The Jordan Harbinger Show - 368: Coffeezilla | How to Expose Fake Guru Scams

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) is a prolific YouTuber who exposes fake guru scam artists and alerts would-be victims to the tactics used to part them from their hard-earned money. What we discuss with Coffeezilla: How fake gurus who profess to teach you how to get rich quick aren't using these same methods to get rich -- they're using you. The classic framework used by fake gurus to entice their target demographic. How fake gurus leverage cult of personality dynamics to be both relatable and unquestionable. How fake gurus pass off once-legitimate moneymaking methods long after they've become obsolete and worthless. Why you don't have to be especially gullible to fall for what a fake guru is selling, and you don't have to be a steel-willed ice king or queen to resist their sleazy machinations. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/368 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

He faked an appearance on Ellen. And part of his little hype reel where he's about to say you his course is him appearing on Ellen. He's like, look how it's successful you can be if you follow my course. But when you look at that clip of Ellen, I found it and she was reacting to some Adele clip. And he cropped out Adele and he put himself and he's like, yeah, look at me on it. These people, they're brazen because they know that most people don't look beyond the absolute surface. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. I want you to become a better thinker,

especially a better critical thinker. And if you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So, if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, you're going to be right at home here with us.

Scams are nothing new. Since I've been on the internet, there have always been scams. In fact, even before that, there were plenty. They were just less plentiful and a little bit harder to find. The fake guru scam comes in all shapes and sizes, but what they have in common is that they all involve some sort of wannabe mentor or cult of personality, and they're perfectly suited to the internet. Today, we'll chat with my friend, a YouTuber by the name of CoffeeZilla.

He researches fake guru scammers online and exposes their tactics and shady inner workings so that you can avoid falling prey to their tricks. If you've ever seen these make money from home guys or these entrepreneur scams, business opportunities, learn how to sell, learn how to close this program, that these scams are similar to multi-level marketing scams and other fraud, in that once you know that it exists,

what the pieces look like and how it actually works, they're much easier to spot and easier to avoid. So I want to teach you how to do that here today with CoffeeZilla, and I think it's going to be entertaining. It should be eye-opening. And if you want to know how I managed to get folks like Coffeezilla on the show, it's always, always, always about the network. Get your own network, personal reasons, professional reasons, whatever it is.

I know you might not think you need it, but if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it's that things can change really fast. And the only insurance policy, best insurance policy money cannot buy is your network, the people that know and know you. So check out our six-minute networking course, which is free and always will be over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's CoffeeZillow.

What you do is so important. And the reason that I wanted to have you on the show is because I, like you, was hoping people were generally smarter than this. And I thought, only dumb people fall for these at-home business scams, these guru scams. And it's just not true. Not that the guru scam has gotten more sophisticated. It's that the marks have gotten less sophisticated because they're younger.

You know, before conmen would go after elderly people or middle-aged people and have to go through hundreds of people in order to reach a victim, now they're just going, oh, I'm just going to do something on YouTube and reach 17-year-olds and they'll steal their mom's credit card or they'll go take their entire last three years of savings, and they'll give it to me for this stupid crap. So that to me is despicable. If you're 40 years old and you fall for something, you know, shame on me, shame on you. but if you're scamming 17, 18, 20-year-olds out of their college tuition, I'm going to take you down.

And that's why you're on the show today. So can we discuss a little bit the system of the guru scam? What is the guru scam that you love shredding so much? Yeah, sure. So a quick introduction. I run a YouTube channel called CoffeeZilla, where basically I have this series called Fake Guru, which is sort of blown up, which is spoken to your point of how many people have been ripped off by these scams. because I started it. I didn't think there would be that much of a response.

The response has been unbelievably both positive and heartbreaking with the stories that have been coming out of people going, yeah, I got ripped off for thousands, tens of thousands of dollars by these quote, unquote gurus. So yeah, let me unpack what the fake guru scam is, as I call it. So there's this whole system of internet marketers, what they are are marketers, but they purport to be these experts in making money online and they tell you, hey, I can get you to where I, am. You know, they drive flashy cars, they wear fancy clothing, they speak like they're very successful. They have all the trappings of success, especially if you're a 20-year-old, which you might think are the trappings of success, like a fancy house, which is usually rented, but they make it seem like

they own it, a fancy Lambo, whatever. And they say, you know, if you want to be just like me, you need to join my course. Now, the course is usually about $2,000. And usually it has an upsell to maybe a $20,000 course or something like that. But the course is usually just basic information you could find online. It's just pure garbage. And these people make all their money by teaching you how to make money. And it's never really successful because the real way they're making money is not by whatever business scheme they're selling you, which is like drop shipping or Amazon, FBA. Or, I mean, you could think of a thousand selling. That's never how they're making their money. They're never making their money from the thing they're supposedly teaching you. They're always

making their money from selling you the $2,000 course. So that's basically how it works. Ultimately, what you end up finding out is these people, either they lose $2,000 or worse, they get in this cycle of going to guru after guru chasing this dragon of wealth. And they keep falling for it. So they fall into, I mean, I've talked to people who are, you know, spent $50,000, who spent their entire life savings, who are now thousands of dollars in debt, all because of these scams that you see online, these little ads of these guys standing in front of Lamborghinis saying come join my free webinar masterclass where I'm going to teach you how to get rich.

I was originally onto this stuff early in the game because, you know, as a podcaster and before when I was doing like coaching and training seminars, people would go, oh, you're a podcaster. Have me on your show. And I'll talk about this new framework that I've got that earns a bunch of money. And I would go, oh, let me see it. And a lot of the time I'd go like, something doesn't add up here. You know, and I saw guys like, well, I won't name check anyone just.

yet, but I would see guys coming on, and they couldn't even hold a coherent conversation. They'd just be, like, quoting Warren Buffett 5,000 times in a 30-minute period. And I'm like, this doesn't seem right. And I remember there was one popular video where there was a guy who was like, this is my house. And everyone's seen this video. So I go, I'm just going to do what I now call a coffee zilla, but before had no name. And I'll go, let me find out where this house is. So I'd find my friend's like a realtor for Hollywood Hill.

She goes, oh, I know this area. It's probably this. I'd do like Google satellite view, find the house and go, oh, okay, it's 731 Mall Holland Drive. And I'd look it up and sure enough, vacation rentals by owner. And I'm going, ah, you don't own the house. And then you could do like a quick flyby or something like that or even drive by because I go to L.A. all the time for media. And I'd go, oh, there's the Lambo that was in the video.

Let's look up the plate with a private investigator friend. Yeah, it's owned by luxury carrentel.net. you know, net, it's not his car. You know, it's a, sure, it might be not a day-long, week, month, Rendell might be an annual, but it's still not this guy's car. Like, it's there for appearances. And there was just more and more and more and more of that. I'm like, the guy says he has a cold plunge chamber outside.

Don't see what, you know, like all these little things fall through. And I thought, again, nothing of it. But then more and more people start coming out of the woodwork. And I even had people from, and I think I made this intro for you, people coming out of their companies and their scams, like employee number three would be a whistleblower and go, hey, Jordan, I know I can trust you, don't out me on this, but this whole thing is a scam,

and I quit because I don't want to go to prison with so-and-so. So this is important to me because these guys are bilking millions of dollars out of, not idiots who are my age or guys like me who can go, wow, I just wasted 10 grand, that sucks. Oh, well, what's for lunch? This is like these people's last dime,

a lot of the time. And they specifically target these people based on their level of desperation because that makes them easy marks. And that to me is the worst part of this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, like some of them, they'll specifically say like, hey, this training course, you can join under 18, for example. So it's like pitch specifically at those people. Or they'll, you know, they'll target their ads where they know the demographic is young because there's a lot of kids. They don't really have a path in life, and they maybe don't want to go to college. But they're working this dead end job, and they don't see a clear path forward. You know, there's a lot of disruption right now in a lot of industries.

And, you know, they see these guys online. And you made a great point about how a lot of their symbols of success aren't actually real. The Lambo's rented. The house is rented. But it looks real. And in this time where we're all looking at each other's Instagrams and we're like the YouTube ad is so convincing, you want to look to these people who are supposedly making so much money. And on top of that, there's been this sort of mantra that's been going around that all the

gurus who benefit from it have been basically preaching, which is you have to get a mentor, Jordan. You have to get a mentor. Oh, yeah. And, you know, who's going to be your mentor? Well, the people who are successful in your life probably don't have time to be your mentor. So let me be your mentor. I'll be your mentor for a low, low price of $2,000, $10,000, $20,000. And look, there's nothing wrong with mentors. But, people teach you what they know. And so what you end up having is a bunch of get rich quick mentors teaching other people to teach get rich quick who are then going to go sell get rich quick schemes and they're going to go teach people how to get rich quick. It's like, what are we doing?

Yeah. Where does this end? It's a cycle. And I often go, wait a minute, why would I want to learn business techniques from a guy who essentially made all his money doing a stock scam in the 90s or some kind of like real estate commercial real estate? It's like great. Okay, commercial real estate. All right, I'm in. Tell me what you have to say. And then suddenly they're showing me how to sell info products, and I'm going, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You own commercial real estate in Arizona, but you're teaching me how to do something online using your course. Like, what's going on here? There's a disconnect. But most people don't think that far. They just go, dude, look at that guy's car. Look, he's got a house, it's got a pool.

I live in an apartment with my mom, and I'm 30. I don't care. Jordan, quit raining on my parade. Let's explore the framework of the guru here. There's a classic framework that all of these guys use. The framework isn't what makes them a scammer, but I think if we teach people the framework, they will go, ah, I'm in this part of their funnel right now. Is this a scam?

I want people's alarm bells to be triggered, even if what they're doing is legit, because they can always work that out later. For sure. Yeah. And it's, as you said, it's just this famous thing. It's called a click funnel, sort of named after Russell Brunson or a sales funnel. And so how it works is sort of at the top of the funnel. You're this cold lead.

You've never heard of this sales guy before. And you see an ad. You see an ad and it's of some guru. You've seen before. You haven't seen before. Let's say, Jordan, you're the guru for today. And you tell me, oh, come to my free webinar. It's always free.

And it's always going to teach me how to get rich. And there's no investment that I initially think I have to make. So I go to your webpage. I give you my email and I sign up for this live webinar. It's never live. They've pre-recorded it. And they've built all these appearances of being. live because they know that if they say it's live, you're more likely to show up and you're more

likely to, you know, kind of sit through the whole thing. So then what comes out of that is a three-hour webinar where they basically pitch you the entire time. It's a three-hour sales pitch for their $2,000 course. And they basically tell you, look at all these people who have had success. A lot of this is about social proof. So, you know, we've kind of joked that they have fake Lamborghinis but there's something a little more sophisticated going on, which is they know that before you, you buy a $2,000 course, you have to believe that they're legit. And so they will show you all the appearances of legitimacy. They will show you the Forbes article that they bought, but they'll not tell you that they purchased it. They'll say, hey, look how successful I am.

I'm featured in Forbes. You know Forbes. You respect Forbes. Hey, look at my students. They made millions of dollars, even though they didn't make millions of dollars. Look at, you know, all my past success. I was just like you. They tell what's called a success. I think it's a story bridge is what they call it. They put themselves in your shoes. They know that their average buyer is broke, you know, disaffected. He's, everything he's been trying hasn't worked. And they say, I was just like you. I was struggling. I was treading water. I almost had to get a job. I almost had to get a J.O.B. Or worse, I was working a J.O.B and hating my life. You know, a lot of people. Yeah, my boss yelled at me for the third time for coming in late. That's right. So what, asleep till 1030.

What a loser. Now he make more money than him. Just a slave to the man. Then I threw my resignation on his desk. Yeah, exactly. If this thing happened that only happens in movies and I was the hero, that's what I see a lot, where it's like, you see this in ads all the time. Like, you're going to do this thing that no one does in real life. But you don't know that. You're 17, 22 years old.

You have no idea that people don't smack their boss in the face and walk out the door and not go to jail. Yes, yes. And here's the key part. They say, look, I was where you are and I bounced around and I made all these mistakes until I found the one secret or the three secrets. Usually it's one or three secrets. And I will tell you that secret to get you from A to Z way faster.

It took me five years to get to a million dollars, five million dollars, ten million dollars. I'll teach you, Jordan, how to do it, a proven blueprint in one year. If you just pay me $2,000, I'll take you from loser where I used to be. I used to be a loser like you. And I'll take you to winner where I am now. And I'll take you there. Blueprint, guaranteed. No problem.

Look at all the testimonials. sign up, baby, right, right, right, right now. And then they go, hey, my course, normally, I'd sell it for $40,000. Normally, it's $100,000 worth of value. Look at all these things I'm going to give you. And it's all a bunch of e crap, ePDFs, E, you know, MP4s that literally cost them nothing to give out. But they say, normally people pay $100,000 for this. But just this second, for the next 50 minutes, I will give this to you for $2,000. Of course, there is no scarcity. It's invented scarcity. Right.

And maybe they'll say something like this, too. This has said a lot. For the first 50 people that sign up. Of course, you're the only one in the webinar, but you think it's live and you think that a thousand people are there with you. They aren't. But they go for the first 50 people that sign up, $2,000. So these people, they rush to get their credit cards out because they think, oh, my gosh,

I better jump on this deal while I still can't. But you think there's other people in the webinar with you because the webinar is programmed to show 900,000 other people. And even the chats can be automated and fake. Yeah, yeah. Well, they all are. Yeah. So when you sign up for webinar, if you ever have, usually you'll see like webinar jam or something like that. It'll go. It'll have this little timer where it says like how long it's been live. And even the guru will say something like, oh, is everyone in chat? Type yes to say that you're in chat and you type yes. And you see a bunch of other names say yes too. And that's pre-programmed. It's all a lie. I mean, like, if you just think about it for a second, if somebody's lying to you from the second they start selling to you, they're lying about it being live. They're lying about other people being in there. They're lying about other people being in there. They're. lying about the fake scarcity, you have to wonder what are their intentions and what else are they willing to lie about? Maybe they're willing to lie about the fact that it's a proven blueprint to me being a millionaire. Maybe. I mean, I don't know. That's crazy. Wild accusations. So wild

promises. What about the cult of personality? That's an ingredient we didn't really touch on, but that's one of the major ingredients. It's never like, hey, look, I'm just a random guy. I just have this thing. Like, I'm nobody special. It's always, look, I'm super, super successful, super, super smart. I'm different than other people, but I'm just like you at the same time. I'm different than everyone else, but I'm also just like you,

but you're different than everyone else, but hey, don't think too hard about this. You're just going to hurt yourself. I'm different than everyone else that you've gotten scammed by, but I'm also just like you. So anyway, just give me your money. Like there's a cult of personality

that's built around this stuff very deliberately, and you see this with a lot of the guys, especially the guys on your channel, which will link in the show notes, that you take down. There's a very specific type of cult. I use the term cult loosely, but there's a type of cult building going on.

Yeah. So let me give an example because, you know, it goes from the not so overt where they call themselves a boss. If you can be a boss just like me, if you follow in my footsteps, there becomes this thing of like the master and the pupil. Don't question the master. You kind of have to, there's sayings like work the system till it works. Stuff like this, like where it's like, you don't question me.

You just do what I do. So that's already like a little bit of a don't question me, whatever. But it ranges from the sort of subtle to the more overt where they're asking their followers to call them Sifu. They're asking their followers. No, to literally call them Master Shri. And I think Shri actually means something like God or like His Holiness. So actually what you're saying is like, and I forget exactly which one it is. But you're saying something like Master His Holiness and in the guy's name.

Oh my God. So it's like literally, overtly, like almost like a worship thing of like you are our leader. There's things where these gurus will say, hey, you're listening. to too many gurus. Unsubscribe to everyone else. Don't listen to anyone. Don't listen to your family. Maybe it's time to cut your family off because they're haters. They're haters who will never, they're not rich. That's classic cult stuff right there. Yeah, yeah, screw poor people. You're your average of your five friends, right? So you better not be friends with anyone who's poor. Get rid of your old friends. Now we can be your friends. In some of them, they call each other brothers and

sisters. We're your brothers and sisters. All you need is your brothers and sisters, your Sifu, your master shri. I mean, I'm not kidding you guys. Like this stuff is, widespread. These people that I'm talking about, millions of followers. It's not like they're small potatoes. These are the successful people. That stuff is a little scary because it cuts people off from the support network that they need not only to get out of this mess, but also the people they're going to fall back on. You did an interview with a guy who was in one of these scummy, I'll say cult, again, the term used loosely, this sort of online business cult. And he was saying he would get an argument with his family because they were like, you are in a scam. You are

like giving your money away to this guy who is scamming you. And he's like, and then I decided I'm not talking to my family because seafood, Dan, told me this was going to happen. And it's like, yeah, you told you that was going to happen because sensible people go, hey, mom, dad, people with life experience in my life. What do you think of the fact that this weird guy online who wears a cheap suit and walks around doing ridiculous stuff with money to try to impress kids? Do you think this guy's legit?

He has no substance anything. And they're like, no, get away from this. It's like, you need to cut those people off. They're dragging you down. It's like, no, these are the voice of reason. It's very deliberate for people to get you away from other voices of reason. When I do this show, I want you to absorb

as much content from everywhere on the internet as possible. If I make a claim, go look it up in Science Magazine. When I do a debunk, I debunked Plandemic. That went over well on YouTube, by the way. I debunk Plandemic. The podcast audience was like, great. In the show notes, there's all these links to science magazine. There's all these links to these reputable scientific journals debunking it.

And on YouTube, it's like just fury. I want you to go look at my sources and go, hey, man, you know, you mischaracterized or misunderstood one of the arguments from one of your sources. But you don't get that. What you see with the guru webinar, the business gurus, what you see is, hey, don't absorb any other sources. Those are garbage. They're going to screw with you.

Only absorb this one channel. of information that I control because if you get other inputs, it's going to mess up the magic of you manifesting more money or whatever garbage they're pumping into your head. Yeah, that's right. And some of them, like I've seen one, they have a bad Apple list where they tell everybody on their thing. These are the channels you absolutely cannot watch. Like, not only don't listen to people, but these are our haters and they are not to be listened to. So don't go to anyone who might have a criticism of us because, you know, you might actually believe it. It'll only work for you if you believe it's going to work. So therefore, if you go out and you seek other opinions, it's all going

to fall apart. Yeah, extremely, it ranges from, like I said, the sort of subtle, a little bit of cult stuff here or there, maybe don't listen to other people so much, to the totally overt bad apple list, call me seafood, brothers and sisters. I mean, like, really, and think about it, this isn't a religion. This is like make money stuff. Yeah. I mean, when did this start becoming a part of make money online stuff? It's so strange. It's bizarre. Imagine you take a job. at like, you know, you're a kid, you take a job in a movie theater like I had. And the boss is like, bow to your sensei. Bowdy or sensei.

It reminds me a Napoleon Dynamite, right? The guy with the American flag pants. Oh, I miss the part where they have you listen to mantras every morning and night, 15-minute mantras. And some of them are like hypnosis guided tapes where the Sifu guides you through this hypnosis about wealth affirmations. I mean, if your average person saw this, they'd be like, this is totally bizarre. But you slowly get sucked into it. That's the thing. Everyone thinks I would never fall for this.

And one of the things that I kind of have to confront when people first hear about this stuff is it is so natural to think, oh, my gosh, who's going to fall for this? But the thing is, is that different people fall for different stuff. I mean, the people who fall for the wealth stuff, they're not going to fall for the romance stuff. There's romance scams now, too, where people, you know, they make you fall in love and send them much money. And it's vice versa. I mean, they think, oh, who's going to fall for that romance stuff? they fall for the wealth stuff. The people who won't fall for either of those, they fall for the health

stuff. The guy who says he's going to cure your cancer with a Himalayan turtle pill or whatever. Let's talk about the money making opportunity, the fake money making opportunities. A lot of these are dried up before they're even shared. Yes. Right? These are like a lot of these money making opportunities are garbage and have long since ceased to work by the time this fake guru is teaching you how to do it supposedly. Absolutely. I mean like a classic. example I always give is there was this Kindle course of how to make a million dollars on Kindle or

whatever, get rich on Kindle by publishing little 15 page books. And that ended up being a gigantic scam because by the time the course was released, this little gimmick that you could do with Amazon's, I don't want to get into it, but there was this algorithm thing where if you're really clever for a very small window of time, there was a way to make some money, you know, making these crappy books. But by the time they made a course about it, the algorithm had changed. And of course, people were making literally nothing. So you're buying a $2,000 course with all the promises, with all the appearances of because somebody really did make a crazy amount of money. And of course, you don't see it. The rule of them is this, guys, if people were making a ton of money with something,

you'd be the last to know about it. They're not going to tell the whole world because they want to basically milk the opportunity for as long as it lasts. And of course, competition dries up the opportunity faster than anything else. And so what you end up seeing is what these people do, they milk the opportunity, and then they sell the course. They get all their money out of it, and then they sell the course. And sometimes they don't even do what they preach. I mean, I know some Amazon gurus who they don't even sell on Amazon. They fake screenshots, like they fake sales screenshots to say like, oh, yeah, I'm such a baller on Amazon.

And then they sold a course, and they never actually did it. They never actually do the thing that they say they're doing. I love that about your channel, because you'll zoom in on this like blurry-ass screenshot of a frame of a video, and you go, oh, that looks like this. And you'll go to that, it'll be like not the guy that owns that website. That'll be like someone else's website. And they're using it as their example of their online business. These people are absolutely shameless.

They don't think you'll notice. I mean, a great example of like the most overt thing that I've ever seen was this guy who's pretty big on YouTube. I mean, super big on YouTube. He faked an appearance on Ellen for like clout for trying to sell his little course where he was teaching you how to make a million dollars on YouTube. or whatever. And part of his little hype reel where he's about to say you his course is him appearing on Ellen. He's like, look how it's successful you can be if you follow my course. But when you actually look, it's this clip of him and then Ellen's like laughing at the clip hysterically or whatever. But when you look at that clip of Ellen, I found it and she was reacting

to some Adele clip. And he cropped out Adele and he put himself and he's like, yeah, look at me out of these people, they're brazen because they know that most people don't look beyond the absolute surface. I'm sure there's thousands of people before me who watched that and unquestioningly said, oh, well, nice job. You got on Ellen. I could get on Ellen too now if I followed this guy's advice. But no, yeah, that's my favorite thing to do. Those busts are hilarious because you know they never thought they'd get busted for it. And it's so satisfying to watch these people. That clip was down within like days after I released my video. He's like, took the whole video down. Yeah. Imagine how long he spent making a fake Ellen appearance. Dude. The thing is,

is nobody's really looking at this stuff except for you. And of course, I always see stuff and suspect it. But like, investigating this stuff, they don't even care. It's like there's this concept. I'm trying to remember who told me this on the show. There was somebody who said, the reason these Nigerian scammer emails are so dumb. And the reason that they are so obviously scammy is that there's, and I don't know if this is completely accurate, they want to screen in the dumbest people.

So they're typically going, why correct spelling? Why correct it? Like I want the dumbest, lowest morons to screen into this because those are the ones who are going to send me $5,000 for PayPal fees or something that doesn't even exist. So there may be something to that, but I think some of it is they know that like the bottom 10% of the population, which is their target, is going to go,

oh, I recognize Ellen from TV. He was on TV. Guess he's credible. Guess I'll buy this. That's all they're hoping for. None of these people are using critical thinking skills. None of them. Yeah, it is unfortunate.

I mean, I remember I had a debate with this. I have debates on my show with gurus if they want to challenge me on points. You know, they can challenge me on points. One of them was, I don't want to say who it is. But basically, we had a phone call beforehand. I said, well, I was actually kind of surprised he wanted to do it. I was like, dude, I'm going to take you to task on this stuff. Is this the kid?

I'm not going to say who it is. But I was like, you lied about this. You lied about that. Like, you're going to get roasted. I mean, I'm happy to do it. But I was just like, are you sure? We're going live. I'm not taking this down.

Because I expected him to, after I did it, to be like, no, you have to take that down, blah, blah, blah. So I was telling him beforehand. Like, oh, shit, I got owned. Right. I was like, I'm not taking this down. So you just do whatever you want to do. He goes, no, no, it's fine. Because of the fact, my buyers do not watch your stuff.

Sure. Because if they watch this stuff, they'd never buy my stuff. So he goes, you know what? my audience that I'm actually targeting with all these like scams, they would never watch someone like you because they're not looking for, you know, critical things. Right. They're just blindly buying into it. And he goes, yeah, so no matter what you say on this thing, I could look terrible to 90% of the world, but that's not ultimately who I care about. I'm targeting, like, as you said, the lowest bottom denominator. And that's why I actually have such a passion about it isn't because,

you know, people are getting rich. Some people say, oh, you're jealous they're making so much money, which they are making a ton of money. But, I'm mad because they're taking it from these just desperate people. I mean, it's like some of them are uneducated, but all of them are poor. All of them are in dire, dire straits, and they're looking for a way out. And you know what? I mean, I've said it before, but desperation is the antidote to skepticism. You're not going to be skeptical of the miracle pill when you're finally sick on your deathbed.

You won't be. You might think you're the most skeptical person in the world, but you'll try anything when you're desperate. And so that's what you ultimately come to. And so it's like for these people to be fleecing thousands, tens of thousands of dollars from desperate people, that's where kind of I draw the line. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Stephen Coffeyzilla. We'll be right back. And now back to Stephen Coffeyzilla on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Before the show, you brought up the example of this one online guru who is suing a single mom substitute teacher with a kid who I think has like disabilities or. or something like that, because she started a Facebook group saying, hey, I never got my money's worth from this guy. And now his customer service has given me the runaround. Instead of just being like, here's a refund, go away. Yep. He's suing her. She's already below the poverty line, essentially, with a disabled kid.

And he's like, no, I'm just going to ruin your life now. So something I've heard before from some of these people is the thing about these victims is they have no money to fight back. So if we just push them legally, they're going to fold. Yeah. Because ultimately, unfortunately, our legal. system is to some extent of pay-to-play system, you just have to have a certain amount of money if you're going to play. So they bully people with money. Yeah, yeah. Single mom, her son was depressed.

She was a substitute teacher who I believe had quit her job because her son was all depressed. And then she tried this HDC thing because she was no longer substitute teacher. So she no longer had money coming in. So she tries HTC. She gets thousands and thousands of dollars in debt and realizes what's going on, starts a Facebook group for victims and says, hey guys, you know, I've gone through this process. I think this is how we're going to get refunds, et cetera, et cetera. Instant lawsuit. Instant lawsuit, drag her to court and basically punish her for speaking up. And also send a message. The whole thing is you're sending a message to everyone else. Don't mess with me. I'm going to see you. It's so sociopathic that it's, it really is itchy. Like it's, there's like a gross itch

somewhere in my psyche. Yeah. Seeing people selling scraping systems to do something that YouTube now demonetize and that's like the secret to wealth in our century. Yeah. You know, the hyperbole is ridiculous. It's always a new opportunity. It's always novel. It's always they don't want you to know. So it really panders to the beliefs that there's an underclass and there's an upper class and the

upper class has secrets. It's not like a factor of luck, which it often is, admittedly, privilege, which it often is. Or education or work ethic. It's always a secret that's been kept from you. because otherwise the sort of reality is, hey, you're downtrodden, and it's going to be really hard for you to get out of this because you don't have this, you don't have that,

and also you're uneducated. And also, you know, this isn't working for you. It's always, no, no, no, no. Guys like Jordan and Coffeezilla, they don't want you to know this because anything you get gets taken away from them, which is just not true. But it plays to the beliefs that a lot of people have,

especially those under the poverty line, or young people who don't want to go through the system of education because it's a big scam, you know, that kind of thing. It's always something like that. And you mentioned before, this is $40,000 worth of value for only $1,000. You don't see clothing that was worth $2,500, but is now $90. Yeah, you see some stuff in clearance. It's rare, but I don't do webinar. I don't do huge amounts of advertising. We have a clearance rack here at this store. Come in here and get the cheapest crap we are trying to get rid of. No, you never have that.

When you have massive advertising and you have fake scarcity, if you don't buy this within 60 minutes, it's gonna be gone. It's a digital product, ignore the fact that we can make infinite numbers of copies, it's gonna be gone. They're gonna take this website down. They don't want you to know. We can't even get Plandemic offline,

and it's a bunch of crap. You have to call on different platforms to censor it. Meanwhile, we're gonna take down a website from some Yuts who's offering know-how on some Reddit videos, like it just doesn't check out. So there's this whole oversell of health, wealth, happiness. You mentioned before, elastic versus inelastic demand. I'd love to hear about that. As an econ major, that's tickling my fancy. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, great rant, by the way. You're so right up my alley, by the way. You're like speaking my language. Yeah, so this is something that I often say

on my channel, which is my whole problem with a lot of the advertising around, you know, these fake gurus because some people say, hey, doesn't everyone sort of exaggerate their product? Doesn't everyone sort of talk up their product to the moon and back? Yes. But there's a difference when you're talking about health, wealth, and happiness, really, because they're what I call inelastic price demand products where basically normally, like if I try to sell you a phone, Jordan, there's only so much you will pay for that phone for the specs or whatever it has. If I try to sell you AirPods, there's only so much, there's a point at which you'll say, you know what? No, absolutely. not. I will not take that. And that fluctuates with how much supply and demand there is. If it's

the last AirPods, you pay more. If there's a ton of AirPods, you pay less. This is what's called an elastic priced product. The price changes with supply and demand. So inelastic demand is where no matter what you're charging for it, I will buy it. I have to buy it. And so products like the easiest way to get people's head around this is you have Alzheimer's. I have a magic pill that cures Alzheimer's. No one else has it and you will pay anything, right? Because it's your life or it's the pill. So this is an inelastic demanded product, whether I charge you 15 bucks or 5,000 bucks, you're going to pay it. The same is true of wealth products. Because think about it. Why wouldn't you buy a $5,000 course? If you truly believe it's going to make you $40,000. If you truly believe it's going to make you a millionaire,

right? Because, you know, I'll put it on my credit card. I'll pay it back when I become a millionaire, right, Jordan? Like, of course, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, why not? I know people, and here's the thing, It's not just young people getting caught up in scams. I remember when I was in college, I went to law school and I had friends who were in medical school, they would do stupid crap and they'd go, well, I'm going to be a doctor. So I don't have to worry about my bad credit score. I don't have to worry about being in debt. Like, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be making so much money.

Now those guys are making like $92,000 a year and they're like, dude, my credit card debt is swallowing my lifestyle whole. I pay $20,000 a month because the interest is $16,000 on crap I bought. in 2006, you know, it's horrible. Yeah. And imagine if you're not a doctor and you're paying that stuff off. You are completely effed. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So like something I covered just the other day on my channel was this real estate scam

where it's another get rich quick scheme, right? Of course. But they were using celebrities to get you in the door. So they would use like the guy from Shark Tank, Robert, I forgot his. Yeah, Hershevec. Hershevec. They would use these people from Flip or Flop from A&E to basically say, hey, we're promoing this real estate thing. And it was all an upsell into a $2,000 course into a $40,000

course. The $40,000 course, nobody there has that kind of money, right? So what do they say? Well, they pitch you to the moon. They do this advertising. You want this product because you believe you're going to be able to pay it back with your millions of dollars. So they say, hey, we're going to apply for a credit card in the back. Let's go apply for a credit card right now. At this seminar, let's go apply for a credit card for you so you can buy this product. And you know, you might be saying, well, hey, I don't have good enough credit. I don't make enough money to apply for a credit card. They can give me a $40,000 limit. They would say, oh, well, don't worry about that. This is kind of what I consider to be an innovation in the fake guru space. Sometimes I see it. They go, hey, listen to this.

Say your income is not what you're currently making. It's what you're going to make as a millionaire real estate investor. Oh, man, that's illegal. Oh, it's very illegal. And they got busted for it. But they would say, like, yeah, there's quotes of them in the like federal trade commission lawsuit. They're like, yeah, just go ahead and say you're making, we usually say whatever you're making right now. going to make $100,000 more. Say that. And they're talking to you, they're coaching you through the little credit card application. Oh, they're like, you're on the phone with a credit card company that coach me through this? You're like, you're like sitting there and they're like, hey, this is what you're going to say. Go ahead, call them right now and let's swipe that card, baby.

Let's swipe that card before you leave this seminar. This is what we're dealing with. I mean, this is so, so, you know, people are like, oh, everybody advertises like this. Everyone does, no, this is a totally unique space of scamming. This is not this Volkswagen is going to make you happy. This is a whole other level. You know, and these people are left holding the back. They're left with a $40,000 collection debt, you know, for a high interest rate. They can't pay it back. They're not making the money they were promised. And then there's a money back guarantee. There's not a money back guarantee. Right. Right. It's a fake. Yeah. I've heard about this where it's like, in fact, we can talk about this right now. Why not? The money back guarantee. Sure. But it's not really

possible for you to get it because of, well, tell us why. I mean, I know this is like a fake. Oh, yeah. It's an action-based refund. There's sketchy policies. Tell us what's going on here. Okay, so this is the dumbest thing ever. It's a diabolically genius because in their webinar, they'll say 100% money back guarantee 30 days. No, like, what do you have to lose? And they'll even tell you that. They'll go, hey, if you have nothing to lose because we have this refund, so you're just letting fear hold you back. Jordan, you're just fearful. Take the plunge, man. What could you lose? There's nothing to lose because if you don't make money, we'll give you your money back.

Then you sign up for the course and there's this little box that says, I've read terms and conditions. In the terms and conditions, they say, well, actually, this is an action-based refund guarantee. And to do this action-based refund guarantee, you have to complete a series of the seven circles of hell, as I like to call it, where you have to jump through hoop after hoop. First, you have to contact 12,000 businesses and get quotes from all of them. Then you have to go through 30% of the course, but not 40% of the course. So it's like this Goldilocks on you.

You have to watch 30% because you have to prove you tried, but not 40% because that would be proof that you're pirating my course. Right, right. And then you have to be posting once a week in the Facebook group and da-da-da. And if you don't know about that at the start, and why would you? Because they made it seem like there's no terms and conditions at all. There's just that little box you check. Right. So people find out day 20.

They email back, hey, I didn't make any money. I need my refund. They go, oh, did you complete the thing? And they're like, no, what conditions? And they say, oh, the conditions listed on our terms and conditions that you... Yeah, you got to leave a 20-minute-long video update every Friday in the Facebook group. If you don't, you can't get a refund. Yeah, there's this joke that, like, you know, we're all trained to sign our privacy policy,

you know, our Apple terms and conditions. And we all just check it without reading. And there could be something diabolical, you know, put in there. But there, you know, almost never is. maybe a few privacy problems. But this is actually that. Like this is actually what everyone fears of like sneaking in this little thing that robs you out of thousands of dollars. I actually have, and I will not say who it is, but I'm planning to have a secret shopper go through some of these courses who are notorious for these refund problems. And we're going to find out. Because I found

this guy, this guy wants to do it. He goes, hey, I know these guys are all scams. I want to go through these courses and I'll go through all the, I'll check all the boxes and we'll see if they actually do the refund like they said. And my guess is no. I mean, I have serious. That'll be interesting. Yeah, it's going to be a good one. Right, right. So, and also there's a lack of a lot of metrics, right? So the metrics can be left up to the discretion of the person selling the course who has no incentive to give you a refund because the whole thing was this game anyway. So it's like, oh, well, not only did you not leave this in Facebook, not only did you do too much of the course, but you have not done a satisfactory, whatever that means, like job working at the various exercises.

There's no legal requirement to outline specifically what you need to do to get a refund. You can also just, you can just not have a refund policy. But they want to give you a refund policy because people go, well, what's a refund policy? So they make up one that is complete malarkey so that later on they can say, well, you didn't fulfill it. And this is very common. I would love to see The Secret Shopper to sort of highlight how real this is, you, have heard slash have talked with people who are literally eating is this true they're eating cat food because they have no money and they're in debt and they're doing these courses yeah i mean not only are they eating cat food they told the salesman that they're eating cat food and they need this product they need

this product they need this product and the sales guy used it as an example of how desperate some of their clients were to make money and they were all laughing about they were all like being like oh yeah oh this is like a leaked call or leaked email well basically behind closed doors, they had this like mastermind of, you know, how the types of people who buy our product. And sort of the more extreme, I mean, admittingly, the more desperate, this is probably the most desperate person you can get on the phone. There was an old lady who basically was eating cat food because she had no money. This had to work for it. This had to work for. And they were talking about how that's the reason they don't like to press into what you're buying,

because why would they press into your financial situation? Because fundamentally, as salespeople, they don't want to know. Right. Because they know the type of people, deep down, they know the type of people who come and buy their product. And they don't want to hear it. They don't need anything else weighing on their conscience at night. Right. It's like a psychological defense mechanism where they can go home and go, well, it's this person, it's fine.

I mean, they'll be fine. They don't want to know that, like, you're basically homeless and you can't even afford food. Yeah, I mean, when I heard that, I was like, yeah, how did you go back to that job the next day? Yeah, or sleep that night. And, you know, it's sort of in these organizations, they're like the big bad guy at the top. But there's also this trickle down of tons of people who are sort of just doing their job, right? I'm just doing my job. What harm am I doing?

And it's sort of unfortunate because, yeah, I guess you are doing your job. You do need this. But I don't know what it's going to take for these people to sort of wake up and realize you're participating in this fleecing of millions of just poor people, the devastation. And this is why I have on my show, I don't just like to have, you know, like take downs and dunking on these gurus. I also like to have testimonials because at some point it needs to hit home for people. Like, this is like crushing people's lives. I was talking to, I told you off the air that I'm exploring this Ponzi scheme right now.

But two of the people from the Ponzi scheme, when it all went belly up, they committed suicide because they spent everything they had. And it's like- So horrible. Yeah, I mean, it's horrible. But like, this is what happens to victims. this is the most extreme case, but this is not the first time I've heard of a suicide because a course went belly up and you spent every single dime you had.

That's really bad. I mean, that goes without saying. It's an understatement. You are contributing to people's demise physically. I mean, that's even probably goes without saying. I'm not sure how much I even need to highlight that. That's sociopathic garbage. We see a lot of these guys having fake sales calls and they prey on the inexperience, right?

I looked at some kid who's like, I don't know, it's like 18, 17 years old. and he's pretending to be on a sales call. After being in sales for a few years, I'm like, this is not how real sales calls go. This is how people who watch YouTube thinks sales calls go. Oh, yeah. Are you going to be a loser or are you going to be a winner? All right, that's what I want to hear.

It's like, you're not selling, this isn't real. So it's geared towards people who don't have experience. And a lot of the social proof is engineered as well. Success story as testimonials are often faked. Tell us the sort of revenue profit scam, where they show the revenue instead of the actual profit. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of testimonials, by the way, before the course is even finished.

That's always nice. This course made me a million dollars. Wait, didn't this come out today? Aren't I on the inaugural webinar for this course? Yeah, you got to project your income. Just like with the real estate thing, you've got to project how much money you're going to make in your success story. So, yeah, the revenue profit thing is really funny. I mean, I saw this guy just the other day, zero to 20 million in one year in sales, right?

Or he doesn't say it. as he says zero to 20 million in one year. But that's not profit. That's, first of all, revenue. And he could have spent, and I've seen this before, they'll spend $19 million or 95% of their revenue is spent in ad spend. And so they've actually made like a tenth of what you make. So one time, because all these people were saying, you know, you make 100K in revenue using, you know, Amazon, I calculated how much you would profit if you made 100K in revenue. And you know what the average person would profit. 100k in revenue sounds like you're making tons of money. And that's what they all preach. Right. Get you to the 100K club. It's what you hear a lot.

It's called your quit your job club. That's what they call it. But that's about $15,000 in profit, given an average profit margin on Amazon of like about 15%. That's reasonable. Because you have to buy the inventory and ship the item. Amazon takes a cut, of course. Why wouldn't? By the way, how do these people think Jeff Bezos is like so generous with money and like profit sharing that he's going to? You've heard all the stories of these people in the factory, you know, like not even being able to pee. You think all of a sudden he's going to let the Amazon sellers make all the money? Right. Hell no.

He takes all the, every step of the way, Jeff Bezos puts his hand in your pocket, takes as much money as he possibly can to get you on a barely living wage. I mean, sure, at the top, the tippity tippity top, people are making some money. They're making a good amount of money. You can even make millions of dollars. But that is so much the minority. I did the math. And 8.125% of people who become Amazon sellers, third-party sellers, will make the income of a fry cook at McDonald's. So these people are saying, quit your job, quit your job with my genius Amazon FBI, quit your McDonald's job, and take a 92% risk that you're going to make less money or no money.

I mean, that's horrible. Of course. You're reminding me of this shouldn't be funny, but it kind of is. So somebody told me, but wait a minute, Amazon is free shipping. And I go, no, no, it's free shipping, not because the shipping part is free and you don't have to pay for that. Because I was trying to explain, you have to pay for the shipping of the item and the inventory. And he goes, no, but Amazon is free shipping. I'm like, it's free for the buyer.

It's free for the buyer. It's not free for you. Yeah, of course not. What are you thinking? And that's the whole thing. Like part of the sales picture of this one, this one guy was like, well, Amazon's free shipping. I'm like, this is not free for you as a seller. Are you insane?

But no, yeah. You're just going to add that to your bottom line. No problem. That's your net revenue right there, buddy. No. No. And if you're trying to drop ship Fidget Spinners, that ship is sailed, man. Nobody's buying those. These Facebook groups are full, and some of the whistleblowers I've talked to there, the Facebook groups are full of people. Hey, this isn't working. Are you guys selling fidget spinners? It's not working for me. They're all competing against each other for the traffic, of course. So there's 7,000 new fidget spinner sellers. And the gurus know this. And so they put you full of metaphors like this to get you to

keep going. They go, hey, you're closer than you think. You're closer than you think, Jordan. You're about to boom. Just when you're at your lowest point is when you boom. So, of course, you can always rationalize that the lower you go, the more desperate you are, the more destitute you are, well, I'm just getting closer to my boom. Of course. I'm about to be, you know, make millions of dollars like my seafood, when in reality, that guy doesn't do what you're doing. He sells the stuff. It's all about, I mean, there's only one way. There's one way to, to make a lot of money in this space, and it's to be the seller of these courses. And I don't encourage it. I think it's awful. I think it's predatory. But, you know, those are the people who are actually making

money. That's the real, quote, quote, income opportunity. It's not any of these, you know, other things. And I want to be careful here. There is a way to make money on Amazon FBA, but it's hard work. It's technical. It's boring. It takes years. It's just like any other business. It's just difficult. It's not a shortcut to wealth. There are no shortcuts to wealth, except for selling a course. That's a shortcut to well. That's right. Selling a course to suckers, that's a shortcut to wealth. We see fake paid profiles on Forbes, Entrepreneur Inc. Magazine, fake Amazon reviews. There's a lot of fake social proof out there. So anytime you see like, hey, other people like this, other people are making money doing this, always doubt what you are seeing, because some of that can either be fake, like the Ellen appearance,

or fake as in this whole thing. With multi-level marketing, you see this all the time. That's a different show, of course, but you see this, someone will go up on stage and go, and then me and my husband, we quit our jobs and we have kids and we travel around the world. And what's funny is you can follow some of these people and maybe you meet them somewhere else. And it's like, oh, this is my, this is actually happened to me. I saw somebody who was like a hardcore MLM supporter. And I go, huh, wow, okay, well, one of those 0.4% people who are profitable and 0.01% people who are making an actual living off of multi-level marketing. Right.

And then as time goes on, it's like, I know some of their friends and stuff. Yeah, you know, Angela, her husband lost her job. I'm thinking, husband lost her job. What are you talking about? They work for themselves. Aren't they doing that stupid MLN thing? Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

He works for UPS. Wait, wait, what do you mean he works for UPS? I thought he quit? No, that's just kind of like, I don't know, maybe cut down his hours or something. I'm like, no, no, no, no. He still worked at UPS. That was just a bunch of bullshit.

And then it's like, wait, how are they going through tough financial times? I mean, she's on stages traveling all across the United States and Canada talking about how much money they're making. Sure. Doing multi-level marketing. Well, you know, those are unpaid. Who cares if those are unpaid? She's making millions of dollars multi-level marketing. Oh, wait a minute.

That's a bunch of crap. She's doing that to recruit to her marketing team. She gets invited to do that at her own expense to recruit to her successful marketing team. but even that grift has gotten so stale that she's now in the red, so she's in financial hurt. Yeah, it's the total unironic application of fake it, till you make it, where they think that it is truly the way to success. I mean, look, fake it to you make it is good for like confidence. It's good for a narrow scope of things. But you would never go into a software engineering job faking to no Python.

You would never, like who you're not going to go into a job and fake having a degree that you don't have. or you shouldn't. And so it is weird the way that these people apply, like the fake it until you make it as if really that is the only way to be successful. Oh yeah, Elon Musk, he must have faked it. Bill Gates, he must have faked it. All these people, they must have faked it. No, they actually learned a real skill. They applied, they grind it. They worked really hard. They ate dirt for years. So, yeah, it is immensely frustrating. I wanted to get on the social proof thing because I find that fascinating because people would be surprised how sophisticated it gets. I think some people are aware. Amazon reviews are fake. That's like the lowest bar. Then it's like, okay, well, people will pay people to get them in Forbes. Okay, that's a little more sophisticated. That looks a little more legit. It has the appearance of being legit. But there's more than that. There are something like I exposed the other day. This guy had Chris Hansen, the investigative journalist. Oh, I saw that on your channel. He paid this guy to create an anti-scam infomercial, where it was all to sell this guy's course as the expert in anti-scam. But this guy himself is a scam. So he hires Chris Hansen because Chris Hansen has such a great, he really does still have the reputation to some extent from his Catcher Predator Days. He was sort of still known. And so he goes, I'm going to hire this guy, pay him a bunch of money and have him say that

I'm the expert in scams. So therefore I am now unable to be a scam myself because how could I be a scam if I'm an expert in scams? That's way more sophisticated. I think most people who saw that probably didn't think to themselves, oh yeah, this is obviously paid, hired. Then you have, I mean, I think we've talked about this a little bit, fake Harvard speeches. Oh, yeah.

I was going to, yeah. I was going to out myself on this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. I got scammed by the fake Harvard speech. Do you want to go over fake PR or are we kind of there already? I mean, we talked about fake Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. profiles, fake magazine placement. Yeah, fake PR real quick for those you don't know. It's not only positive things, it's negative things.

They will get websites removed. They will, you know, work all this SEO magic to basically present the appearance of, you know, of being squeaky clean online while there's this sort of iceberg of dirt underneath the seafloor where it's like what they're hiding from you. So yeah, there's just, I mean, PR companies are making, you know, millions of dollars off these gurus to keep their reputation squeaky clean. But let's launch into the how Jordan got scammed. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our special guest, Stephen Coffeyzilla.

Don't move. We'll be right back. Stay tuned after the show. You're going to hear a trailer for our interview with Frank Abing. nail the inspiration for the movie Catch Me if you can. Frank used psychology and social engineering to pull off a stint as one of the most successful impostors the world has ever known. If you've seen the movie, you know Frank posed as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. He even passed the bar exam. It's more than I can say for a few of my law school classmates. That's at the end of

the show coming right up. Thank you for listening and supporting this show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us going. To learn more and to get links to those great discounts you just heard so that you can check out those amazing sponsors for yourself, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. The link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Stephen Cawthi-Zilla. So this is how I accidentally got taken by a fake PR scam.

So I was at one of my friends' events who's, he's a great speaking coach. and I showed up, and it's like part of his lead gen is he's like, hey, these are my students from last round. And I was like, yeah, I'll happily show you because he really improved my public speaking. And they have vendors that kind of go in the beginning of the theater where you walk in and it's like, hey, here's a cool microphone, here's like a webinar software, here's a web hosting company, that kind of stuff. And this guy approaches me and goes, hey, hey, hey, man, I'm a publicist.

I wanted to know if you wanted to join us at our Harvard event, you can be my guest there. I want you to give a talk before I do my other talks and my other people give their talks at this business school event. I go, wow, cool, yeah, Harvard, that sounds fun.

It's legit. Why not? Yeah. So I show up and I'm like, some of these people are kind of weird and also like, we're in the Harvard business school, but we're kind of like,

we're in like a club room. We're not, this isn't like a big auditorium. What's going on here? This is kind of weird. The first red flag was, where are the Harvard students? These are all people.

Yeah, you thought you're doing some commencement address or something like that. Yeah, I thought I was doing like a club for, you know, online entrepreneurs at Harvard who like wanted to hear from me. I really didn't think about it. But these are all like 40 something. There's like chiropractors and dentists and so now there's anything wrong with those professions. I'm just like, we're the Harvard Business School students. Right.

So I give my talk, first of I prepare it. My talk is an hour long, the general keynote that I gave. And he goes, so it's going to be 10 minutes. And I'm like, annoyed, but I go, you know, I'm a guest at his event. There's obviously some sort of weird reschedule. And since I'm the freebie, he's just going to go, all right, Jordan Harbinger's got to take the hit. And he was kind of apologetic. And I go, fine, 10 minutes, fine, you know, whatever.

It's fine. I'm here with my wife. I'm going to go get a great sandwich. I'm going to go get some crab sandwich later in Boston. So, or lobster, roll. My bad. My bad, Boston. No worries.

So I go and I give the talk. And it's very. weird, like hyped up, kind of weird. They're like, it's all live streamed. And it's like live streamed on some people's phones. And there's like two people watching the live stream because I could see the screen of his assistant's phone. There's nothing sadder than two people watching.

And one of them is the screen you're looking at. For sure that counted. And the other person's like in the other room checking and make sure the sound levels are okay, right? So then I go, huh, that's not a Harvard school logo. But maybe this club has like a different logo that they use. Didn't think too hard about it. After 10 minutes, all these people are approaching me and like, hey, can I take a photo with you?

And I'm like, oh, cool, whatever. It's kind of cool. I'm, you know, not used to that. Yeah. But then I walk outside, and they're like, here's an award for you. And a guy runs over with a camera and I go an award. Like, I wasn't told about this. So I'm kind of surprised.

I take this glass award, or not even glass, like this plastic cut award thing. And I pose for a photo. I'm like, that's kind of a cool, like, weird gift, but whatever. It's a nice gesture. Then this guy in a Hawaiian shirt, I'm not even kidding, runs up, puts his arm around me, and the video guy is still there. And he goes, I'm Jordan's publisher of his bestselling book. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, I stop in the middle of the video. And I go, I don't have a book.

I would love to see this video. Me too. This could be in a cringe compilation of like. Me too, but also I'm kind of glad, like hoping it's not there. So I stop in the middle of the video. I go, dude, I don't have a book. I don't know what this award is. What is going on?

And the guy goes, no, no, no, no. He's like, pause the video, pause the video. So he proceeds to explain, everybody who's going to be speaking at this event, our speeches are going to be transcribed. And the transcription is going into a PDF, which has been pre-sold to, wait for it, everybody in that room who paid to be here. And that's when my world came crumbling down. And I go, holy crap.

Everyone in this room had paid like, I don't know, five grand or whatever, to go and give a talk at Harvard. Everybody except me, I'm the idiot. I'm the biggest dumbass, because I didn't realize what was going on. They took those speeches, or they were going to take those speeches.

They put them in a book. They pre-sold the book to everybody, like, at the same time. Sure. So there's 150 people or something that all bought this book on the same day, whatever. They had their friends and family buy it on Amazon for free or for 99 cents. So it hit the Amazon top whatever list.

They screenshot it in, and they go, oh, you're a best-selling author now. And this guy was the quote-unquote publisher because I don't know, his job was to like manage the virtual assistant that was going to copy and paste all the transcripts into that one book. So I'm like, what the actual F is going on here?

So I walk out, I told my wife, I called her, I went outside, I called her and I go, I just have to process what's going on. And she goes, come back to the hotel right now. I'm changing our flight. Like we fled Boston because we were, like they were as if they were going to chase us. We fled.

And I was like, what is going on it? And so I write the guy and I'm like, hey man, this was so clearly not the business. Like what's going on? Tell me the truth. And this guy explains everything. He doesn't even try to deny it. And he goes, by the way, I'm having an event at West Point in a couple months. Do you want to come? And I was just like, click. Just what planet am I on? This is my favorite story ever. I'd been tricked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was the social proof. By the way, how sad is that? Like, I'm your social proof. So sorry about that. No, no. I mean, this is just a perfect illustration of the different planet that internet

marketers are on. The people who engage in sort of this weird kind of social proof by any means. I mean, it's again, it's the delusional fake it to you make it. Like a little bit is okay, but too much will get you into a world of trouble. And the idea here for everyone who hasn't caught on yet, just to spell it out, is Harvard. Harvard hadn't sanctioned this event at all. Right. The idea is if you put yourself on Harvard campus, you can say, I spoke at Harvard without technically lying.

All of this internet marketing stuff is, I'm not technically lying, but you're lying in every other sense, right? Like, I'm in Forbes. That's true, but you paid to get in Forbes, but you're not going to mention that. I spoke at Harvard. Well, you spoke at Harvard, but Harvard didn't want anything to do with you. And they later banned that guy. I heard about that.

It was like a Domino's because they banned the guy. I'm pretty sure West Point has also banned the guy at this point. So this guy has like slowly tried to find, okay, who's the most reputable person who hasn't heard about me yet? So I can go crash their party, rent out a room. Yeah. And say, so they're speaking at NASDAQ, they're speaking at Coca-Cola, all this stuff. And all these internet marketers, they have this mentality of, well, everybody else is doing it. I got to do it. I mean, if I don't have a speech at Coca-Cola or Harvard, you know, how do I compete against all the other gurus who are saying they spoke at Harvard? And there's this thought that, reputation's never going to catch up with you. And it will. Like reputation will eventually, the internet will figure it out. I believe that. I'd like to think that. And what's funny is, of course, I took that off my website immediately because I put it on like the day of. And I was like, this is so exciting. Spoken Harvard. And I was like, hey, web designer, remember when I gave you that logo and you got to like, so this is awkward, but you have to take it off. And my web, at the time, my web designer goes, why do you want me to remove it? I mean, it's such a good cred.

And I go, it's a long story. Just take it off for now. You know, it was like such a cringe tale between the legs moment. I did, thankfully, speak at Harvard for something else. And I was like, yes. Thank God. Yeah. It was really funny, too, because I remember feeling this unreasonable sense of satisfaction. Because I had made it.

I had to, like, fill that space in my cognitive dissonance for, like, years. And I was like, yes. Okay, now I don't feel like it's such a POS. It's been interesting because the same person who's just such a weird person, honestly, who's doing this. The whole West Point thing, I remember emailing the person they said was going to be at West Point. It was like an astronaut or a general or something. I guess probably was a general. And I remember emailing his team and going, hey, FYI, this is like this thing I was duped in. And his team goes, thank you. We'll take this under consideration. I don't know if they canceled or not,

but I think it might have been kind of too late. Like crap, it's tomorrow. You know, that kind of thing? Because it was like, right. Sure. The trick is they don't tell the person, hey, show up and you're at this bull crap event, we're going to give you 10 grand. They're like, yeah, just do a meet and greet. Couple photos. People want to meet somebody who's in uniform at West Point. And some, like, I guess dean of the schools, like, so I wear my class A and you donate 25 grand to the endowment of this university to give other people scholarships or you give me 25 grand, however it works.

Sure. And they kind of might look sideways at you, but they're like, eh, people want selfies with a general. It can't be any deeper than that. They're not thinking, holy crap, this is like a massive grift. I saw recently that the guy, the guy, okay, he's good at what he does. He tricks a lot of people. And so his whole mentality, his whole philosophy is hilarious to me because his whole idea is fame is proximity to fame.

So if you can get proximity to reputation and status, you will become well respected and you'll be of high status. It's like the most simplistic thought about how reputation works. So his whole idea and his whole pitch to people is, I'll get you on the local news. I'll get you on this and this, and this is going to help your marketing to be able to say that you were on all these things. So I saw one of his recent events, Caitlin Jenner's there. Wow. Who's like a big name? I mean, she's like, yeah.

It's a super big git. And it's like, I thought at the time, wow, Caitlin must be strapped for cash. But now I'm thinking there's no way she knows. Like I didn't realize he was tricking, tricking the speakers. Because in his talks with his students, according to him, he would tell them that it was a fake. up front and he would be totally transparent about it. So I thought, no way. I didn't realize there was a big disconnect between the people who were invited for free

versus the people who were going like as a thing for their marketing and their promos and whatever. Nobody that I, you know what, I shouldn't say that they didn't know it was fake. I'm the idiot who didn't know it was fake, but I don't know if everybody else had a clue. I think if somebody said, hey Jordan, give me five grand, come to Harvard, your speech is five minutes long, I'd be like, what? But I was invited as a guest. So it never occurred to me that this was a grift. You know, I was just like, oh, it's kind of a weird event. Like I said, when I found out my talk was 10 minutes long, which was the day before, I go, huh, okay, so, or a couple days before, I go,

eh, he had like a scheduling snafu. I'm not going to cancel a flight and not go. I'll just go and enjoy Boston, and I'll give a 10-minute talk at Harvard. And what's the big deal? I remember telling my wife, there's probably going to be other interesting speakers there. So that should be fun. And of course, everybody gave a five-minute life story about how they became a dentist. And I was just like, oh, I get it now. But you redeemed yourself. You redeemed yourself and that's where we should leave that story is that you did actually go talk at Harvard. That I imagine that was very satisfying. It was. And I remember thinking, should I tell this story on the stage at Harvard? And then I went, nope, definitely should not. That sounds like a quick way to get.

escorted off the very stage I was on. Like, oh, you were part of that thing. Right. Adios. Before we wrap here, I do want to come up with a, I want to handle a couple objections because a lot of people will go, well, wait a minute. You know, some of this works. It's just that most of the people that do it are bitter because they didn't work hard enough

or they sabotage. And one of the common sort of refrains is, if this doesn't work for you, don't be salty about it. It's because you're self-sabotaging. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that is super common. And all I'll say to that is the people making money off you aren't making money doing what they're teaching you to, quote, make money on. And also, all of this stuff is findable

online for free. As we talked about, they always pitch it as if it's some big secret. But there are no secrets. We're in the age of the internet, baby. I mean, if there are, they're about advanced topics. They're not the basics of Amazon fulfillment by Amazon. They're not the basics of drop shipping. that is a common trap to get victims to blame themselves. And I've seen this over and over again is these victims, they'll have lost $50,000 and they go, you know, I worked so hard, but maybe I was just a little bit off. Maybe if I would just. And it's like, no, this thing that you've been sold is like the blueprint that works. It just doesn't work. No one's gotten rich off of it. Not you, not the person selling it. Like this isn't this proven thing or the opportunity has dried up like we've been talking

about. So, you know, it is true that the one thing that I'll agree with gurus on is that sometimes people don't put into action everything that they sell. But ultimately, their stuff is predatory. It preys on young, desperate, broke people. And it's inexcusable at the end of the day. What about some of this philanthropy for goodwill? There's a whole Pablo Escobar analogy here. Where Pablo Escobar, like, yeah, he killed so many people. He's a horrible, horrible person. and countless deaths, not just the drugs, I mean murdering innocent people who like wouldn't go along with his stuff

or knew too much or whatever, paid for roads and schools in poor areas. So a lot of the people in the area where he wanted to go and take refuge, they would be like, he's great, he built the school in the soccer field where my kid plays soccer. And it's like he killed 3,000 policemen

who weren't going to go along with this and corrupted the whole country. We see a lesser, more amateur internet bullcrapper version of this when we see guys, guys say, I built seven schools in Guatemala. And it's like, yeah, but you got the money from grifting people on penny stocks, D-Bag. There's a whole kind of Pablo Escobar thing. You've seen this, right? Absolutely. I mean, yeah, this guy, like I talked to this charity owner who had been

sponsored by this internet grifter. And he was like, yeah, it ruined our reputation for a long time. I'm trying to rebuild this thing. They were building basically schools in Africa. And this was this guy's whole thing. It's like, how can I be a scam? I'm helping people. And actually, actually, I'll have my students who bought into my thing come down and help with the charity, but he wouldn't pay for their tickets or anything like that. They would pay to be a part of the charity and work and do all this labor. And then he would take credit for all their stuff and say, yeah, look at what is such a good guy I am. I've done all this stuff.

But you're absolutely right. I mean, it's a way to, it's called laundering your reputation. I love that. You do a few good things. But you've also done so many bad things that like this little bit of good, you've done a real actual enterprise maybe, it doesn't all of a sudden make everything else clean, but they think it does. Laundering your reputation, I love that. It's like these guys will make a $2 million donation, and they'll go, see, look at this. I'm here making sure I traveled the world building schools.

I travel the world doing educational programs. I'm donating my wealth. I'm going to join that Bill Gates type thing where you die without your money because you donated it to some sort of disease eradication fund. And it's like, well, wait, how'd you get so wealthy? Oh, I get, oh, you're selling courses on, uh, watch trading because watches are a good investment or some other crap like that. And to be clear, neither of us are donation shaming in of itself. No, no.

And what we're talking about, it's a specific type of donation to, because even I don't have a problem. If somebody made their money illicitly, the best thing they can do with that money is go and donate it to charity. I mean, honestly, you've gotten. it for bad reasons, but sure, go give it to charity. But that's not what they're doing. They're spending it for the purpose of laundering their reputation. They're spending it exactly to show it off all over the internet and you'll often see tweets about it or they'll say like, look how much

money I gave and they make sure to prop it up so everyone can see exactly they won't give a dime without telling you about exactly how many dimes they gave away. And so that's the kind of stuff we're talking about. I just want to be clear about that because I think in the wrong context you can think, oh yeah, these guys are just hating on people trying to do a good thing. Absolutely not. This is another type of social proof that these people do knowingly to basically improve their little e-name and prevent the idea of their scammer from getting out. Right. Like, oh, if you were a scammer, he would have just bought another Lambo and another boat not donated a bunch of money. And it's like, well, wait a minute. The last two years, all this

guy's doing is showing how he's speaking at the event for the charity, how he's traveling around the world. Oh, but he's building school. so it's fine. Yeah, staying in five-star hotels off the grift money, but you know, let's sweep that under the road. It is marketing dollars. Yep, yep. Period. Before we go, I am so curious, there's a lot of these videos that's like, such and such name, guru scam. What's going on here? This has to do with the YouTube algorithm. I can't quite put my finger on it. Is this just a sort of nabbed search results for their name? Because otherwise somebody will find one of your videos where they're actually talking about this person being a scam? What's going on there? Yeah, so they

This is the most bizarre thing you'll encounter if you don't know it's going on is you'll type, you'll have a question about a guru and you'll go, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-d-scam or da-da-da-d-d-exposed. And these videos will come up that says such and such is a fraud, 100% proof. You click on it because you're like, okay, this is giving me the information I want. And then it's a gigantic pitch for their course. They go, in this video, I'm going to show you why I think that he's not a fraud, da-da-da-da, you should buy his course. What's going on here is something called affiliate marketing, which we haven't touched on, which is where I can basically sell your product for you and get a cut of that product. And so what they're doing is, you know, a $2,000 product

is a high ticket course. And when there's no overhead for selling it, it's all pure profit. These people will give a gigantic amount of the profits away to their affiliates, sponsors. And so they'll maybe give $1,000 away for a $2,000 course sale. So what comes up is like there's sort of the shark, the guru, and there's always all these remora around them trying to feed off, you know, the leftover chunks of whatever, all the people, the shark is. eating. And so they make all these videos trying to capture all the people skeptical of this guy and trying to convince them, oh yeah, this is not a scam, whatever. So they can get a sale and they can basically make money off of it. And for the guru, it's a good thing because they get

protection from videos like mine, which show what they're actually doing because in Google search result, they want to show you the most relevant thing. And what could be more relevant to a da-da-da-da-da-da-d scam than, yeah, Jordan Harbinger, scam 100% proof verified. So you this is what you see a lot of the time. You can look up your favorite guru right now on YouTube. I guarantee you'll see a video like this. It'll say what you think you're going to get, and then it'll be the opposite. They'll be basically pitching the guy's course by the end of it. How come these schmucks haven't sued you into oblivion? Well, they've tried. I mean, they've sent me a lot of cease and desist letters. I've had to retain counsel, and we've sent

some letters back to them, basically saying you have nothing on us and, you know, come at us if you want to try. Yeah, come at us and we'll do discovery and then we'll see what your financial records look like. And it's definitely not. I don't want to project that I want or I'm looking for a lawsuit. Lawsuits are prohibitively expensive. Everyone knows it.

They're terrible. Indeed. But I've learned to be careful. I've learned what I can say, what I can't say. And ultimately, a defense against defamation and slander is the truth. And that's ultimately what the reason a lot of these people aren't going forward is when I say, oh yeah, you're a fake guru and you've ripped such and such person off, I'm careful that they actually have ripped that person off and they have. So when they go and they say, hey, you can't be

saying that. The question is, well, was I just telling the truth and you're mad about it? Yes. Sorry, it's hurting your business, but at the end of the day, you're hurting people. So we've got to do something about that. Well, thank you for exposing untruth and fighting for the truth because I think we all know it would be much more profitable if you just lied to everyone. and sold your own course. I think we're on this. I mean, trust me, there are days where I go, there are days.

I'm in the wrong business. But then, of course, you know, I look at my 10-month-old kid and I go, no, no, no, I got to sleep in it. That's right. And honestly, I don't understand how you can need money so bad or want something so bad. Who cares about a car?

You have no integrity. There are days where I go, I'm the sucker. You know, I'm the one who goes, yeah, I can't do that because I don't care about a Lambo enough to want to sacrifice my, reputation. But it's like, maybe I'm the dumbass. We all think that. Yeah. Yeah, I just can't look my family and kid in the face. My wife would, she would literally divorce me if I did something like this. The gap between who I was

and who I am at that point or who I would have be at that point would be so great. It would be like a different person and she wouldn't be able to stay with me. I know this to be a fact. I would lose my family if I were to do something like this. And I look at these people and I go, who's married to you and goes, that's okay. Because we have a jet. That's okay because we go on nice vacations. That's what I always wonder. And I think that has to be a crappy place to grow up. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. And I joke about the same things all the time with my friends. I'm like, I probably would be the best guru ever because I've watched all the greats do it and I've broken down how it works. It's not easy, but it's definitely not hard to do this. It's probably what I would rank as the easiest way to make quick cash. And by quick cash, I mean millions of dollars in the world that I could think of right now. It's not a real business in the sense of there's really not much overhead.

There's not much in terms of labor. It's all about faking it, so you need absolutely zero qualifications. And I'm not trying to pitch it here. My point is... Yeah, I was like, keep selling it. Tell us more. My point is that this industry desperately needs regulation. It desperately needs people to step in.

My call has always been... Look, I don't want to make fake guru videos forever. I find it funny. But ultimately, I hope that the Federal Trade Commission steps. and realizes that this is a massive problem, and they make reforms, I don't think you should be able to say without being punished, hey, yeah, you're going to make a million dollars. Hey, yeah, this is how you're going to get rich. Hey, yeah, come get a Lambo like me. That's called an implied earnings claim. When I'm sitting in front of a Lambo saying, you can be just like me, that's an implied earnings

claim. I shouldn't be able to do that while selling my garbage course. But of course, you know, they're allowed to right now. So that's my long game, is that I hope that happens and that I can move on with my life. And I don't know, maybe I would still do some kind of investigation because I kind of get a kick out of it. There's something in me that likes that justice. You're not going to run out of pieces of crap to investigate on the internet. I'll tell you that. Don't worry. The FTC covers the fake guru scam. We just go after, I mean, where do I even begin with the list of crap? You want to just go after MLM? Oh, the FTC wrapped them into? Cool. Well, let's go after Ponzi screams. Oh, FTC wrote them into? Yeah. Let's go after business opportunities.

I mean, we could do a video every day for the next decade and we wouldn't even run out of the types of scams that people are out there. That's why I wanted to do this framework where people can go, here are the common tactics used by people that are selling you a bunch of crap. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And once again, guys, for those of you out there, you're young, you're looking to make a quick buck. Just give up that dream now. The sooner you give up that illusion of like, I'm going to be the guy who gets the Lambo by the time I'm 26. Give it up now. save yourself a ton of time, learn a real skill, read a book, for God's sake. A lot of this stuff is only compelling to people who haven't read a single self-help book in their life. Like all

these guys are regurgitating, obvious stuff that was written about 50 years ago and said a lot better. So read a book, learn a skill, and you know, maybe get a real job. That wouldn't hurt a lot of people. Yeah, no, that wouldn't hurt. I want to mention, we didn't mention specific scammers because I don't want people to go, and this is important, I don't want people to go, well, they didn't mention this guy. So that guy must be legit. Because we don't have time to mention all of the sheisters out there, all the scammers, all the grifters.

There are too many to count, first of all. So we teach you the framework so you can spot the framework. Because if we mention a name and then we don't mention the next guy who comes out next week, then suddenly it's, well, that guy must be legit because Jordan and CoffeeZilla didn't mention them. So once we teach people the framework through this show and through the podcast version or the YouTube version, in whichever version you're watching

or listening to right now, if you can spot the framework, then you can start to ask the critical thinking and the questions that are required to disassemble this and find out whether you're being had or not. And if you get the framework,

then it doesn't matter what the name is, what the flavor is, what the business opportunity is, it's going to be something that it will scam. You'll be able to spot it beforehand and hopefully before you hand over your credit card. So CoffeeZilla, thank you so much.

I recommend your channel. I watch it all the time because who doesn't want to watch a good take to it? Right? It's entertaining. It's entertaining. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it. Appreciate it being able to, you know, kind of give the gospel to your audience. You got it, man. Appreciate it. Big thank you to CoffeeZilla. We'll be linking to his YouTube channel in the show notes and links to all of this stuff. Also in the show notes, there are going to be worksheets just like there are for each episode so you can review what you've learned here today from CoffeeZilla.

We also now have transcripts for each episode and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships. using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course. That's free. That's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, you can kick the can down the road. You can do it later, but you will run into problems. You have to dig the well before you get thirsty.

You have to build your network before you need it, even if it means you've got to start from scratch. These drills take just a few minutes a day, hence the name, six-minute networking. Find it for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. so come join us. You'll be in smart company. In fact, why not reach out to CoffeeZilla and tell

them you enjoyed this episode of the show? Show guests love hearing from you. You never know what might shake out of that. And speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and follow me on social media. And I'm very reachable there, by the way, people. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with podcast one. This episode is produced by Jen Harbinger and engineered by Jay Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viore. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own.

And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into these scams or thinks they're going to get a mentor or make money online, share this episode with them. I do hope you find something great in every episode, so please do share the show with those you love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen.

And we'll see you next time. When I put that pilot's uniform on, no one question that I looked too young to be a pilot. I did walk up to a TWA counter. It was in a uniform. I was getting ready to purchase a ticket. And she said to me, are you buying or riding? I said, I beg your pardon. You want to be in the jump seat?

I said the jump seat. Yeah, I gave you a pass. Just go on the jump seat. Well, I learned everything as I went. I had no idea you could do this. So then I started riding around on planes in the dump seat. I walked in a bank in a bank, and I opened the account and I handed the girl $100, and she said, well, here's some temporary checks. We'll be mailing you your printed checks. Now, because I was young and inquisitive, I just happened to say to her, I noticed that I don't have any deposit slips. Oh, no, if you need to make a deposit in the meantime, just go over there to that table in the lobby and help yourself.

a blank deposit slip, then write your account number in and then use these to you get your printed ones. Well, I wonder what would happen if I encoded my account number on the bottom of all these blanks, and then I went back to the bank, put them on the shelf. So that's exactly what I did, and everybody who came in put their money in my account. Oh, wow. Frank Abagnale could write a check on a piece of toilet paper drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it, you are hooked, and cash it at any bank in town using a Hong Kong driver's license for identification. I could and I believed I could and I probably would. They only saw that uniform.

They paid no attention to the check. If you want to hear more from the mind of one of the most successful impostors the world has ever known, check out episode one of the Jordan Harbinger Show. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger Show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical. useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top

experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me

later.