our purchases and the choices in our purchases. Yeah. There's been one study where marketing professors said, hey, if you look at someone's grocery list, you can kind of judge how reliable they are as a person by whether they're buying salads versus energy drinks versus lottery tickets. It's totally normal to buy 20 boxes of cocoa puffs and a kitty pool. And they're unrelated.

And I don't really appreciate sort of this intrusion into my privacy. Yeah, the one further step you described about your one. watermelon and peanut butter, freaky nature. Companies could just proceed to do that and establish U.S. social credit scores. It would not be hard. Yeah. But when our leaders worry about that kind of thing, they don't describe worrying about it happening here. They spin out myths about China. Yeah. And one prominent example in 2018, the current U.S. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech claiming, quote, by 2020, China's rulers aimed to implement an Orwellian system promised on controlling virtually every fast of human life, the so-called social credit score, end quote.

Pence also claimed to have read documents outlining the entire system. He also claimed its worst feature would be the targeting of China's Christians, along with Muslims and Buddhists. Okay. And at 2025, none of that has happened. But also China is horrible to its Muslims. and also has a lot of negative elements. So if you hear about social credit in China being some kind of demonic thing that's currently happening, that's not true. It distracts you from what's really happening in China. And it's a reflection of anxieties about your own country.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it does, like we have a lot of homebrew technocrats here who like openly talk about doing more surveillance, more data collection, and how cool that is. So that, you know, like, I think we should maybe focus on that a little more. And the last last thing, I'll link examples from Digit magazine and elsewhere of Chinese internet users laughing about all this. They have a micro blogging service called Weibo. It's kind of like X.com.

Users have created an entire culture of memes that are jokes about the Western perception of social credit, where there's either a little arrow going up a few points because he said something nice and a smiling, very Chinese emoji. or like a thing that says you mentioned Taiwan down 100 million credit points. I feel like this happens on the internet a lot where people assume either like people from other countries don't have a sense of humor or women don't have a sense of humor. Like only American men are allowed to have a sense of humor on the internet. Otherwise, it's like, oh my God, look at them like openly talking about how their social credit is going up and down.

Right, right. And I'll bet that woman was attacked by an Antifa super soldier. Like jokes like that, exactly. Right, right. So, yeah, there was also one Chinese joke where users built a website that pretends to offer your Chinese social credit score. And some users received an output where the social credit score is zero and it instructs you to schedule your execution in the next two weeks for the government's convenience. Like, they're doing really funny bits about this myth. So good job.

Sure. Yeah. That's, you know, I mean, I would like to learn more languages just for the memes, if possible. Yeah. I don't have the mental capacity for it. Like, I am all, like, it's hard enough for me to understand Italian memes, but I'm getting there. I wonder what your book of the credit is among this society. Yeah. Italian credit score is measured entirely whether you break your pasta or not. Like if you break your spaghetti, schedule your execution. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, a heroic U.S. abolitionist, Louis Tappen, invented credit scoring almost 200 years ago. Within that, takeaway number two, credit scores matter a lot more for institutions and governments than they do for individuals. Takeaway number three, modern credit scores for individuals can function like a privatized and digitized second layer of citizenship. Mega takeaway number four, most claims about social credit scores in the People's Republic of China are myths or gases, driven by dystopian fears about our own country. And then just a few numbers at the start about what the heck FICO is and some of the gist of credit score numbering. Again, it works pretty much like you think it does.

And you can raise or lower your credit score like you think you can. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is four recent rule changes and loopholes that yo-yoed American credit scores. That's the one big way your score could suddenly change without you doing anything. The government and rules.

Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show. For a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund.org. Key sources this week include a ton of historical information from PBS, from the New England Historical Society, from history.com,

modern expertise from professors D. Brian Blank and Tom Miller Jr., both at Mississippi State University. A group of China watchers gathered on the Spectators' podcast Chinese Whispers, hosted by Cindy Yu, And then a book called Money, The True Story of a Made Up Thing, by journalist and Planet Money co-host Jacob Goldstein. That book was also a key source for the Credit Union's episode of SIFPod in the past. I know credit is in both of their names. They are very separate topics, but they also have a lot to do with each other. That page also features resources such as native-land.com. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others.

Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating

by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode nine. That's about the topic of wooden blocks. Fun fact there, the toy wooden blocks for assembling a structure have a totally different origin from the alphabet letter wooden blocks. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast creature feature,

about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.