Speaker 1: Hello, Snaffoo listeners. I've been pondering the world's deepest questions.
Speaker 2: Why are we here?
Speaker 3: Who will win the World Cup later this week?
Speaker 2: What is the meaning of life?
Speaker 3: Are La boo boos always.
Speaker 1: Going to be popular or is it just like a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five thing? And if so, what's the new
Speaker 1: la boo boo of twenty twenty six? Is there a
Speaker 1: chance I could make an ed booboo?
Speaker 2: You know what? No?
Speaker 3: AnyWho, The people who do the real cognitive acrobatics, the
Speaker 3: real critical ponderers. Those are the folks that get me
Speaker 3: really thinking the most, people like Adam Grant, Kara Swisher,
Speaker 3: Scott Galloway, Kelly Corrigan, or one of my oldest buddies,
Speaker 3: Jada bum Rat. The best part is all of those
Speaker 3: folks appeared on Snaffoo this season, and they blew me
Speaker 3: away with their adept insights and quick witticisms. The way
Speaker 3: these folks interpret and evaluate snaffoos it's really cool. It's
Speaker 3: eye opening and incredibly insightful and also at times extremely funny.
Speaker 3: So this week I'm really excited to share a few
Speaker 3: of my favorite moments with our favorite thought leaders. Enjoyment
Speaker 3: Kelly Gorgan Wonders is a phenomenal podcast which I highly recommend.
Speaker 3: You're five years in over seven hundred episodes. The format
Speaker 3: of the show, it's basically a masterclass in human curiosity,
Speaker 3: in exploring what makes us tick, what we fear and love,
Speaker 3: and how we cope. And I'm just curious, after all
Speaker 3: of that deep listening, do.
Speaker 1: You feel any closer to the secret of living a
Speaker 1: good life? Or is there anything like some crazy counterintuitive
Speaker 1: revelation about the human condition that you've landed on.
Speaker 4: More than sometimes when you're listening to someone a guest
Speaker 4: on the show, so they synthesize things in such a
Speaker 4: memorable way that it's almost like I've sort of known this,
Speaker 4: I've sort of intuited this my whole life, but now
Speaker 4: you just put the words on it. So two that
Speaker 4: come to mind or this. We had this neuroscientist on
Speaker 4: named Lisa feldmcbarratt. She's some top one percent scientists cited worldwide,
Speaker 4: so in any discipline, so.
Speaker 2: She's really respected.
Speaker 4: And she has a great book called How Emotions Are Made,
Speaker 4: And that's what we were talking about. And the line
Speaker 4: she said was the best thing for a human central
Speaker 4: nervous system is another human central nervous system, and the
Speaker 4: worst thing for a human central nervous system is another
Speaker 4: human central nervous ament. So pick your human central nervous
Speaker 4: systems wisely, right, And that's the feeling that you get.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's what happened when we first met. Really
Speaker 4: is my es central nervous system in your central nervousystem
Speaker 4: kind of wrapped up against each other.
Speaker 5: And I was like, oh, this is a good Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of pressure when you're like on the
Speaker 1: life partner choices.
Speaker 2: That's like, oh, geez, I better get this right.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: I mean, this other guest said that we're an average
Speaker 4: of the five people we spend the most time with
Speaker 4: M and so that's sort of a related thought. And
Speaker 4: then this other guest said that listening is so close
Speaker 4: to love that most people can't tell the difference.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: And so if you kind of glue those all together,
Speaker 4: you get some clarity about like who you're looking for
Speaker 4: out there, and you're looking for people who can be still,
Speaker 4: who can listen, who can take it in, And that's
Speaker 4: the central nervous system that's going to work for you.
Speaker 4: And that's the central nervous system that's going to make
Speaker 4: you better.
Speaker 1: I love that because I've always felt that profound insights
Speaker 1: are things that we hear that were like these aha moments.
Speaker 2: They feel like aha moments, right, they feel like things that.
Speaker 1: Like, oh my god, what a revelation. I now understand
Speaker 1: that better. But you're really just it's our It's actually just.
Speaker 2: A affirming something that you already felt. The only reason it's.
Speaker 1: An AHA moment is because you know that it's true
Speaker 1: the second you hear it, because it resonates with something
Speaker 1: already in you to And I just I.
Speaker 2: Love that because it speaks to this.
Speaker 1: Like kind of like grand human intuition that we all
Speaker 1: share and that we all could we all understand these
Speaker 1: fundamental truths.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that intuition is being developed and honed by knowledge.
Speaker 4: How you feel from podcasting that you're just full of
Speaker 4: so much more information to draw from, Like I feel
Speaker 4: like my inputs in the last five years have gone
Speaker 4: through the roof.
Speaker 1: I love that podcasting has emerged as such a vital
Speaker 1: medium in our culture now because it feels.
Speaker 2: Like an antidote to social media. It feels like an
Speaker 2: antidote to all of.
Speaker 1: The that just like crazy, flashy quick disposable stuff. Yes,
Speaker 1: to your point, it has provided a great scaffolding for
Speaker 1: my curiosity and connection with so many cool people like yourself.
Speaker 1: I see this as basically the collision of two very
Speaker 1: primal emotions. It's rage versus fear. You have the workers
Speaker 1: raging about inequality, and then of course elites are afraid
Speaker 1: of losing their status and their fancy things. Is this
Speaker 1: dynamic just baked into capitalism or is there a better
Speaker 1: way that is socialism kind of trying to have both
Speaker 1: both sides.
Speaker 2: Oh, I think.
Speaker 6: I mean, Scott can talk more about this because he
Speaker 6: talks about sort of the rage. But one of the
Speaker 6: things I just interviewed Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 2: It was very good.
Speaker 6: It was very mad about the oligarchs. He's a book
Speaker 6: called Fighting Oligarchy, And you know, so, I think this
Speaker 6: isn't a new thing. But one of the things that's
Speaker 6: important to keep in mind is that it's usually preceded
Speaker 6: by an area where lots of people get really rich,
Speaker 6: like really really rich, and we're in that and many
Speaker 6: years ago when this income and equality started to really
Speaker 6: and then the tech people are the new winners, essentially
Speaker 6: tech moguls. When they started to get ahead. I went
Speaker 6: to one of them and I said, we have a
Speaker 6: real problem with incoming quality. You could see the numbers
Speaker 6: the minimum wage hadn't hadn't been rising, And I said,
Speaker 6: you're either going to have to deal with the inequality
Speaker 6: and give people a better wage like solve it, or
Speaker 6: you're going to have to armor plate your tesla. And
Speaker 6: I looked at him and I realized he wanted to
Speaker 6: armor plate his tesla.
Speaker 5: That was okay.
Speaker 6: Like they thought that they had gotten all their money
Speaker 6: by their own doing and not by help by the government, etc.
Speaker 6: And they didn't care about people, And you could see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: For the If I were to try and think of
Speaker 7: one piece of data that explains the epicenter of many
Speaker 7: of our problems, it would be the following. For the
Speaker 7: first time in our two hundred and seventy five year history,
Speaker 7: a thirty year old American isn't doing as well as
Speaker 7: his or her parents were at thirty, and that not
Speaker 7: only keeps creates rage and shame among a young group
Speaker 7: of people who are more likely to pick up guns,
Speaker 7: specifically young men, it creates rage and shame.
Speaker 2: Across the household.
Speaker 7: The algorithm or the power and you're referring to it
Speaker 7: plays out over and over in a capitalist society, and
Speaker 7: it's the following. A group of very talented, very hard working,
Speaker 7: and very lucky people gather a disproportionate amount of assets,
Speaker 7: and then we talk ourselves into believing that it is
Speaker 7: patriotic and not a bad thing to create tax policy,
Speaker 7: legislative policy, and regulatory captures such that corporations can have
Speaker 7: their lowest taxes since nineteen thirty nine. Now such at
Speaker 7: the twenty six wealthiest families in America pan average tax
Speaker 7: rate of six percent. That is now the bad news
Speaker 7: about income in equalities.
Speaker 2: That always happens.
Speaker 7: The good news is it's always self correcting. And more
Speaker 7: bad news, though, is that the means of correction are
Speaker 7: usually war, famine, or revolution. And I would argue that
Speaker 7: as revolutions take on new complexion, we're in the midst
Speaker 7: of a series of small revolutions. Black Lives Matter and
Speaker 7: the Me Too movement, we're both righteous movements that had
Speaker 7: real justifiable components. But they weren't going after the sexual
Speaker 7: harassmer owner of a taco truck. They weren't going after
Speaker 7: someone who is racist in a small company. They were
Speaker 7: going after rich people and at some point when the
Speaker 7: bottom fifty two percent of America have the same amount
Speaker 7: of wealth as Elon Musk, they figure out that the
Speaker 7: fastest way to double their wealth is to.
Speaker 2: Go after that person.
Speaker 7: And that's where we are. At some point. We are
Speaker 7: having a series of small revolutions to try and correct
Speaker 7: income inequality.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Heavy, that's a good break heavy, that's heavy. It's
Speaker 2: a good breakdown, and people.
Speaker 5: Are getting it.
Speaker 6: I'm sort of shocked we haven't had much more of
Speaker 6: a of a revolution or anger over money.
Speaker 1: The crazy thing is that back in nineteen nineteen these
Speaker 1: workers were in like really horrendous conditions and still trying
Speaker 1: to make it work.
Speaker 2: But it's sort of it's all relative, right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter, It doesn't matter what, like what the
Speaker 1: actual conditions might be. It's the disparity itself that is
Speaker 1: So that just feels so off.
Speaker 7: Well, that's a that's a great that's a great point.
Speaker 7: Just interrupt you, because if there's something to the notion,
Speaker 7: and this is true, this is a true statement. A
Speaker 7: middle class person right now is living better than the
Speaker 7: richest person on the planet one hundred years ago. And
Speaker 7: middle class Mississippi's our poor estate. It has a higher
Speaker 7: household income than the UK or Germany or France. So
Speaker 7: America is actually you could correctly say a middle class
Speaker 7: person in the US is thriving and doing really well.
Speaker 7: But that's not how the human brain works. The human
Speaker 7: brain sees two hundred and ten times a day that
Speaker 7: if they're not on a Gulf streamer, don't have a
Speaker 7: boyfriend with ripped abs, that they're failing. And also they're
Speaker 7: living with roommates because they the price of a home
Speaker 7: went from two ninety to four hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 7: dollars during COVID because we flushed the market was so
Speaker 7: much stimulus because me or you or care getting less
Speaker 7: wealthy would be a crime greater than a million people dying.
Speaker 7: And the natural cycle of redistributing income destroying capital during
Speaker 7: crises that seeds economic advantage back from the capital owners
Speaker 7: to labor. We didn't allow happen. And what was most
Speaker 7: criminal about it was we use their credit card to
Speaker 7: pay for our incumbency. So these people, you know, you
Speaker 7: can understand people say young people are entitled.
Speaker 2: No they're not.
Speaker 7: They're entitled to be enraged. And you have just this
Speaker 7: incredible shifting of economic prosperity, and there reminded several hundred
Speaker 7: times a day on their phones that they're failing.
Speaker 2: So try to tell that.
Speaker 7: It's like the mistake democrats made trying to tell people
Speaker 7: inflation is not that bad. Well, okay, it feels that
Speaker 7: bad to me. And I also want to be clear,
Speaker 7: this is a bipartisan issue. What Trump has effectively done
Speaker 7: really well is like, Okay, Republicans and Republican donors, I'm
Speaker 7: going to divide up TikTok. I'm going to give you
Speaker 7: ai legislation that makes you richer. And Democrats who are
Speaker 7: really rich and whole lot of the power. There's a
Speaker 7: really uncomfortable silence of conspiracy that says, don't get too
Speaker 7: angry because you're going to make bank if you're a
Speaker 7: rich Democrat. And one of the most disappointing things about
Speaker 7: this is good democrats who are in positions of powers
Speaker 7: have been fucking silent on all of this. Why could
Speaker 7: stop stop? It hurts so good? My taxes are going down.
Speaker 6: I would agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely brutal.
Speaker 6: And also, you know, at the it's all often at
Speaker 6: the expense of the young towards the old, and you know,
Speaker 6: you see it in Congress where they're you know, antiquated,
Speaker 6: and they're making rules that would benefit But the top.
Speaker 8: Groups that has that story has all the things ed
Speaker 8: like that. That is a that is that is something
Speaker 8: I liked how you kind of right at the Connecticut moment,
Speaker 8: you sort of you spun it into a a sort
Speaker 8: of clue knives out who done it kind of situation.
Speaker 8: They lived large back then, you know, they explored large,
Speaker 8: They they poisoned large, They beefed pretty large. It's a
Speaker 8: it's a I feel like our lives are soft and
Speaker 8: small by comparison, although maybe we're better for it. You know,
Speaker 8: that's quite a tale.
Speaker 1: What I love about this story and what I loved
Speaker 1: about it for you in particular, was how science is
Speaker 1: part of the murder mystery. And I I always loved how,
Speaker 1: you know, Radio Lab episodes would unpack a narrative, whether
Speaker 1: it was a mystery, whether it was even a science
Speaker 1: based narrative. Very often science was part of the if
Speaker 1: not the sort of mechanism of discovery in Radio Lab episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it speaks to the power of science both from just
Speaker 1: a a research standpoint. I mean, here's a guy at Dartmouth,
Speaker 1: this lumis professor. He's just writing a biography and and
Speaker 1: and turns out, Oh, I've got reason to suspect.
Speaker 2: He was murdered.
Speaker 1: We're going to go dig him up and run these
Speaker 1: tests on him, and lo and behold, all this new
Speaker 1: evidence emerges. And there's just no end to what we
Speaker 1: can learn when science is applied in the right ways
Speaker 1: and with creativity.
Speaker 8: Yeah, what I was thinking about as you were talking
Speaker 8: was the way science has changed over the years. Right,
Speaker 8: there was a period in the nineteenth century and really
Speaker 8: in the precise moment that this story is unfolding, where
Speaker 8: what it meant to be a scientist It was this
Speaker 8: kind of like the era of the gentleman scientist, where
Speaker 8: they would get on a boat and sail to a
Speaker 8: new land and they would collect species, and then they
Speaker 8: would create these cabinets of curiosities of butterflies and birds
Speaker 8: and you know, all kinds of marsupials, and there's something
Speaker 8: sort of imperial about it, and there's such an abundance,
Speaker 8: and they're grabbing from the land and really collecting and
Speaker 8: trying to out do each other. But on the other hand,
Speaker 8: and there is just this kind of wonderful sense of
Speaker 8: openness and discovery of the world is full of things
Speaker 8: that might seem magical, but we through inquiry and a method,
Speaker 8: will demystify them and we can there's a sense of
Speaker 8: like a naive sense that we can know everything. And
Speaker 8: it's interesting to juxtapose that in a split screen in
Speaker 8: your mind to where we are now, where there's science
Speaker 8: has never been more robust, and there's so much. I mean,
Speaker 8: my mother, just as a personal example, has been studying
Speaker 8: one protein for forty something years at this point in
Speaker 8: what capacity as a as a biologist she discovered or
Speaker 8: not discovered. I mean, it was there, but she kind
Speaker 8: of came to know this protein, brought it to the
Speaker 8: world's attention, and has been studying it every day for
Speaker 8: forty years. And like that's what science is now. It's
Speaker 8: just like unbelievable rigor and dedication and discipline. And yet
Speaker 8: you're in this like Maha moment when Chah, science kind
Speaker 8: of hold on the truth has been a bit marginalized.
Speaker 8: But you know, I say to myself, and I'm spinning
Speaker 8: myself into a cul de sac here, I say to myself,
Speaker 8: you know, science was always one way of knowing the world,
Speaker 8: and it's not the only way, and now all the
Speaker 8: different ways have to compete, and maybe that's maybe that's
Speaker 8: where we are.
Speaker 2: Very well said.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, that the sort of magic of science
Speaker 1: is getting confused with the magic of wellness. Stories that
Speaker 1: make you feel good wellness, narratives that grossly oversimplify and
Speaker 1: just kind of give us that doorphin rush. But good science,
Speaker 1: hard science, disciplined science, also provides that it's just a
Speaker 1: lot harder, and it's a lot harder to consume. In
Speaker 1: nineteen oh seven, Ponzi landed in Montreal and scored a
Speaker 1: job as an assistant teller at a small bank serving
Speaker 1: Italian immigrants, and it was there that he witnessed the
Speaker 1: original mad of the scam he would later perfect. His boss,
Speaker 1: Luigi Zorosi, lured depositors with absurdly generous interest rates, and
Speaker 1: amazingly he would pay them, of course, by funneling new
Speaker 1: deposits straight to the earlier investors. It was a beautifully
Speaker 1: unsustainable system. So when the bank inevitably crashed and Zorosi
Speaker 1: bolted for Mexico to avoid accountability, Ponzi was left behind,
Speaker 1: unemployed but newly educated in the fine art of financial
Speaker 1: Tom foolery. Now most of us would look at this
Speaker 1: whole mess and think, Okay, well that backfired. Maybe crime
Speaker 1: doesn't pay. What can you tell us about the psychology
Speaker 1: of someone who definitely does not learn that lesson, in
Speaker 1: fact sort of learns the opposite lesson of like here's
Speaker 1: more opportunity. I mean, do you see like sociopathy at
Speaker 1: play or is it just sort of that healthy or
Speaker 1: maybe unhealthy ego with a kind of rules don't apply swagger.
Speaker 2: I mean, how dark is that?
Speaker 9: So there are three traits that would normally predict being
Speaker 9: attracted to that kind of that kind of scheme, and
Speaker 9: the psychologists call them the dark triad, and you hit
Speaker 9: on one of them pretty closely anyway. They're being a narcissist,
Speaker 9: being Machiavelian, and being a psychopath.
Speaker 2: H And I.
Speaker 9: Think we're probably talking about Machiavelianism here more than we
Speaker 9: are being a narcissist or or a psychopath or sociopath,
Speaker 9: because what this kind of scheme is really about is
Speaker 9: it's about manipulating other people and using them for personal gain.
Speaker 9: And you don't have to have a giant inflated ego
Speaker 9: to want to do that. You don't have to feel
Speaker 9: no empathy for other people. You just have to be
Speaker 9: a little bit callous around, feeling like, you know what,
Speaker 9: I can use other people a little bit. And in fact,
Speaker 9: I think part of the appeal of a Ponzi scheme
Speaker 9: is you look at that and you say, well, you know,
Speaker 9: if I can keep it going, actually I'm going to
Speaker 9: profit and no one else is going to get hurt
Speaker 9: because each like each each former investor is going to
Speaker 9: get their money back because of a new one. And
Speaker 9: so all I have to do is perpetuate it. And
Speaker 9: you know, I'm just I'm exploiting a loophole in the system.
Speaker 9: I'm not exploiting people so much. And I think if
Speaker 9: you tell yourself that story, you probably sleep at night.
Speaker 9: And it doesn't it doesn't require much more than a
Speaker 9: little bit of machiavelianism.
Speaker 2: The scale of his operation.
Speaker 1: That's what's so mind blowing is that like the buy
Speaker 1: in from so many different people, like the eagerness to want,
Speaker 1: like the desire for this to be true is and
Speaker 1: for this all to be like a functioning, healthy way
Speaker 1: to make money. It's like the things we can force
Speaker 1: ourselves to believe, Like he's the perpetrator Ponzi or Bernie
Speaker 1: made Off like they're the perpetrators. They're either deluding themselves
Speaker 1: or they're just like criminals or whatever they're whatever's going
Speaker 1: on with them. I mean, there's the investors who are
Speaker 1: just pure victims. But then there are people who are
Speaker 1: in the organization, right, they're in the running of these things,
Speaker 1: and they have to have a sense of like this
Speaker 1: doesn't add up, or it's just like I'm gonna keep
Speaker 1: my head in the sand. I'm not gonna like this
Speaker 1: spreadsheet looks weird to me, but I'm just not gonna ask,
Speaker 1: because boy, it feels good to trust this, like nice
Speaker 1: old man Bernie, who just seems to know who's been
Speaker 1: venerated by the great financial institutions for decades.
Speaker 9: There are terms that have been coined to describe what
Speaker 9: happens to a lot of people in the orbit of
Speaker 9: a Ponzier made off. Bendura called it moral disengagement. Ten
Speaker 9: Brunzel and Mesk have called it ethical fading, where you
Speaker 9: just you stop applying a principled lens to the situation
Speaker 9: you're in because other people are accepting it, and you assume, well,
Speaker 9: you know, surely these are not bad people.
Speaker 2: I see them, you know, their their.
Speaker 9: Decent parents and partners and caring bosses, and you know
Speaker 9: they couldn't be doing anything bad, and you lose sight
Speaker 9: of the lines that are being crossed. I think that
Speaker 9: that could be part of what's happening in their orbit.
Speaker 9: And maybe the other piece of this is I was
Speaker 9: thinking about Maria Kannakova, a psychologist turned poker champ who
Speaker 9: wrote a book called The Confidence Game, and there's a
Speaker 9: quote in that book that shook me. Maria wrote, the
Speaker 9: true con artist doesn't force us to do anything. He
Speaker 9: makes us complicit in our own undoing.
Speaker 1: Adam, what are you and I complicit in right now
Speaker 1: that we have no idea?
Speaker 2: Is part of our own doing?
Speaker 9: I really hope nothing, But you know, just thinking about
Speaker 9: what happens to the early employees, in the early clients,
Speaker 9: they are to recruit other people into the scheme. Of course,
Speaker 9: you try to get your friends hired at this great company.
Speaker 9: You try to get your you know, your family to
Speaker 9: invest in this, you know, this fun with incredible returns,
Speaker 9: and pretty soon you have a strong incentive to see
Speaker 9: no evil.
Speaker 2: I want to bring this into the present moment a
Speaker 2: little bit. I love digging into this.
Speaker 1: Story because of how hyper relevant it feels today in
Speaker 1: the age of Internet scammers and just this sort of
Speaker 1: like new generation of con.
Speaker 2: Artists that have emerged.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's funny to think of Charles Ponzi
Speaker 1: as perhaps now him being like an Instagram influencer, you know,
Speaker 1: who's just like taking people in.
Speaker 2: But here's just a few stats.
Speaker 1: The FBI reported that Americans lost sixteen point six billion
Speaker 1: dollars to online scams, which is a thirty three percent
Speaker 1: increase from twenty twenty three. Do you think that there
Speaker 1: is also a way that sort of the online distance
Speaker 1: from a con artist and like us when we're in
Speaker 1: our own bubble and we don't have other people to
Speaker 1: sort of cross reference with or bounce an idea off
Speaker 1: of does does the solitary nature of internet interaction make
Speaker 1: us additionally more vulnerable or less vulnerable? Or I mean
Speaker 1: it does seem like the Internet is just a cesspool
Speaker 1: of scam Yeah.
Speaker 9: I would love to see some data on this. I
Speaker 9: have not seen a good analysis. I think I have
Speaker 9: a similar hunch to yours, which is the isolation can
Speaker 9: make it really easy to to fall for a scam.
Speaker 9: I think the other piece of it is you're missing
Speaker 9: some of the cues that would normally you know, sort
Speaker 9: of you know, even if you didn't recognize them consciously.
Speaker 9: You know, you interact with a con artist face to face,
Speaker 9: and you start to get a gut feeling sometimes I don't.
Speaker 2: Quite trust this person.
Speaker 9: I don't know why, but you know, maybe maybe I
Speaker 9: should verify, or maybe I should you know, wait a
Speaker 9: little bit. And you're just deprived of a lot of
Speaker 9: those cues.
Speaker 2: Over the internet.
Speaker 9: Sometimes you don't even know if it's a human or
Speaker 9: a bot that's you know, that's pitching you. And so
Speaker 9: I think that that probably makes it harder for people
Speaker 9: to use whatever intuition they have around judging people's trustworthiness.
Speaker 9: What's the what's the New Yorker cartoon on the internet?
Speaker 9: No one knows You're a dog?
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, Well that's more of a catfish joke.
Speaker 2: No, but I guess it's uh, I guess it works
Speaker 2: here just as well.
Speaker 1: This app was building a surprisingly detailed dossier on you,
Speaker 1: your psychology and that of your entire digital entourage.
Speaker 2: Question, do you.
Speaker 1: Think that the average American at that time had any
Speaker 1: sense of how this kind of personal information that that
Speaker 1: everyone was sharing just exhaustively could be turned against them
Speaker 1: or or were we just high on digital narcissism?
Speaker 2: No, I mean an American.
Speaker 10: Americans are very interesting in that they will say that
Speaker 10: privacy is very important to them, but they will give
Speaker 10: up their privacy for almost anything.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 10: It's like they will tell you, you know, that they
Speaker 10: don't want to, you know, put the name of their
Speaker 10: children online, but if it got them ten percent off
Speaker 10: at ross dress for less, they.
Speaker 5: Will absolutely give you all that and more so.
Speaker 10: Companies are always sort of doing this weird dance where
Speaker 10: they're trying to get you to reveal as much as
Speaker 10: they possibly can without it accidentally blowing up in their face.
Speaker 11: Well, and this was also an era that was called
Speaker 11: sort of the open graph era of Facebook. Basically, they
Speaker 11: were trying to turn Facebook from an app where you
Speaker 11: would go and you know, stock your crushes from college
Speaker 11: or whatever, to a platform where other apps could build things.
Speaker 11: There were apps like Farmville that you could play inside Facebook.
Speaker 11: You could use Facebook to log into Spotify or any
Speaker 11: other number of services, and that was part of this
Speaker 11: quiz push was like you could build things on top
Speaker 11: of Facebook, and then Facebook would actually send some of
Speaker 11: that data to the developers of the quizzes. This was
Speaker 11: the same protocol, the same process that they used to
Speaker 11: connect people with Farmville games and Spotify.
Speaker 1: The best case use of that data would just be
Speaker 1: for that app to reach more users, or at this point,
Speaker 1: what's the reason for being just so give and.
Speaker 2: Take with this data.
Speaker 10: So Facebook used to have this very permissive what they
Speaker 10: call an API and application programming interface. It's essentially just
Speaker 10: a piece of software that lets other pieces of software
Speaker 10: talk to each other. And there was a time when
Speaker 10: Facebook invested really heavily in that because they wanted essentially
Speaker 10: every other software to connect whatever they were building to Facebook.
Speaker 5: Facebook thought, this is the way.
Speaker 10: That we are going to grow and take over the
Speaker 10: world is essentially everything runs through this. And the way
Speaker 10: that Facebook was able to attract so many of those
Speaker 10: people to its platforms was by saying, we will give
Speaker 10: you data that you can't get anywhere else. Right, there
Speaker 10: aren't a lot of other places where you can go
Speaker 10: if you're a legitimate researcher, a shady researcher, somebody who's
Speaker 10: making a mobile game, and immediately get not just my
Speaker 10: name and my email address and my phone number, but
Speaker 10: also at the time the names of all of my
Speaker 10: friends and their phone numbers and their email addresses. So
Speaker 10: for people like the ones who wound up building the
Speaker 10: app that led to Cambridge Analytica, this was a gold mine.
Speaker 10: It was an absolute bananza and it really benefited Facebook
Speaker 10: until it did.
Speaker 1: And do you think we've gotten just back to that
Speaker 1: initial question about how you know we share information online?
Speaker 2: Have we gotten any better at this? Or?
Speaker 1: I mean, in casey, I love your analogy, if we
Speaker 1: get a discount on something.
Speaker 3: We're just like, yeah, take whatever you want.
Speaker 2: Here's here's my mother's maiden name.
Speaker 1: But are we just that lazy, like where our brains
Speaker 1: are just wired for heuristics, like we just want the
Speaker 1: shortcuts everywhere.
Speaker 10: I think there have been some major changes and you
Speaker 10: can see it when you log onto social media, right.
Speaker 10: You used to log onto Facebook and Instagram and you
Speaker 10: see your friends and family. Now you see a clip
Speaker 10: from a podcast you've never heard of, right, And that's
Speaker 10: you know, has several causes behind it, but one of
Speaker 10: the big ones is that Americans are sharing less. The
Speaker 10: whole bargain that they struck with Facebook of hey, I'll
Speaker 10: give you all my information in exchange for you keeping
Speaker 10: up on the divorces of my high school classmates. That
Speaker 10: bargain doesn't feel like that's as good anymore. And so
Speaker 10: all the real sharing is happening in these private group chats,
Speaker 10: and all the public stuff is kind of more you know,
Speaker 10: creator content and you know, celebrities and all of that.
Speaker 5: So in that respect, I really do think things have
Speaker 5: changed now.
Speaker 10: At the same time, can I get you to give
Speaker 10: up information if I give you something of relatively low value? Yes,
Speaker 10: I think that is still broadly the case across you know,
Speaker 10: many different dimensions.
Speaker 11: Well, And I also think like AI has become the
Speaker 11: sort of next frontier of this because people are sharing
Speaker 11: all kinds of stuff with pots. People are having therapy sessions. Yeah,
Speaker 11: they're confessing their crimes. They're like people are doing People
Speaker 11: are having these conversations that are very intimate in some cases,
Speaker 11: and I don't think they know or particularly care what's
Speaker 11: happening to that data on the other end.
Speaker 2: Wow, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I just I've gotten much more anxious about this over
Speaker 1: the last few years.
Speaker 11: What kinds of times are you doing it?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Well, I mean the stuff I've already
Speaker 1: told to Chad Gbt.
Speaker 2: It's all, that's all, just in the murder category.
Speaker 1: Snaffo is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media,
Speaker 1: a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company.
Speaker 1: Post production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are me Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner,
Speaker 1: Andy Kim, and Dylan This episode was produced by Alyssa
Speaker 1: Martino and Tory Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis.
Speaker 1: Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering
Speaker 1: from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our
Speaker 1: creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt
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Speaker 1: especially Will Pearson, Carrie Leeberman and Nikki Ator. While I
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Speaker 1: my book, Snaffoo, The Definitive Guide to History's.
Speaker 2: Greatest screw Ups.
Speaker 1: It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to
Speaker 1: snaffoo dashbook dot com.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening, and see you next week.