The Daily Show: Ears Edition - In the Field with Desi Lydic

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Get out from behind the desk with some of the best of Desi in the field  Investigate the Yelp protection racket and the truth behind daylight saving time. Then take off for a potential mission to Mars scam, and make a hard swamp landing to uncover the origins of the infamous Florida Man.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to Comedy Central. Yelp, the most popular crowd-sourced review forum online, and a vital resource when choosing which waxing place doesn't laugh so loudly. But can we trust everything we read on Yelp? One extremely Italian restaurant owner finds Yelp's business practices so devious, he's protesting. It's so nice to meet you. Mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah. My name is Chef Davide Cerretini.

I'm a chef owner at Botto Bistro, and I give 50% off a pizza if you give me a one-star on Yelp. Why would you want a one-star review? Sorry, let me ask you in terms you can understand. What's the matter, you? If you want to have a good rating on Yelp, you need to pay for advertising.

And I decided to don't pay advertising. So what they do, they manipulate your rating in order for you to give up and pay for advertising. According to Davide, when he refused to pay Yelp to advertise, he noticed dozens of five-star reviews disappearing from his Yelp page. To me, that is extortion. Manipulated.

Extortion. Yes. I'm Italian. We invent extortion. Well, yeah. I mean, you're not just Italian. You're, like, cartoonishly Italian. I agree with you.

How exactly did Yelp try to extort you? Walk me through from the beginning. Yes, absolutely. I agree with you. How exactly did Yelp try to extort you? Walk me through from the beginning. Yes, absolutely. You open your business. In a couple of weeks, you have your business place in their forum. You start to have good review. And then in three or four weeks, you

start to receive phone calls. They call you every single day. They're pushy. They don't give up. They keep calling you. We were answering the phone, looking at the number, and we were just telling to to go f*** themselves immediately. That's why I tell my mother-in-law.

After a couple of days, you start to see the results of your bad decision. So immediately, your rating is changing. Somehow, this good review, they're gone. Davide's claim that Yelp extorts businesses was a serious allegation, and he's not the only one with the Yelp grievance. In fact, Yelp gets accused of extortion so much that they have an entire page on their website dedicated to explaining how they don't extort businesses. So I went to Yelp's headquarters to meet with their spokesperson, but not just any

spokesperson. My name is Ben Flanick. I am currently Yelp San Francisco's community manager. And? And I did some television a number of years ago. You're on? It was on The Bachelor. I was The Bachelor.

That's right. Forget about Yelp extorting people. I had to ask season 16's Bachelor what really went down on that horseback ride with Lindsey or the time he totally- I would prefer that we probably keep this conversation about Yelp today, if that's cool with you. Yeah, no, yes, absolutely. No, I am 100% a professional

and I'm here to talk to you about Yelp. I would never wanna talk about it. Go, go, go, go, get outta here, go. Clean it up, clean these up. I didn't arrange that. No, no, it's fine, it's fine. Sorry, Excuse me What would you say to someone who says that Yelp extorts businesses?

I would say that's simply not true Great I'm also not in sales. I don't you know, I run the community side of things here Yelp makes its money primarily through advertising. You don't have to advertise. Reviews are shown just the same, whether you're a paid advertiser or not. So businesses can control the order

in reviews that come up, descriptions. Reviews are a bit different. We have this algorithm, it's called recommendation software. And unfortunately the business owners get frustrated with the algorithm. Alongside that, you have sales reps that are calling them and they think that the two are correlated,

but they're absolutely not. We don't extort businesses. Bullshit. You are going to work. You are going to be harassed from these people. It's blackmailing is racket, bring the money in to the family. And that's the Yelp mafia.

Does it cause you pain being so Italian and seeing your noble tradition of mafia culture be portrayed by these Silicon Valley douchebags? It is. It's insulting. The Italian community got really mad, not because the attentional distortion, it's the way that it's been done.

That a little stupid guy called me from the Silicon Valley because he's manipulating it, that's humiliating for the Italians. You should know. At least do it in the right way. Send a couple of guys with a baseball bat, do it in a classic, give them money. Nobody say anything. But what if he was on The Bachelor? Well, you can congratulate him, but also tell him to go f*** himself.

These people are protected by politics, law, and lawyers, and we don't give a s*** anymore. It might be legal, but it's not okay. Choosing who to trust between these two guys was going to be tough. Yelp's business practices are totally legal. But Davide had a point. Harassing businesses and adjusting reviews feels dishonest, almost as dishonest as calling

this Italian-style pizza. In the end, I had to listen to my heart. It might be legal, but it's not okay. Just because it's legal doesn't make it right. I was going to have to let Ben down easy. Ben, I spent a lot of time with Yelp today. And I think it's just that Yelp and businesses are somehow not trusting one another.

It just feels like there are some things that Yelp is keeping from businesses. But I really hope that Yelp finds happiness. I'm sure one day they'll make a business very happy. Thanks. Time. It flies when you're having fun. But it also killed Peapaw.

Every March and November, we try to control it. Daylight saving time is about to begin. Remember, we fall back tomorrow night, set the clocks back. It's bringing forward an I hate it. Back one hour. Why do we change our clocks? And does it do more harm than good? Well, as I found out, if you screw with time,

who are you? it just might screw you back. Arizona. It's one of America's top states, alphabetically. But more importantly, their clocks play by their own rules. Arizona has opted out of daylight saving time. They stick to standard time all year. So I'm here in cactus country to find out

how these time bandits can even function living outside of normal time How has living without daylight saving time completely messed up your life? I feel like everybody else is all messed up because I've never turned my clock back and never have to worry about it I guess it's like the Wild West. Does that explain your mustache? I Don't know what explains this. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about changing the clocks. Don't you feel like you're missing out being an hour behind the rest of the country? No, that's alright. We'll catch up. You won't

catch up. You're always an hour behind. Oh, yeah. I don't see it as living in the past. I only see it as living in the present. It's their future and not my past because my past is then their past. I'm sorry what? Arizonans seemed happy with their own time laws, not to mention their access to primo desert drugs, but if they were unaffected by not changing their clocks, why do the rest of us do it? I sat down with clock blocker Scott Yates, who's on a mission to permanently stop clock changing. I'm the leader of the Lock the Clock movement,

trying to stop people from having to change the clocks twice a year. But isn't it a good thing to set the clocks forward an hour and gain that extra hour of sunlight? People in general like that extra hour of sunlight, but for some people, it's really deadly. Traffic accidents go up, strokes, heart attacks. More people actually just die in the few days after the spring forward time change.

Wow. I guess for some people time is up. Solid jokes aside, if this is literally killing people, there has to be a good argument for it. There really isn't any argument to change the clock twice a year. Well, there is. The farmers. No, the whole story about the farmers, it's the biggest PR con job ever. The farmers have always been against changing the clocks for daylight saving time.

And they've been like, hey, stop blaming us. We don't have anything to do with this. Y'all blame the farmer trope. No, honey, I did not have sex with my blaming us. We don't have anything to do with this. You'll blame the farmer trope. No, honey, I did not have sex with my yoga instructor. It was the farmer. Who I had sex with. Why do we even have daylight savings time?

Or is it daylights saving times? Daylight savings time. No S's. Daylight saving time. Got it. Daytime save light time. Well, it was first proposed here in the United States by a retailer that found that if there was more sunlight, people would have more time to shop.

This all started from a retailer? Well, he came up with the name Daylight Saving Time, but it actually started during World War I. The Germans started doing it, and then the Brits, and then the U.S. fell into it after that. It was called wartime. Such a German thing to do to make people lose an hour. After the war, we stopped doing it

because everybody hated it. And then in the 60s, the golf industry became a really big industry. So golf lobbyists were able to convince politicians that we should have daylight saving time so that there's more time to play golf after work. Wait, the golf lobby? Yeah, that's right.

They make hundreds of millions of dollars for every extra month that the country is in daylight saving time. And then the candy lobbyists went to Congress and said we should have daylight saving time extend into the first weekend of November. And that way, on Halloween, they sell more candy. All right, wartime golfers and now candy men are the reason behind DST.

Where does that leave us now? Things are actually really improving. There's a bill that has both Republican and Democrat support to actually make the change to the law so that the states can go on permanent daylight saving time. So it's a bipartisan issue? It's totally bipartisan. Wow. I don't think I've ever heard that from anybody before. Well the basic idea of time is really just an agreement. We all have to come together to decide when 10 a.m. is. And that agreement shouldn't kill people.

Time is an agreement? What even is time? When is time? Who is time? Why is time? Why is time? What? Can I go now? The deeper I traveled into daylight saving, the deeper I got lost in what time even was. Time is a construct, right? Time is now, it's before, it's later.

I'm in their past, but it's my future. And if some states change the clocks and Arizona doesn't, could space and time invert on themselves? Who are you? Better question is, when am I? Future me? Yeah, I'm you during daytime save light time. Hold on a second. This is me in an hour?

Yeah, this whole changing the clocks thing is really f***ed up. God damn it. If you would just lock the clocks this whole thing would never happen. Ah, yes. The McFly paradox. I knew exactly what to ask me. You want a 69? Yeah, okay. Either America needs to lock the clocks or I need to stop doing peyote on work trips.

Mars, humanity's side piece. The worse our relationship gets with Earth, the more we lust after that cold, unattainable hunk just out of reach. Which is why everyone went wild for Mars One, a private company who in 2012 offered four lucky Earthlings a one-way ticket to Mars. Mars One has selected its final hundred contenders to form a colony on the foreign planet. That is actually happening in life. People are being offered a one-way ticket to Mars. Yet thousands still signed up and paid application fees for a chance to go to Mars forever. Who would do that?

My name is Leila Zucker and I'm an emergency medicine physician. What would make someone want to take a one-way trip to Mars? You know, aside from just being a woman on this planet right now. It's been almost 50 years since we went onto the moon. It's time to go. So you're telling me you would choose space over your husband? I would. My husband is OK with that, because if you love something,

you have to let it go. Are you sure you don't just need a little bit of space? Like, I tell my husband that I've got book club once a week. There's no book club. I barely read. It's not really about that. We need to make humans a multi-planet species. Unfortunately for Leila and 99 other finalists,

there's only one problem. Mars One now filing for bankruptcy. Was Mars One ever a real thing at all? The more that I looked at it, I kind of felt like, this is like not a real thing at all. They didn't have any kind of real money. They weren't working with SpaceX. Their idea was they make reality TV shows,

but where do you get the money before that to pay for the scientists, the gear, everything else that goes into actually getting you there. You know what they should have done? They should have done a pyramid scheme. I had a very successful pyramid scheme going in college. It was basically like Herbalife, but with 100% cocaine.

I would sell it, then I had other people selling it, I would take a cut of it. It's pretty great. That sounds I had other people selling it. I would take a cut of it. It's pretty great. That sounds like you were just selling drugs. What are you, a cop? Like I told those prosecutors, I'm going to need a second opinion. So I turned to real-life astronaut Chris Hatfield. Mars One had no spaceships.

They gave everybody the impression that you could just go buy a spaceship that could take you to Mars. But those spaceships don't even exist. They still have to be invented. Mars One was a scam. They bilked people out of a million dollars, and when they just went broke recently, they still owe somebody else another million euros. You don't mean a scam scam. You just mean they told the world that they had a thing, but they didn't actually have the thing

and they couldn't deliver on the thing. That's what scams are. What kind of magician can pull off an illusion this big? I had to find the man behind it all, Mars One CEO, Bas Lansdorp. I didn't want him to be suspicious, so I started off slow. Is Mars One a scam?

And Mars One is definitely not a scam. And I think that if you take a real good look at their website, you cannot be convinced otherwise. As everyone knows, the best way to check to see if something is a scam is to see if it has a website. And like any legitimate space venture, Mars One offers sweet merch and a chance to donate monthly. Don't forget that in 61, when Kennedy said,

we're going to the moon before the end of the decade, they basically had nothing. OK, if President Kennedy and 400,000 people working for NASA could turn a dream into a moon landing, maybe Bosz and his team could get us to Mars. How many people do you have on staff at your company? There's 10 people currently working on Mars One. 10 people?

Yes. How many of the 10 are scientists? So there's three engineers currently involved in Mars One and the others are more on the storytelling part of the company. Seven of the 10 are more involved in the storytelling process? Yes. So, if I invest in Mars One, am I investing in a space program or a media story? Investors are really investing in a media company that's selling the story. So all this time Mars One was nothing more than a sales pitch sold to us as news?

How could the entire world be fooled by this one Dutchman? The media. Sorry, you said the media? Yeah. MIT was putting out papers about how Mars One's plans were gonna actually kill the people within 68 days of arriving because they would suffocate to death.

But then you would turn on the news, you would see these kind of like softball coverage. What items would be on your bucket list? What do you need to check off before you go to Mars? These people are really going, everybody. There are two things she will really miss about Earth, her husband of 22 years and her favorite food, hamburgers. The media perpetuated and magnified the lie.

Well, yeah, media's the worst. The first step in becoming a truth-telling journalist, informing Leila that she's been scammed. That doesn't make it a scam. In order to have a scam, you have to be fooling someone and you have to be stealing from them. And nobody has really paid anything other than the original application fee. So if you're not stealing and you're just fooling somebody, it's innocent.

It's an innocent lie that makes life on earth more magical. Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Basically yes. Or like when you tell your husband you only slept with his father once You know little lies that make people happier We say it's only gonna take ten years and it's only gonna take six million dollars And we know those aren't true, but in order to pursue these dreams sometimes We take small liberties everybody is allowed to dream, but the media's job is not to report dreams It is to report the facts.

Exactly. A journalist's job is to seek the truth and to stay sharp. And the best way to stay sharp is with herbicane. The only herbal supplement made of 100% cocaine. Herbicane. Mm, that feels good. ... Mars One had a story to sell.

And like the customers of my herbal supplement, most of the media bought it without examining the product. That's how you end up in a world where Theranos gets the coverage that it did. It's how Fire Festival happens. And there's really big consequences for things like that happening. Maybe that explains Mars One. When you live on a planet where facts no longer matter and the media legitimizes something that was fundamentally empty from the

beginning, it's no wonder people want to escape. But fighting for a world where truth counts is a mission I can believe in. Just tell me when we get there. Florida, God's waiting room. It's home to theme parks, the Everglades, your Pea Paw, and of course, Florida Man. Every week there's a new headline out of Florida. Wild, shocking, unnecessarily sexual. ...masturbating at a bus stop, told police he was Captain Kirk. But have we ever stopped to ask the question, why?

Something's happening to men in Florida, and it can't just be a coincidence. As a future Pulitzer-winning journalist, it's my responsibility to uncover the truth. To reveal what lies beneath the swamp, to answer the question, what makes a man Florida man? First thing I did was some heavy backchanneling, mostly on Craigslist and Facebook. I needed to locate some of these real-life Florida men. First up was Robbie. Last July, he ran into a liquor store with a live alligator for some reason.

Florida man Robbie Stratton decided to bring an alligator with him while making a beer run. Yeah, I definitely regret it. It was stupid. Talk to me about the night that you became Florida man. Can't really tell you much about that night. There's too much alcohol involved that night. Not just alcohol, though. There's probably a deep-rooted conspiracy.

No, this is alcohol. What was it about Florida that made you do what you did? It was hot. It was humid. The heat makes you do crazy things. The heat makes you do crazy things. Alcohol makes you do crazy things. But isn't there something that all Florida men share? There's something behind it. Mental health issues? No, that couldn't be it.

And this wasn't the only man affected. He's been hit with charges after pictures in this video showing him handling an alligator, which he posted, were seen by law enforcement. My real name's Jordan Bedford, but I go by the alligator man. OK. Alligator Man. Okay. Alligator Man, what's the common factor among all Florida men? We all different.

Well, I'm different from the rest because I do the wrong thing in the right way, if that makes sense. No. No? So you're not from Florida, so you don't understand my language, what I'm talking about right now, but I do the wild things. Anything you think of, I probably do it. Catch, like I told you. Anything? Anything, I catch gators. Anything?

Anything. Well, not anything. But basically anything, when it comes to the reptile animals. Mainly the alligators, though. What you like here in Florida, you're not allowed to catch an alligator. I mean, I didn't know that before, but I know now. I just had a little fun, put them on a leash,

and danced with the last one they seen. What kind of dancing did you do with the alligator? The alligator man dance. You gotta kick your feet, spell alligator in the sand as you're dancing, as you're going around, you spell an alligator and you end it with a stomp. The alligator man got a commercial too.

You have a commercial? Yeah, he got a commercial. He got a theme song. Everybody sing like, na-na-na-na-na, it's the alligator man. That is 100% the McDonald's jingle. Well, it's the alligator man's on now.

I see what you're saying about doing the wrong thing in the right way and how it works. It works. Where do you find alligators in Florida? If there's a lake, there's a gator. I promise you. So that's everywhere. There's gators everywhere.

Miss Cheser, very hard to get up out of. She gone. So many Florida men, so many f***ing alligators. Surely there's a Florida man who's normal. Hi, Missy, I am Captain Silky Silver Tips, and I hail out of the island called Marathon, down in the Florida Keys. Cool, and you're a pirate?

Well, I'm a pirate most of the day. When I'm not, I'm a landscaper. What could a landscaper pirate possibly have done? A man dressed as a pirate is accused of shooting his gun on the 7-mile bridge in South Florida. So I took out my flintlocks to shoot at the Sun. Now mind you, there was no projectiles in it. Simply gunpowder, right? Why do you defend what you did? Well, I defend my Second Amendment right.

Your Second Amendment right to shoot a gun into the sun? Yeah, why not? How exactly did you become a Florida man? To become a Florida man you must first be a Florida boy and experience the life that it gives you as a boy to hone your skills to be, in my case, a Florida pirate man. Have you always been a Florida man? Ah, no. Originally, I hailed from Chicago. Oh, so you're transplant. I was then.

But since then, I've lived my entire life here in the Keys. What do you think is behind every Florida man? Must be the water that we're drinking down here to drive us to what we do. It's a water conspiracy. And women. Women? Yeah. They're the ones that drive you crazy. And while I was running away from these unusual men, I was heading towards

some new ideas. There had to be a common thread. What was I missing? There was something different about this state. So many Florida man stories filling the news. Did Florida reporters know something I didn't? I went to an undisclosed orange grove to meet a very casually dressed journalist to find out. What can you tell me about these Florida man stories? I mean, I have my own research, but you just give me yours just so we can compare notes. Yeah, I mean, they are true.

People do weird things here in Florida and it gets into the news. No shit. Yeah. A major factor is that we went from True, people do weird things here in Florida and it gets into the news. But the- No shit. Yeah, a major factor is that we went from being the least populated southern state in 1940 to now being the third most populous state in the country. Sure.

We got- This nerd knew a lot about Florida. And while he mostly rambled, I was connecting the dots. We built tons of homes everywhere where there used to be just wilderness. There's a lake, there's a gate. You can get just about any kind of weapon you want here. This is me knife.

49th among the states in funding for mental health treatment. Mental health issues. Another big factor is Florida was the first state in the nation to pass this landmark law called the Sunshine Act that says that basically any government document is available for reporters to go in and see.

Police reports, for instance, are all open for inspection by reporters. And that's when it hit me, the missing piece of the puzzle. By a guy named Emory Redcroft. Just shut up, shut up. That's it. What's it? It's the Sunshine Act.

Yeah? It's not what causes Florida Man, it's why we hear about Florida Man. Yeah, pretty much. I just figured it out all by myself. I'm a f***ing genius. Florida Man has been the butt of countless jokes. But maybe that's not fair.

Well, this guy was pretty weird. The Sunshine Act makes it easier to discover Florida Man stories. But I was just scratching the surface. We may not hear about them as much, but it turns out there are Florida men in every state. And while Florida will always be America's Petri dish of batshit behavior, the truth is there's a little Florida man in all of us. Explore more shows from the Daily Show Podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

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