Speaker 1: Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
Speaker 1: it it being bad things happening here here being you know,
Speaker 1: wherever you are. We're talking specifically about wherever you are.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts of this podcast,
Speaker 1: and with me today is a guy I have a
Speaker 1: lot of admiration for probably my favorite YouTube documentarian, which
Speaker 1: I guess would be the fastest way to sum up
Speaker 1: who you are and what you do. Dan Olsen from
Speaker 1: the channel Folding Ideas.
Speaker 2: Dan. Hi, Hi, how you doing.
Speaker 3: I'm doing well? Thanks for thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, Dan, you and I have like a topic of
Speaker 1: shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about is your name on the internet is
Speaker 1: foldable human.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You. I don't feel like I could fold you very well. No, Okay,
Speaker 1: So back in high school, I used.
Speaker 3: To be like I was a really small guy, Like
Speaker 3: I was a really skinny guy. And you remember the
Speaker 3: you remember all the ads from the nineties for exercise equipment.
Speaker 2: I do remember some of that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the tagline that they always used for like the
Speaker 3: as scene on TV exercise equipment was that it folds
Speaker 3: for easy storage. Ah and being being dumb ass kids.
Speaker 3: You know. It's like one person in our friend group
Speaker 3: like has a car, but there's like seven of us,
Speaker 3: and so someone's got to ride in the trunk. And
Speaker 3: it's like, well, Dan gets to ride in the trunk,
Speaker 3: Like we're going to stick Dan in the trunk because
Speaker 3: he folds for easy storage. Because I was a small
Speaker 3: guy and so it so I don't know why. When
Speaker 3: I was like busy eric like trying to brand the channel,
Speaker 3: like you know, a decade ago. Uh, I was like,
Speaker 3: I had this phrase that I was using with students
Speaker 3: that I was interacting with, was like, well, let's unfold
Speaker 3: that idea, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, But like that.
Speaker 2: Was kind of like on my mind.
Speaker 3: So I was like, ah, well, we'll like call the
Speaker 3: channel like unfolding ideas. Unfolding didn't really like just sound good,
Speaker 3: so it's like, oh, folding ideas.
Speaker 2: Uh. And then well.
Speaker 3: Esthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human. I don't
Speaker 3: know it, it just it it came to me and
Speaker 3: it sounded good, and it was nowhere on the internet.
Speaker 3: There was like no overlaps. So I'm like, all right, interesting,
Speaker 3: We're good to go. SEO locked in that's.
Speaker 1: An example of a thing that I you know, we're talking,
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking a lot about stuff that's unsettling
Speaker 1: about our modern era and how the Internet has sort
Speaker 1: of altered human dynamics. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: think is kind of neat about it is its ability
Speaker 1: to kind of preserve an amber aspects of you from
Speaker 1: the deep past. Like I have one of my emails,
Speaker 1: like my personal email is a Gmail that I got
Speaker 1: back when you had to get an invite to get
Speaker 1: a Gmail, right like right when Gmail first became a thing.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I'm not going to say it on
Speaker 1: here because then my email will get bombarded with shit.
Speaker 1: But like it's like a stupid joke that doesn't really
Speaker 1: make any sense. And every time I give it to someone,
Speaker 1: their like, why is that your email? Because I was
Speaker 1: like twelve, Like I don't even remember why I set
Speaker 1: this thing. It's just this like moment of something I
Speaker 1: thought was funny when I was pre Pewbescent frozen in
Speaker 1: amber forever. Because that's the Internet does that in little
Speaker 1: ways for each of us.
Speaker 3: I definitely abandoned my original something Awful account because some
Speaker 3: like's like, you know what, maybe.
Speaker 2: Not that user name anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so you are so Dan if people are
Speaker 1: not familiar with you, and I'm going to guess a
Speaker 1: significant chunk of our listenership is kind of one of
Speaker 1: the biggest touchstones for you recently was you put out
Speaker 1: a video about the NFT craze that a lot of
Speaker 1: people have credited with helping to kill it, me among them.
Speaker 2: It's a wonderful, wonderful video.
Speaker 1: Line go up was the actual title line goes yeah,
Speaker 1: line goes up, very good breakdown of how they work,
Speaker 1: why it was a con And you've been doing you know,
Speaker 1: I think kind of the first really the first time
Speaker 1: I became aware of you was you did a Flat
Speaker 1: Earth documentary, which is is very good.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I did an article recently on like AI kids books
Speaker 1: that was partly inspired by an investigation you did into
Speaker 1: these kind of audible slash kindle grifters, the Mickelson Twins.
Speaker 1: So you do that kind of thing, right like you
Speaker 1: you you Bay, You kind of run across things that
Speaker 1: are troubling or confusing to you, and then you investigate
Speaker 1: them to a pretty impressive extent and put together very clear,
Speaker 1: uh video investigations. You know, that's that's uh, I think
Speaker 1: in a nutshell, probably pretty accurate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's kind of where the where the channels ended up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's it's been a few different things over over the years,
Speaker 3: but that's kind of the phase that it's in right now.
Speaker 3: Is this kind of like I don't know, like yeah, documentarian.
Speaker 2: Place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, a lot of your stuff seems
Speaker 1: to focus on basically like the topic of kind of
Speaker 1: online grifter culture and and sort of its intersection with
Speaker 1: like different weird cultic milieuse like there's kind of a
Speaker 1: cross especially like with NFTs, a real big crossover betwixt
Speaker 1: the two, right, Like, it's kind of I think a
Speaker 1: lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between
Speaker 1: old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam
Speaker 1: culture in the United States because and I, by any
Speaker 1: sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this.
Speaker 1: There are more scams and more fraud than right now
Speaker 1: in the United States than at any point previously, and
Speaker 1: basically from all sides, like phone scams are at the
Speaker 1: highest rate they've ever been.
Speaker 2: People are getting.
Speaker 1: Like, like I think the statistic I've got is that
Speaker 1: in March twenty one, I think is kind of when
Speaker 1: that peaked at like four point nine billion robocall scams,
Speaker 1: which is like like just kind of an outrageous increase
Speaker 1: over where it was a few years ago. The rate
Speaker 1: of like fraud against elderly people seems to be in
Speaker 1: an all time high, at least in terms of dollar amount.
Speaker 1: One of kind of the unsettling quotes that I came
Speaker 1: across when I was looking into the degree to which
Speaker 1: old people are being scammed, and it's often through various
Speaker 1: email scams that are kind of based on getting trust
Speaker 1: or frightening them that like someone else is trying to
Speaker 1: scam them and so they need to give in from it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the thing that the quote I came across was a
Speaker 1: regulator talking about this and being like, yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: it's no longer like smaller even medium dollar cons. People
Speaker 1: are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: And then there's kind of like phishing attacks are at
Speaker 1: pretty close to an all time high. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a I'll send you there's a graph that I came
Speaker 1: across in a what was the source on this? In
Speaker 1: a comparaateech article that I mean, it's just a straight
Speaker 1: line up from January twenty twenty nine to like the
Speaker 1: end of twenty twenty two. And so I'm I'm, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of looking at all this, and there's a couple
Speaker 1: of different causes, right, Like some of the stuff the
Speaker 1: SEC did under ajit PI gets blamed for why it's
Speaker 1: gotten even worse with with phone scams, although that's not
Speaker 1: the whole story. AI powered tools have been a big
Speaker 1: part of like why phishing attacks have increased so much.
Speaker 1: But then like you've got like the degree to which
Speaker 1: the elderly are being conned, which is like this kind
Speaker 1: of at this intersection of a few different things. How
Speaker 1: much more online old people are today than they were,
Speaker 1: you know, ten to fifteen years ago.
Speaker 3: For population bubble, yes, you know, multi valent dynamics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but kind of the commonality is that like scams
Speaker 1: are all around, like people, we're all kind of being
Speaker 1: assaulted by scams.
Speaker 3: I mean time, I just I just grabbed my phone
Speaker 3: and like of my last like fifteen text messages.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's like.
Speaker 3: Your pickup is available a couple like three with you know,
Speaker 3: four with actual friends and then interact you just received
Speaker 3: an e Interact transfer high long time, no talk, just
Speaker 3: got your money, Okay, we'll send soon. Three hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty nine can now be routed to your institution. Submit
Speaker 3: Why the Canada Revenue Agency has sent you money? Your
Speaker 3: verification code for visa transfer is And it's like it's
Speaker 3: like it's just.
Speaker 2: Constant, constant. I hadn't even because like.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to be shocked at all if I
Speaker 3: get a phishing text message during this conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like between my email and and like my text
Speaker 1: messages or just phone calls, right, I get every day
Speaker 1: I get two or three calls from scam likely, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: my good friend scam likely. Yeah, my old buddy, he's
Speaker 1: always got always got something cooking. But yeah, it's and
Speaker 1: I this kind of like I started focusing on this
Speaker 1: more a couple of months ago because you know, I
Speaker 1: had vaguely noticed, boy, it's just like nothing but fucking
Speaker 1: scams coming into me through my phone these days. And
Speaker 1: then a couple of months ago, I got a phone
Speaker 1: call from my bank and it was one of those things,
Speaker 1: like everyone else my cell phone lets me know when
Speaker 1: like a call is from scam likely, or when it's
Speaker 1: from like you know, and it had the name of
Speaker 1: my bank on there. It was the right number, you know.
Speaker 1: So I pick it up and human being is on
Speaker 1: the line and they're like, is this you know, Robert
Speaker 1: Evans And I'm like yeah, And then they're like, we've
Speaker 1: seen some like fraudulent activity on your account. Can we
Speaker 1: ask you a couple questions? And that is I've gotten
Speaker 1: that call before. Legitimately, you know, it's not a weird
Speaker 1: thing for your bank to be like, hey, let's talk
Speaker 1: about these cuss.
Speaker 3: Are you in the country right now? It's like no,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm in New York. It's like, okay, so we're
Speaker 3: seeing activity out in New York.
Speaker 2: That's you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you just buy something in Florida? No, I
Speaker 1: never go to Florida, but uh so yeah so And
Speaker 1: I didn't actually get to see where they were going
Speaker 1: with this. Nothing suspicious had happened. But like after they
Speaker 1: say that, I'm like okay, yeah, like what's what's the charge?
Speaker 1: And then my phone disconnects right like it's you know again,
Speaker 1: my where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, so like sometimes connectivity is not great. So
Speaker 1: I call them back, you know, and I get on
Speaker 1: the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what's
Speaker 1: what seems to be up? And I'm like, well, you
Speaker 1: guys called me saying that like that there was some
Speaker 1: possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. The
Speaker 1: lady on the other end is like, no one here
Speaker 1: called you. Like, I'm looking at your record. I can
Speaker 1: tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have any
Speaker 1: record of that. And I explained what happened, and she
Speaker 1: like goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like,
Speaker 1: so that was a scam. They've this is something we've
Speaker 1: seen more and more lately. They've they're able now to
Speaker 1: actually just spoof our banks and this is my bank
Speaker 1: is a significant sized institution. They're able to spoof our
Speaker 1: phone number now and so you can't tell through the
Speaker 1: caller ID, And like it was this whole thing where
Speaker 1: like obviously I know, don't give certain things over the phone,
Speaker 1: even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never
Speaker 1: got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but
Speaker 1: it was just like, well, shit, like what are you Like?
Speaker 1: That's this is now well beyond a thing where like
Speaker 1: you're getting called and someone's offering you you know, to
Speaker 1: make a bunch of money, you know, holding a Nigerian
Speaker 1: prince's wealth or something. If you sit in your bank account,
Speaker 1: this is your bank calls you and your phone tells
Speaker 1: you that it's your bank, and a human being who
Speaker 1: sounds just like the bank teller like it's it's gotten
Speaker 1: so and I think kind of the broad obviously, each
Speaker 1: of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is
Speaker 1: a worthy story and a separate story in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, but they also come together in this like well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not it's not like weird at this
Speaker 1: point to note that everybody seems angrier, and everybody seems paranoid,
Speaker 1: and you hear more stories about like people opening fire
Speaker 1: on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around, and
Speaker 1: there's you know that story. Obviously there's guns and stuff
Speaker 1: that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much
Speaker 1: of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by
Speaker 1: the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers
Speaker 1: at all times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a good observation, like that, just
Speaker 3: we're seeing this erosion of public trust in reality. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And and some of that is like deliberate and political.
Speaker 3: Uh And a lot of it is just coming from
Speaker 3: like the fact that technology has enabled spam in in
Speaker 3: unprecedented new vectors and the fact that you can like
Speaker 3: that you can automate bombarding people with.
Speaker 2: Noise. Uh.
Speaker 3: Is is just kind of it's eaten away at all
Speaker 3: of us because it's like, how do I how do
Speaker 3: I trust anything? I mean so like and this is
Speaker 3: the thing is it's like, Okay, so I've been I've
Speaker 3: been keyed into this and thus paranoid for like a
Speaker 3: decade now. So if I get a message that's like,
Speaker 3: you know, like that from my bank, if it comes
Speaker 3: in text, then it's like I don't interact with the
Speaker 3: original thing that it came from. I then go like
Speaker 3: on the website. It's like all right, I like call
Speaker 3: my bank to uh to to inquire about it. Like
Speaker 3: never you know, it's like never communicate through the channel
Speaker 3: that you're first contacted in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're dealing with your bank. And it's like
Speaker 1: and it's like, but is that level of paranoia healthy?
Speaker 1: And it's like that takes that also takes effort.
Speaker 3: That means you have to have the foresight to be like,
Speaker 3: do not panic see the thing process it consciously go
Speaker 3: somewhere else and like, you know, activate a different channel.
Speaker 3: You know, if they contact you through text, you know,
Speaker 3: go through like email or or like live chat. If
Speaker 3: they contact you through email, call them on the phone,
Speaker 3: not with the phone number that was at the bottom
Speaker 3: of the email, go to the website. And it's like
Speaker 3: that's effort, that's effort. I don't even have that much
Speaker 3: energy in me sometime, and a lot of other people
Speaker 3: just like absolutely don't. And and that leads to like
Speaker 3: just exhaustion, vulnerability, you know, all of the things that
Speaker 3: feed into like paranoia, distrust, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And it's it's relentless. Like online advertising is
Speaker 3: basically useless at this point. Oh yeah, because like if
Speaker 3: you ran, if you ran a legitimate ad, you know,
Speaker 3: unless you have the money to run like a real
Speaker 3: proper you know, basically TV commercial. Yeah, like banner ads.
Speaker 3: I haven't I've seen like I don't know one legitimate
Speaker 3: banner ad for like a car company in the last year.
Speaker 3: Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or you know,
Speaker 3: liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's this constant like number one, It's
Speaker 1: led me to the situation where when I see an
Speaker 1: ad on social media in particular, but with any sort
Speaker 1: of like print in online ad, my assumption is it's
Speaker 1: probably a con right. Yeah, even if it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: that shirt looks nice, well, that company is probably not
Speaker 1: going to ship me that shirt right like, or it
Speaker 1: won't be right like, yeah, it'll be that photo is
Speaker 1: absolutely not from the company that is running this ad.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You just you assume you distrust as a as
Speaker 3: a first measure. You see you see a banner ad,
Speaker 3: you see the aesthetics of advertising, and the assumption is
Speaker 3: that it's like, ah, that's gonna you know, that's gonna
Speaker 3: get me to sign up for some subscription that's going
Speaker 3: to be buried in like recurring payments that yeah, I
Speaker 3: will never be able to cancel.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting because I, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if this has been your experience, but like I
Speaker 1: can acknowledge, I think I morally have to acknowledge, like
Speaker 1: part of my success financially as a creator has been
Speaker 1: as a result of that. Because one of the things
Speaker 1: that we've seen in the ad market is that text ads,
Speaker 1: ads for print and shit do not work, do not
Speaker 1: function in any way, shape or form, and a lot
Speaker 1: of like random innersitt ads don't work well, but creator
Speaker 1: ads work well, and so there's money in it, right
Speaker 1: because people listen to like people have a degree of like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well this is like number one. It's just like the
Speaker 1: process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is
Speaker 1: different from an article. But like the ads work better
Speaker 1: because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum
Speaker 1: of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation
Speaker 1: you have on Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yea a human that I can confirm existence has at
Speaker 3: least taken.
Speaker 1: A look at this, like this is not at least
Speaker 1: like not a complete con or whatever, right yeah, or.
Speaker 3: If it is, then like then the host has also
Speaker 3: has also been.
Speaker 2: Kind of like gone by that and whatever, Like it.
Speaker 3: Ends up, yeah, we're in this together. Like it ends
Speaker 3: up being at least like a little bit sort of
Speaker 3: sort of distant distanced from that, you know, like the freakin'
Speaker 3: you know, by by a square foot of land in
Speaker 3: Scotland and become a lord and that whole thing is
Speaker 3: like a scam being run out of China. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I Mean one of the one of the kind of
Speaker 3: like weird ironies for me is it's like, okay, so
Speaker 3: line goes up, came out, well, the crypto ecosystem was
Speaker 3: in its like biggest ad blitz ever. You know, they
Speaker 3: had the Super Bowl ads coming up just like a
Speaker 3: month later, actually weeks, like weeks afterwards, and so you know,
Speaker 3: like the vast majority of the like mineral ads that
Speaker 3: ran on that video were crypto dot Com, were ftx,
Speaker 3: were binance, and and the ad rates that they were paying,
Speaker 3: like the CPM that they were paying to run on
Speaker 3: crypto relevant videos was insane. It was like it was
Speaker 3: like twenty eleven all over again.
Speaker 1: Twenty eleven was the only good time to be in
Speaker 1: digital content creation. There's like a lot that's unsettling about that.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that is like most
Speaker 1: frustrated to me is the degree to which it's meant
Speaker 1: that we've we've gone backwards. Like there was this people
Speaker 1: who like study tech and kind of the way socialization
Speaker 1: around big tech works talk about this thing called the
Speaker 1: trow of disappointment, right, which is when you get a
Speaker 1: new technology, everybody we're in like the hype phase for
Speaker 1: like AI right now, right, yeah, And then at a
Speaker 1: certain point it becomes clear which aspects of the hype
Speaker 1: were right, you know, the degree to which the technology
Speaker 1: is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists
Speaker 1: were claiming, and to which extent the hype was wrong
Speaker 1: right in what areas is the tech always going to
Speaker 1: fall short? And that's called like the trow of disappointment
Speaker 1: when people start to reel and then you know, things
Speaker 1: kind of are supposed to level after that's dot com
Speaker 1: is not in fact magic, Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can't
Speaker 1: just keep shoveling money into this shit forever and the
Speaker 1: hopes of exponential returns. Or as a consumer, like at
Speaker 1: a certain point, I can remember the time when phones
Speaker 1: were exciting and I was, as especially as a journalist,
Speaker 1: like really interested every new year at like what new
Speaker 1: things they're capable of. And then after a couple of
Speaker 1: years it was like, well, every phone is like there's
Speaker 1: no difference. Now there's no excitement in getting a new phone.
Speaker 1: It's just like, well this my old phone is broken,
Speaker 1: so I need a new phone. But like I'm not
Speaker 1: like wow, the new capabilities of this device, but I
Speaker 1: feel like there's another I don't even I don't really
Speaker 1: know what to call it. But there's also this kind
Speaker 1: of thing where we the Internet helps to create, or
Speaker 1: is the method through which is disseminated a new labor
Speaker 1: saving device, and then the scams reach such a density
Speaker 1: that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's I feel like there's like a that's
Speaker 1: at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially
Speaker 1: with like digital communication, with just communication in general. Right,
Speaker 1: my smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all
Speaker 1: the time, and now my smartphone like it. Obviously I
Speaker 1: still carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text
Speaker 1: messages are mostly scams, and my emails are mostly scams,
Speaker 1: and most of the calls that I get are scams.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I've actually been finding myself drifting back towards email as
Speaker 3: a communication medium just because the spam filters are better,
Speaker 3: you know, mature and sophisticated and for the most part
Speaker 3: they work. Yeah, like they're yeah, it's like I can
Speaker 3: actually people can actually reach me by email.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: And you know, like there's there's a whole tech like
Speaker 3: really kind of the big thing is there's this whole
Speaker 3: technological element to it.
Speaker 2: And you know, when you when you.
Speaker 3: Sort of pitched the idea of this conversation with the
Speaker 3: first two places, my brain went to where John Romulus Brinkley,
Speaker 3: the goat testicle doctor yes, yes, yes, and pioneer of
Speaker 3: new media radio and and of course uh and Marshall mcluan. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, like those those were the those were the
Speaker 3: two things that my brain immediately was like, this is
Speaker 3: this is sort of like relevant to it because like
Speaker 3: Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio. He he
Speaker 3: absolutely advanced sort of the format of like what radio
Speaker 3: could be and how you could use radio to not
Speaker 3: just extract money from people, but get them onto your
Speaker 3: side such that after they have given you their money,
Speaker 3: like they're they're not just they're not just your your victims,
Speaker 3: You're you're not just rolling into town and selling them
Speaker 3: some some snake oil and then like skid daddling as
Speaker 3: fast as possible, you have made them into your fans,
Speaker 3: into your followers. And you know the way that he
Speaker 3: did that by connecting his scam to like a sense
Speaker 3: of identity. You know that he wasn't just this fake doctor.
Speaker 3: He was also so effectively a pastor.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, people who had defend it after there was
Speaker 1: no longer any chance of them, Like after it had
Speaker 1: been sort of proven that the thing that he was
Speaker 1: promising was not real, right, Yeah, like once there was
Speaker 1: no more. It's almost like you know that play the
Speaker 1: Music Man, Yeah, yeah, if you if you at home
Speaker 1: or not, Like I'm not.
Speaker 2: A huge musical theater guy. This is a pretty famous play.
Speaker 1: But like the basic idea is this guy tells everyone come,
Speaker 1: this con man comes to town, tells everyone he's gonna
Speaker 1: make like a big band and raises money for it,
Speaker 1: and his plan is to like take the money and run.
Speaker 1: It's kind of what the Monoail Sketch and The Simpsons
Speaker 1: is based on to a significant extent. And if I'm
Speaker 1: remembering correctly, I shouldn't have brought this up, maybe because
Speaker 1: I'm actually not that knowledgeable about musical theater. But my
Speaker 1: recollection of the way it goes is that like he
Speaker 1: falls in lover some shit and feels bad, and you know,
Speaker 1: they wind up he winds up becoming not a con man.
Speaker 1: But like I think the modern version of that is
Speaker 1: he just he gets people to like adopt as a
Speaker 1: religion and the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms
Speaker 1: and tubes and shit are on the way, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, then they attack the local newspaper and string
Speaker 1: a journalist up in the center of town for telling
Speaker 1: them that there were ten years into this city, hasn't
Speaker 1: started a bay anyway, whatever, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so so the other mccluan, you know, his his
Speaker 3: famous postulate, the medium is the message, which remains a
Speaker 3: radical observation to this day, is just that it's this
Speaker 3: assertion that the medium itself is more important than any
Speaker 3: given message on it, or even the like the the
Speaker 3: combined weight of the individual messages. Now, I think in
Speaker 3: some regards mccluan kind of went like overboard with that
Speaker 3: because he said that it's like content doesn't matter at all,
Speaker 3: and it's like, ah, I think content matters. But the
Speaker 3: point still stands that like the medium itself, the like
Speaker 3: the invention of radio, the invention of television, the invention
Speaker 3: of the internet, the invention of social media had a bigger,
Speaker 3: like has had a bigger impact than any given thing
Speaker 3: on it, because that's the thing that ultimately we warp
Speaker 3: our lives around that, we restructure our homes around, we
Speaker 3: restructure our physical environment around, we restructure how we spend
Speaker 3: our days like that, our time usage gets warped around
Speaker 3: the medium itself, and thus the medium becomes the portal
Speaker 3: for information to travel.
Speaker 1: Through absolutely and it also I mean, I think there's
Speaker 1: an extent to which that is true of kind of
Speaker 1: the way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. I
Speaker 1: think there are a lot of people, and I think
Speaker 1: there are a lot of things that people a lot of,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people
Speaker 1: adopt because somebody who they had come to already like
Speaker 1: expresses those politics, right, and so something that maybe never
Speaker 1: would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able
Speaker 1: to get purchased with them because like a dude that
Speaker 1: they are, a lady, that they had a parasocial relationship
Speaker 1: express this kind of stuff. And it just it's not
Speaker 1: that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like
Speaker 1: people are you know, little robots. It's that, uh, this
Speaker 1: is kind of the way influence works. It's the same
Speaker 1: reason why like your you like, people often wind up
Speaker 1: believing similar things to their parents or similar things to
Speaker 1: their friends group.
Speaker 2: You know, if your friends are.
Speaker 1: All saying like you know, on the positive end of things,
Speaker 1: if you're if you grow up like like I did.
Speaker 2: I don't know about your high school, but if you.
Speaker 3: Are like I like that. I was just thinking the
Speaker 3: same thing. Like my vocabulary in high school.
Speaker 1: Was yeah, yeah, there is there's a slur that starts
Speaker 1: with F. That was like every third word out of
Speaker 1: not just my mouth, but everyone I knew. No. The
Speaker 1: movie super Bad captures this to a significant degree of fidelity.
Speaker 1: To be honest, that's just the way shit was. And
Speaker 1: like the early aughts, and then you know, the people
Speaker 1: I hung around with, suddenly there were more people who
Speaker 1: were openly queer. And suddenly people weren't talking that way,
Speaker 1: and I stopped talking that way. It's just how people are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just from like somebody that I admired being like, hey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't say that. I don't think that's cool.
Speaker 2: Oh that is kind of fucked up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then you know, and it's it's not an
Speaker 1: like yeah, I can I can go to my the
Speaker 1: subreddit for my show and see people being like yeah,
Speaker 1: I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history
Speaker 1: and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that's bad, because I think anarchist's history and politics
Speaker 1: are useful even if you're not an anarchist, Right, it's
Speaker 1: valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this
Speaker 1: is the same dynamic, This thing which has benefited me
Speaker 1: and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: I think are should be more widely known. This is
Speaker 1: also why there's more Nazis, right, like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: cuts every where which way.
Speaker 2: And so so mccluan.
Speaker 3: You get these new you get the Internet, you get
Speaker 3: the subdivisions of the Internet, like you get social media,
Speaker 3: you get email, you get you know, instant messaging and whatnot.
Speaker 3: And because those technologies have this gravitational effect around them
Speaker 3: that alters the trajectory of how we structure our lives,
Speaker 3: they become because they are potent, because they are valuable
Speaker 3: communication vectors. They become prime targets for grift. And the
Speaker 3: thing is is that all of these technologies that have
Speaker 3: accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out
Speaker 3: like the negative impacts of social media, and just like
Speaker 3: the the effect on like self esteem, self perception of
Speaker 3: just being exposed to other people's curated, idealized version of
Speaker 3: themselves so constantly. You know, it's like this like that's
Speaker 3: already you know, uh, impactful in potentially negative ways.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And that's when you're dealing with like real people.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And but then you add on to that that it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: you go on Instagram and like you can be following
Speaker 3: a bot and not even know it. You know, you're
Speaker 3: you're getting you know, and the algorithm is going to
Speaker 3: float this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down
Speaker 3: these like these addictive infinite scroll feeds, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: you don't have the filter of pre interaction to to
Speaker 3: gauge those things. So like so like I follow you
Speaker 3: on Twitter, and I know that if I see, like, oh,
Speaker 3: Robert Evans has retweeted this thing, that it's like okay,
Speaker 3: so like he's taken a look at it, uh and
Speaker 3: and it's been through like the filter, the filter of
Speaker 3: his brain, and so I can probably just like, you know,
Speaker 3: take my trust in that thing up like one notch, right.
Speaker 3: But if I'm just like scrolling down the like the
Speaker 3: algorithmically curated like this is what our computer has determined
Speaker 3: is similar to things that you have already looked at.
Speaker 3: It's it's just it's so much more fraught. But there's
Speaker 3: it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh,
Speaker 3: I trust this thing, I trust this platform. And that's
Speaker 3: where we get into the trow of disappointment. Is yeah,
Speaker 3: this like, I trust these algorithm. These algorithms do a
Speaker 3: really good job of like, oh, I watched Dan and
Speaker 3: so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to like a bunch of.
Speaker 2: Other really good creators. Cool.
Speaker 3: Uh oops, I watched one video on flat Earth and
Speaker 3: now my my recommends are full of like COVID denihialism
Speaker 3: and anti maskers and you know, the Trucker movement and
Speaker 3: and all of these other like wedges to just sort
Speaker 3: of slowly rot in my brain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it it's it's like kind of the
Speaker 1: way our parents told us, or dare or whatever told
Speaker 1: us drugs worked, you know when we were little kids,
Speaker 1: where someone's like, oh, you want some pot. Here's some
Speaker 1: straight up heroin, right, like you want some of it is too,
Speaker 1: like you want some crack cocade? No, and I it
Speaker 1: is you know you were talking about like yeah, you
Speaker 1: see you follow someone and you see them share something,
Speaker 1: and if they're a trusted source for you, you know,
Speaker 1: it bumps it up a notch. And even that you
Speaker 1: know that's the way it, like it works for me
Speaker 1: as well. But there's a degree to which I find
Speaker 1: it like problematic, especially because like we all fuck around
Speaker 1: on the internet too. I had a thing go crazy
Speaker 1: viral recently where like someone someone posted an obviously photoshopped
Speaker 1: image of like a control, like a Logitech controller at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the of the sea and was like, look,
Speaker 1: the controllers survive, and I like, I shared it to
Speaker 1: make a joke, right, and the joke was that, like, well,
Speaker 1: the joke was that like, well the control or we're
Speaker 1: gonna find out was one of the more functional things
Speaker 1: about that terrible sub and that was And I even
Speaker 1: posted underneath it this obviously this is not a real image, guys.
Speaker 1: But like then I saw, like I wound up finding
Speaker 1: it went. The post that I did of it went
Speaker 1: so viral that like it wound up like screen captain
Speaker 1: in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about,
Speaker 1: and they it was only the first post, not the
Speaker 1: one where I was like, obviously this is fake, and
Speaker 1: like it was a joke. You know, it was it
Speaker 1: was a it was a it was a ship post.
Speaker 1: We were banton online. Yeah yeah yeah. But also I'm like,
Speaker 1: I wonder how many people now think that literally there's
Speaker 1: a Logitech controller that they found at the bottom of.
Speaker 2: The sea because of that?
Speaker 1: What is what are the ethics now of like making
Speaker 1: a making a ji a jape as like somebody who's
Speaker 1: got like a following, like where does that come into?
Speaker 1: And like I don't know, and I don't I'm certainly
Speaker 1: not like clear on it because I seem to be
Speaker 1: incapable of not shit posting. I spent too much time
Speaker 1: on something awful as well.
Speaker 2: But it's so.
Speaker 3: It's so hard to give up.
Speaker 2: I miss it.
Speaker 3: I miss the days when I could just make like
Speaker 3: tasteless jokes on on on Twitter and you know, a
Speaker 3: couple hundred people would see them and go like that's funny. Uh.
Speaker 3: And now it's like, ah, if if I'm a little
Speaker 3: too ironic, someone's going to be like, oh crap, are
Speaker 3: are you like that happened? It's like, no, no, that
Speaker 3: did not happen. But that did not happen. This is
Speaker 3: this is fake.
Speaker 2: I am. I am telling you lies for it was
Speaker 2: a bit, but it was a bit.
Speaker 1: I was doing a bit, but no, And that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, something awful, which is kind of the the
Speaker 1: the digit It's like the oh crap, now I've forgotten
Speaker 1: a very basic science team, you know.
Speaker 2: The big the big puddle of boiling goop.
Speaker 1: That life came out of the prim It's the primordial,
Speaker 1: primordial of digital culture. That's what Something Awful was. It
Speaker 1: was a forum website that gave birth in various ways,
Speaker 1: some direct and some indirect to four Chan, to Reddit,
Speaker 1: to Twitter culture, you know, to all of these different
Speaker 1: to anonymous, to all of these different things have a
Speaker 1: you can trace a lineage back to Something Awful. And
Speaker 1: the motto of that website, as written by the terrible
Speaker 1: person who founded it, was the Internet makes you stupid.
Speaker 1: And I at the time what that kind of meant was.
Speaker 1: And if you're younger, or if you just weren't very
Speaker 1: online in the late nineties early two thousands, you may
Speaker 1: not remember this long period, but there was a fairly
Speaker 1: long period where the default assumption in regular society was
Speaker 1: whatever happens online doesn't matter, right, like, it can't matter.
Speaker 3: Probably fraudulent, it's almost certainly like made up. You can't
Speaker 3: you can't trust anything online.
Speaker 1: And real people are not on the internet, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's kids, it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who
Speaker 1: run banks aren't online. You know, Like the idea that
Speaker 1: the richest man in the world would spend all of
Speaker 1: his time shit posting was absurd, Like, so.
Speaker 3: He really should be busier than he observably is he?
Speaker 1: Certainly it seems like it, although I guess so should
Speaker 1: I if I if.
Speaker 2: I'm being fair, But yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: There's this, uh, this degree to which digital culture is
Speaker 1: still very much a huge chunk of it. Like we
Speaker 1: all want it to not matter. We all want a
Speaker 1: place where we can just shit post and bullshit because
Speaker 1: shit posting and bullshiting comes out of like the very
Speaker 1: same impulses that like determine a lot of how we
Speaker 1: interact with like our friends, right, you know, we all
Speaker 1: need some times where you can just sit down, have
Speaker 1: a couple of beers or whatever and like say shit
Speaker 1: with your with your buds, you know, and it's not
Speaker 1: it's not being recorded, it's not going up any everywhere forever.
Speaker 1: You can just kind of like talk. This is the
Speaker 1: it's a it's a field almost social experimentation is a
Speaker 1: huge part of maturity of growing up, becoming a person. Uh,
Speaker 1: and I think we all get kind of there's a
Speaker 1: degree of like the accessibility of the Internet that makes
Speaker 1: that impossible to entirely get over even though it is
Speaker 1: demonstrably untrue. What happens on the Internet matters quite a lot,
Speaker 1: and you can have a real significant you can influence
Speaker 1: your own life in very negative ways by saying.
Speaker 2: The wrong thing on the Internet at the wrong time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean lots of people have observed just this
Speaker 3: fact that it's like on Reddit, you can you're not
Speaker 3: on Reddit, I mean on Reddit too, but you know,
Speaker 3: on Twitter, like once, you know, once a month, Twitter
Speaker 3: elects some ten follower anime profile pick with who with
Speaker 3: with a single tasteless joke and makes it the full
Speaker 3: crim of reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's like that's a and.
Speaker 3: The thing, I don't think this is actually that far
Speaker 3: off topic, just because like it's this warping of reality,
Speaker 3: this warping of like what is real, what is trustworthy,
Speaker 3: what are the like impacts of things, And the fact
Speaker 3: that like you know, ten follower account can become can
Speaker 3: become international news. Yeah, has to sit alongside the endless
Speaker 3: bombardment of Dick pills and global leaders. Like I had
Speaker 3: this joke that I was trying to formulate over the
Speaker 3: weekend of like World War two with Twitter, where it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, just a joke hinging on the idea that
Speaker 3: some like follower bought would observe this like, ah, it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, two posts in a row, Like it's like
Speaker 3: the USSR has rolled into Berlin, Stalin has unfriended the President.
Speaker 3: I hope this doesn't mean anything, you know that it's
Speaker 3: like the you have, like you have international politics happening
Speaker 3: in the same space as fake international politics, as the
Speaker 3: same space as just like this endless bombardment of you know,
Speaker 3: of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality and spam, and no
Speaker 3: one knows what's real anymore, no one knows what to trust,
Speaker 3: and the instinct and a lot of people is to
Speaker 3: just give up trying to parse the difference. And that
Speaker 3: makes us like increasingly vulnerable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think.
Speaker 1: A big part of what's what's kind of at the
Speaker 1: core of the problem here is what you've said here
Speaker 1: makes us vulnerable. The degree to which this can be
Speaker 1: weaponized is really significant, Like the you know, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we saw that I think is kind
Speaker 1: of low key a significant moment in sort of info conflict.
Speaker 1: Shit is this last this weekend, last weekend from you
Speaker 1: know where we're talking now, there was a mutiny by
Speaker 1: the Wagner Mercenary forces in Ukraine and southern Russia against
Speaker 1: the Russian government, or at least that's what it appears
Speaker 1: to have been now right, this is Russia. A lot
Speaker 1: of this is really weird. So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say we know, we don't. We certainly don't know entirely
Speaker 1: like what happened there, like what's going on there? But
Speaker 1: a couple of things happened very quickly. For one, folks
Speaker 1: on the right, and there were also a lot of
Speaker 1: kind of like shit had left people who adopted this
Speaker 1: too decided that liberals were cheering on the head of
Speaker 1: Wagner Yvjiny Pregoshin because like they believed he was a
Speaker 1: reformer and that like they'd all thought this guy, who
Speaker 1: was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist,
Speaker 1: is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin
Speaker 1: so much and they've convinced themselves that he's you know,
Speaker 1: going to fix Russia, and he's like, no, no, I
Speaker 1: didn't see that. Like, look, I love calling people out
Speaker 1: when they have shitty takes, specifically on this specific war,
Speaker 1: because I've been covering it since twenty fourteen, But like,
Speaker 1: I didn't see that, and none of the people talking
Speaker 1: about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it.
Speaker 1: And it happens all the time, right Sometimes people will
Speaker 1: like take a post that has like thirty likes and
Speaker 1: be like, this is what the left is saying, But
Speaker 1: like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't
Speaker 1: see a single post where someone was like, Pregosion's gonna
Speaker 1: like fix you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No
Speaker 1: one was saying that they just invented that this was
Speaker 1: going on. And it part of it is that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the way Twitter works now made it a
Speaker 1: lot easier for dis info to spread from this thing,
Speaker 1: Like there was very famously a guy who is an
Speaker 1: absolutely a con artist just started sharing up bunch of
Speaker 1: videos from there with like bad commentary that was inaccurate,
Speaker 1: and Elon.
Speaker 2: Musk was like, this is the guy I've come to
Speaker 2: trust about. You can say Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can say Elon Musk I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: a problem, Dan, So.
Speaker 3: You beat me to Elon Musk because I was going
Speaker 3: to say this like the con artist was. But then
Speaker 3: it turns out that he was just retweeting that is,
Speaker 3: like he got of course he got involved anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's the I don't think this the
Speaker 1: solution was not because we lived, you know, our parents
Speaker 1: and grandparents lived to the day where most people would
Speaker 1: be like, well, you know, folks who are in politics
Speaker 1: maybe need to care about this. I might want to
Speaker 1: get the broad strokes of it, but like random people,
Speaker 1: you know, shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these
Speaker 1: international relations. And that's how you get shited, like the
Speaker 1: Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on
Speaker 1: behalf of the US government, where most Americans are like.
Speaker 2: What did we do in Guatemala?
Speaker 1: I didn't know we had guys in Guatemala and that
Speaker 1: wasn't great. But also this new thing where if you
Speaker 1: are a personality, if you are in media, then you
Speaker 1: are obliged to be a part of every big thing
Speaker 1: that happens everywhere, even if you are demonstrably incompetent at
Speaker 1: that and everyone is demonstrably incompetent at that past a
Speaker 1: certain point.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's been Oh boy has that. That's been
Speaker 3: a lot to deal with.
Speaker 1: And it going back to the original thing that started
Speaker 1: this conversation. That's part of how so many of these
Speaker 1: cons perpetuate is that, like people are only competent, including
Speaker 1: famous people, including people with followings in limited areas, and
Speaker 1: once you get out of your area of competence, it's
Speaker 1: easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who trust you because of the things you were
Speaker 1: right about, then they can very easily get fooled when
Speaker 1: you get fooled.
Speaker 3: One of the big hazards there is that, and this
Speaker 3: is a long standing observation, is that huckster's con artists
Speaker 3: are going to be more willing than anyone else to
Speaker 3: pretend to be up to date on it. They have
Speaker 3: no compunction about being It's like, oh, yeah, I know,
Speaker 3: I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and Russia and belarush, yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, so there.
Speaker 3: The reason it's a con man is it's a confidence
Speaker 3: man because they get your confidence because they act confidently
Speaker 3: and give you reason to give you reason to trust them,
Speaker 3: and they have no moral compunction about lying to you.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And and they are always going to be faster with
Speaker 3: the take, faster with the confidence statement, faster with the solution,
Speaker 3: faster with the with with a call to action to
Speaker 3: buy their book or dick pills.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's the And often I think part
Speaker 1: one of the things that's made this all so much
Speaker 1: harder to catch and so much more durable is that
Speaker 1: it's it used to be as obvious. You used to
Speaker 1: be able to see like, Okay, well, this guy's a
Speaker 1: con man, but like, I'm not a person who can
Speaker 1: be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability,
Speaker 1: so I immediately recognize this guy as a con man. Or
Speaker 1: I am not a person who can be conned by
Speaker 1: Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian, So I'm not
Speaker 1: vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the
Speaker 1: cons are downstream of the fot and of the fame,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of people are getting taken in
Speaker 1: by conman. And maybe you know the fact that person's
Speaker 1: putting in a link for their their's supplements. You know,
Speaker 1: on every viral post you don't buy their supplements, but
Speaker 1: they'll come up with something else for you once they
Speaker 1: get you in, once you're in the funnel, or even
Speaker 1: if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're
Speaker 1: sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel,
Speaker 1: you know, and that really wasn't the case. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the case with you know, you go back ten years
Speaker 1: talking about like Young Living, right, or some other like
Speaker 1: multi level marketing company where they're selling you know, essential
Speaker 1: oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people
Speaker 1: to spread their business without paying for shit. And now
Speaker 1: you can do that. If you're a con man and
Speaker 1: you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and
Speaker 1: you're you're on the Ukraine, shit, you just grab whatever
Speaker 1: videos and say whatever about them, you know, frame them
Speaker 1: in whatever way is likely to get people to share
Speaker 1: them the most. Then suddenly you gain two thousand, three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand followers in the space of a night or
Speaker 1: to and your ability to scam people and get money
Speaker 1: out of them has increased several times. You know, the
Speaker 1: con is downstream of the of the platform, right, so
Speaker 1: you know that's you get this guy and maybe he's
Speaker 1: shilling thing X or thing. Why he's got a couple,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever different con he has. But regular people
Speaker 1: can be in the in the business of spreading his platform,
Speaker 1: of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to
Speaker 1: the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's
Speaker 1: ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or
Speaker 1: whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know,
Speaker 1: sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: you know, at a moment when it happens to be
Speaker 1: the opportune moment to do that, and they go crazy viral,
Speaker 1: well then that guy is able to triple his following
Speaker 1: and you know, and have people who are not interested
Speaker 1: in his con spread his shit, which gets him followers,
Speaker 1: which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part
Speaker 1: of the con is. Yeah, it's it's all a sales funnel.
Speaker 1: Are just anxiety lives we have.
Speaker 3: Built our society into just like a giant nested series
Speaker 3: of sales funnels. Yeah, I don't know that's bound to
Speaker 3: be a solid foundation. I don't see if you go wrong,
Speaker 3: that seems like that will go well for us.
Speaker 1: How do we get any ideas on how to fix
Speaker 1: it or should we just should we just state a
Speaker 1: problem and then run away.
Speaker 3: I mean, the easy thing to do would be to
Speaker 3: restore trust in our public institutions. You know, if we
Speaker 3: could uh have sort of like I don't even want
Speaker 3: to say, like a unifying cause, but just a sense
Speaker 3: of common of like shared commonalty and and trust in
Speaker 3: like our local our local society, you know, strong like
Speaker 3: not necessarily strong families, but like strong family units constructed
Speaker 3: or natural or however you want to like defin our constructors,
Speaker 3: but like local with like good infrastructure around us, so
Speaker 3: that our physical spaces are you know, appealing and comfortable
Speaker 3: to live in and and provide us a sense of
Speaker 3: like enrichment and fulfillment.
Speaker 2: You know, the easy stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media, and
Speaker 3: uh and then I think we're good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's that's good. So if we fix everything,
Speaker 1: then we won't have any more problems. That's great. We're
Speaker 1: on the same page now. I mean it is really
Speaker 1: like and this is there's it's also there's also this
Speaker 1: kind of like problematic element of when you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we want to like a problem is that there's zero
Speaker 1: trust in institutions objectively a problem because it means that
Speaker 1: when say the CDC is like, hey, guys, there's this,
Speaker 1: there's a plague, we should probably do this and this
Speaker 1: and this, it immediately becomes a culture war thing. And
Speaker 1: so you can't actually you can't actually confront serious problems
Speaker 1: the way that you need to be able to confront them.
Speaker 1: It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, Like, but the other
Speaker 1: issue is that like, well, for a significant chunks of
Speaker 1: the population, there's never been any good reason to trust
Speaker 1: you know, the institutions because you know, they're marginalized groups
Speaker 1: and whatever, you know, when the institutional trust was higher,
Speaker 1: like the government was fucking them in this way and
Speaker 1: that way, and yeah, you know that's also so I wonder,
Speaker 1: like I think there's a significant extent to which we
Speaker 1: need new concepts of like what an institution is and
Speaker 1: should be, Like we need It's it's such a ground
Speaker 1: floor problem because like I don't know, we're never getting
Speaker 1: back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like
Speaker 1: that's just not going to happen, you know, Like whatever
Speaker 1: the way forward is on us having less the overcoming
Speaker 1: the anti vax anti science shit around medicine it's not
Speaker 1: getting everyone to love the CDC. You know, that's just
Speaker 1: not ever going to happen again.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And part of the complexity here is that it's it's
Speaker 3: really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 3: well the solution is like strong central institutions, and it's
Speaker 3: like that's not that's not correct at all either, because
Speaker 3: like I mean, the my go to example for that
Speaker 3: would be that it's like look at look at the
Speaker 3: LDS Church, look at Mormons. They have a very very
Speaker 3: strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point
Speaker 3: for a lot of their lives, and yet Mormon communities
Speaker 3: are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and and MLM's you know,
Speaker 3: like Utah Salt Lake is like the locus of MLM culture,
Speaker 3: and so like it's not the sort of like strong
Speaker 3: man like, ah, this is why we need strong like
Speaker 3: you know, strong leaders is not isn't the answer in
Speaker 3: its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort
Speaker 3: of like answer to gravitate towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's that's I don't know, I don't actually know.
Speaker 1: Part of the problem is that like there are little solutions, right,
Speaker 1: there are little things that you can do, stuff like
Speaker 1: advocating for you know, a more functional idea of like
Speaker 1: a more a more functional legal definition of like what
Speaker 1: an auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally
Speaker 1: sort of like flooding phone lines with with with cons
Speaker 1: and stuff or restricting you know, the ability of people
Speaker 1: like bill collectors and stuff to utilize you know, the
Speaker 1: phone system and some of the ways that they do,
Speaker 1: like the and that can make stuff better. Just like
Speaker 1: you know, at a certain point, we will develop tools
Speaker 1: that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in
Speaker 1: the con space. Some of its ability to automate and
Speaker 1: push shit to people at scale will get reduced at
Speaker 1: a certain point. That will happen, right, because it happens
Speaker 1: with everything.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: AI is not unique.
Speaker 1: This is the It's it's a you've heard the you've
Speaker 1: heard the red Queen hypothesis, right, Yeah. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a way of like for it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's this this point
Speaker 1: in Alice in Wonderland where you know, the Red Queen
Speaker 1: kind of like traps Alice in this situation where like
Speaker 1: she's got to keep running as fast as she can,
Speaker 1: but it's like a situation like a conveyor belt sort
Speaker 1: of situation, So no matter how how hard she runs,
Speaker 1: she never gets ahead. Right, And that's kind of the
Speaker 1: way that like the evolutionary arms race works, right, Like
Speaker 1: you know, one one animal develops a defense against a
Speaker 1: predator and the predator develops a way around it, and
Speaker 1: like the the like, that's kind of the best case
Speaker 1: scenario for how we adapt to cons I think actually,
Speaker 1: like technology just moves too fast now for us to
Speaker 1: to be able to keep up, right, Like we're not
Speaker 1: We're not just standing in place. We're consistently following behind.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, I don't know what we do here, uh.
Speaker 3: I mean yeah, so like there will there will be
Speaker 3: technol technological solutions to specific manifestations. I mean a big
Speaker 3: one like in there, like to not to not bant.
Speaker 2: Is that you know, the uh.
Speaker 3: At A, the legal system, the governments, Like governments need
Speaker 3: to do something about the robocalling and the text messages
Speaker 3: because they're rendering a vital piece of like sneak infrastructure unusable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people don't trust their phones anymore, and that's that's bad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it means they stop using it. You know, it's like.
Speaker 3: There's yeah, there's very real like consequences. Uh, and we
Speaker 3: need to be able to trust that we're talking to
Speaker 3: people who aren't just trying to get our money.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yep, Well, Dan, anything you want to plug at the
Speaker 1: end of this here YouTube channel Folding Ideas everyone should
Speaker 1: check out if you have not already.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the YouTube channel that's going to be the big one.
Speaker 3: I'm still on. I'm on socials at Foldable Human, though
Speaker 3: I'm trying to wean myself off of them because they're
Speaker 3: broken and being broken purpose and they're.
Speaker 2: Bad for my soul.
Speaker 3: So I still I'm addicted, So I still keep coming back.
Speaker 3: But I'm a lot less active than I used to be.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy
Speaker 1: getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter. No. Yeah, Dan,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on today. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm looking forward
Speaker 1: to your next video, your next investigation, whatever that happens
Speaker 1: to be. Folks should check out. If you haven't, line
Speaker 1: goes up your documentary on NFTs. You should check out
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs Is. I think what you called your Michelson Twins documentary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: check out everything Dan has done. Thank you Dan, And
Speaker 1: that is the episode. You can all go home now
Speaker 1: and deal with the fact that your bank information just
Speaker 1: got stolen by somebody in Macedonia.
Speaker 2: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.