This Country is Cons All the Way Down Ft. FoldableHuman

guy and so it so I don't know why. When I was like busy eric like trying to brand the channel, like you know, a decade ago. Uh, I was like, I had this phrase that I was using with students that I was interacting with, was like, well, let's unfold that idea, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, But like that.

the deep past. Like I have one of my emails, like my personal email is a Gmail that I got back when you had to get an invite to get a Gmail, right like right when Gmail first became a thing. And it's like, I'm not going to say it on here because then my email will get bombarded with shit. But like it's like a stupid joke that doesn't really make any sense. And every time I give it to someone, their like, why is that your email? Because I was like twelve, Like I don't even remember why I set

this thing. It's just this like moment of something I thought was funny when I was pre Pewbescent frozen in amber forever. Because that's the Internet does that in little ways for each of us.

old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam culture in the United States because and I, by any sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this. There are more scams and more fraud than right now in the United States than at any point previously, and basically from all sides, like phone scams are at the highest rate they've ever been.

One of kind of the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed, and it's often through various email scams that are kind of based on getting trust or frightening them that like someone else is trying to scam them and so they need to give in from it. Anyway, the thing that the quote I came across was a regulator talking about this and being like, yeah, it's not

it's no longer like smaller even medium dollar cons. People are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. And then there's kind of like phishing attacks are at pretty close to an all time high. I mean, there's a I'll send you there's a graph that I came across in a what was the source on this? In a comparaateech article that I mean, it's just a straight line up from January twenty twenty nine to like the

end of twenty twenty two. And so I'm I'm, I'm kind of looking at all this, and there's a couple of different causes, right, Like some of the stuff the SEC did under ajit PI gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI powered tools have been a big part of like why phishing attacks have increased so much. But then like you've got like the degree to which the elderly are being conned, which is like this kind

of at this intersection of a few different things. How much more online old people are today than they were, you know, ten to fifteen years ago.

scams coming into me through my phone these days. And then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank and it was one of those things, like everyone else my cell phone lets me know when like a call is from scam likely, or when it's from like you know, and it had the name of my bank on there. It was the right number, you know. So I pick it up and human being is on the line and they're like, is this you know, Robert Evans And I'm like yeah, And then they're like, we've

seen some like fraudulent activity on your account. Can we ask you a couple questions? And that is I've gotten that call before. Legitimately, you know, it's not a weird thing for your bank to be like, hey, let's talk about these cuss.

of nowhere, so like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them back, you know, and I get on the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what's what seems to be up? And I'm like, well, you guys called me saying that like that there was some possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. The lady on the other end is like, no one here called you. Like, I'm looking at your record. I can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have any

record of that. And I explained what happened, and she like goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like, so that was a scam. They've this is something we've seen more and more lately. They've they're able now to actually just spoof our banks and this is my bank is a significant sized institution. They're able to spoof our phone number now and so you can't tell through the caller ID, And like it was this whole thing where like obviously I know, don't give certain things over the phone,

even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but it was just like, well, shit, like what are you Like? That's this is now well beyond a thing where like you're getting called and someone's offering you you know, to make a bunch of money, you know, holding a Nigerian

prince's wealth or something. If you sit in your bank account, this is your bank calls you and your phone tells you that it's your bank, and a human being who sounds just like the bank teller like it's it's gotten so and I think kind of the broad obviously, each of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is a worthy story and a separate story in a lot of ways, but they also come together in this like well, you know, it's not it's not like weird at this

point to note that everybody seems angrier, and everybody seems paranoid, and you hear more stories about like people opening fire on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around, and there's you know that story. Obviously there's guns and stuff that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers at all times.

my bank to uh to to inquire about it. Like never you know, it's like never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in.

that's effort, that's effort. I don't even have that much energy in me sometime, and a lot of other people just like absolutely don't. And and that leads to like just exhaustion, vulnerability, you know, all of the things that feed into like paranoia, distrust, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's it's relentless. Like online advertising is

basically useless at this point. Oh yeah, because like if you ran, if you ran a legitimate ad, you know, unless you have the money to run like a real proper you know, basically TV commercial. Yeah, like banner ads. I haven't I've seen like I don't know one legitimate banner ad for like a car company in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or you know, liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse.

as a result of that. Because one of the things that we've seen in the ad market is that text ads, ads for print and shit do not work, do not function in any way, shape or form, and a lot of like random innersitt ads don't work well, but creator ads work well, and so there's money in it, right because people listen to like people have a degree of like, Okay, well this is like number one. It's just like the process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is

different from an article. But like the ads work better because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you have on Twitter.

in its like biggest ad blitz ever. You know, they had the Super Bowl ads coming up just like a month later, actually weeks, like weeks afterwards, and so you know, like the vast majority of the like mineral ads that ran on that video were crypto dot Com, were ftx, were binance, and and the ad rates that they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying to run on crypto relevant videos was insane. It was like it was like twenty eleven all over again.

that we've we've gone backwards. Like there was this people who like study tech and kind of the way socialization around big tech works talk about this thing called the trow of disappointment, right, which is when you get a new technology, everybody we're in like the hype phase for like AI right now, right, yeah, And then at a certain point it becomes clear which aspects of the hype were right, you know, the degree to which the technology is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists

were claiming, and to which extent the hype was wrong right in what areas is the tech always going to fall short? And that's called like the trow of disappointment when people start to reel and then you know, things kind of are supposed to level after that's dot com is not in fact magic, Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can't just keep shoveling money into this shit forever and the

hopes of exponential returns. Or as a consumer, like at a certain point, I can remember the time when phones were exciting and I was, as especially as a journalist, like really interested every new year at like what new things they're capable of. And then after a couple of years it was like, well, every phone is like there's no difference. Now there's no excitement in getting a new phone. It's just like, well this my old phone is broken,

so I need a new phone. But like I'm not like wow, the new capabilities of this device, but I feel like there's another I don't even I don't really

know what to call it. But there's also this kind of thing where we the Internet helps to create, or is the method through which is disseminated a new labor saving device, and then the scams reach such a density that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal, right, Like that's that's I feel like there's like a that's at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially

with like digital communication, with just communication in general. Right, my smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all the time, and now my smartphone like it. Obviously I still carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text messages are mostly scams, and my emails are mostly scams, and most of the calls that I get are scams.

Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio. He he absolutely advanced sort of the format of like what radio could be and how you could use radio to not just extract money from people, but get them onto your side such that after they have given you their money, like they're they're not just they're not just your your victims, You're you're not just rolling into town and selling them some some snake oil and then like skid daddling as fast as possible, you have made them into your fans,

into your followers. And you know the way that he did that by connecting his scam to like a sense of identity. You know that he wasn't just this fake doctor. He was also so effectively a pastor.

I'm actually not that knowledgeable about musical theater. But my recollection of the way it goes is that like he falls in lover some shit and feels bad, and you know, they wind up he winds up becoming not a con man.

But like I think the modern version of that is he just he gets people to like adopt as a religion and the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubes and shit are on the way, and like, you know, then they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up in the center of town for telling them that there were ten years into this city, hasn't started a bay anyway, whatever, Yeah, yeah.

and it's like, ah, I think content matters. But the point still stands that like the medium itself, the like the invention of radio, the invention of television, the invention of the internet, the invention of social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger impact than any given thing on it, because that's the thing that ultimately we warp our lives around that, we restructure our homes around, we restructure our physical environment around, we restructure how we spend

our days like that, our time usage gets warped around the medium itself, and thus the medium becomes the portal for information to travel.

the way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. I think there are a lot of people, and I think there are a lot of things that people a lot of, especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people adopt because somebody who they had come to already like expresses those politics, right, and so something that maybe never would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able to get purchased with them because like a dude that

they are, a lady, that they had a parasocial relationship express this kind of stuff. And it just it's not that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like people are you know, little robots. It's that, uh, this is kind of the way influence works. It's the same reason why like your you like, people often wind up believing similar things to their parents or similar things to their friends group.

valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this is the same dynamic, This thing which has benefited me and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that I think are should be more widely known. This is also why there's more Nazis, right, like it's it's it's cuts every where which way.

communication vectors. They become prime targets for grift. And the thing is is that all of these technologies that have accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out like the negative impacts of social media, and just like the the effect on like self esteem, self perception of just being exposed to other people's curated, idealized version of themselves so constantly. You know, it's like this like that's already you know, uh, impactful in potentially negative ways.

gauge those things. So like so like I follow you on Twitter, and I know that if I see, like, oh, Robert Evans has retweeted this thing, that it's like okay, so like he's taken a look at it, uh and and it's been through like the filter, the filter of his brain, and so I can probably just like, you know, take my trust in that thing up like one notch, right.

But if I'm just like scrolling down the like the algorithmically curated like this is what our computer has determined is similar to things that you have already looked at. It's it's just it's so much more fraught. But there's it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh, I trust this thing, I trust this platform. And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment. Is yeah,

this like, I trust these algorithm. These algorithms do a really good job of like, oh, I watched Dan and so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to like a bunch of.

it bumps it up a notch. And even that you know that's the way it, like it works for me as well. But there's a degree to which I find it like problematic, especially because like we all fuck around

on the internet too. I had a thing go crazy viral recently where like someone someone posted an obviously photoshopped image of like a control, like a Logitech controller at the bottom of the of the sea and was like, look, the controllers survive, and I like, I shared it to make a joke, right, and the joke was that, like, well, the joke was that like, well the control or we're gonna find out was one of the more functional things about that terrible sub and that was And I even

posted underneath it this obviously this is not a real image, guys. But like then I saw, like I wound up finding it went. The post that I did of it went so viral that like it wound up like screen captain in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about, and they it was only the first post, not the one where I was like, obviously this is fake, and like it was a joke. You know, it was it was a it was a it was a ship post.

We were banton online. Yeah yeah yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how many people now think that literally there's a Logitech controller that they found at the bottom of.

you can trace a lineage back to Something Awful. And the motto of that website, as written by the terrible person who founded it, was the Internet makes you stupid. And I at the time what that kind of meant was.

And if you're younger, or if you just weren't very online in the late nineties early two thousands, you may not remember this long period, but there was a fairly long period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever happens online doesn't matter, right, like, it can't matter.

all want it to not matter. We all want a place where we can just shit post and bullshit because shit posting and bullshiting comes out of like the very same impulses that like determine a lot of how we interact with like our friends, right, you know, we all need some times where you can just sit down, have a couple of beers or whatever and like say shit with your with your buds, you know, and it's not it's not being recorded, it's not going up any everywhere forever.

You can just kind of like talk. This is the it's a it's a field almost social experimentation is a huge part of maturity of growing up, becoming a person. Uh, and I think we all get kind of there's a degree of like the accessibility of the Internet that makes that impossible to entirely get over even though it is demonstrably untrue. What happens on the Internet matters quite a lot, and you can have a real significant you can influence your own life in very negative ways by saying.

bombardment of Dick pills and global leaders. Like I had this joke that I was trying to formulate over the weekend of like World War two with Twitter, where it's like, you know, just a joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bought would observe this like, ah, it's like, you know, two posts in a row, Like it's like the USSR has rolled into Berlin, Stalin has unfriended the President.

I hope this doesn't mean anything, you know that it's like the you have, like you have international politics happening in the same space as fake international politics, as the same space as just like this endless bombardment of you know, of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality and spam, and no one knows what's real anymore, no one knows what to trust, and the instinct and a lot of people is to

just give up trying to parse the difference. And that makes us like increasingly vulnerable.

Shit is this last this weekend, last weekend from you know where we're talking now, there was a mutiny by the Wagner Mercenary forces in Ukraine and southern Russia against the Russian government, or at least that's what it appears to have been now right, this is Russia. A lot of this is really weird. So I'm not going to say we know, we don't. We certainly don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going on there? But

a couple of things happened very quickly. For one, folks on the right, and there were also a lot of kind of like shit had left people who adopted this too decided that liberals were cheering on the head of Wagner Yvjiny Pregoshin because like they believed he was a reformer and that like they'd all thought this guy, who was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist, is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin so much and they've convinced themselves that he's you know,

going to fix Russia, and he's like, no, no, I didn't see that. Like, look, I love calling people out when they have shitty takes, specifically on this specific war, because I've been covering it since twenty fourteen, But like, I didn't see that, and none of the people talking about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it. And it happens all the time, right Sometimes people will like take a post that has like thirty likes and be like, this is what the left is saying, But

like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't see a single post where someone was like, Pregosion's gonna like fix you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No one was saying that they just invented that this was

going on. And it part of it is that, like, you know, the way Twitter works now made it a lot easier for dis info to spread from this thing, Like there was very famously a guy who is an absolutely a con artist just started sharing up bunch of videos from there with like bad commentary that was inaccurate, and Elon.

international relations. And that's how you get shited, like the Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on behalf of the US government, where most Americans are like.

vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the cons are downstream of the fot and of the fame, and so a lot of people are getting taken in by conman. And maybe you know the fact that person's

putting in a link for their their's supplements. You know, on every viral post you don't buy their supplements, but they'll come up with something else for you once they get you in, once you're in the funnel, or even if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel,

you know, and that really wasn't the case. That wasn't the case with you know, you go back ten years talking about like Young Living, right, or some other like multi level marketing company where they're selling you know, essential oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people to spread their business without paying for shit. And now

you can do that. If you're a con man and you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and you're you're on the Ukraine, shit, you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them, you know, frame them in whatever way is likely to get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you gain two thousand, three hundred thousand followers in the space of a night or to and your ability to scam people and get money

out of them has increased several times. You know, the con is downstream of the of the platform, right, so you know that's you get this guy and maybe he's shilling thing X or thing. Why he's got a couple, you know, whatever different con he has. But regular people can be in the in the business of spreading his platform, of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or

whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know, sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine, you know, at a moment when it happens to be the opportune moment to do that, and they go crazy viral, well then that guy is able to triple his following and you know, and have people who are not interested in his con spread his shit, which gets him followers, which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of the con is. Yeah, it's it's all a sales funnel.

Are just anxiety lives we have.

that our physical spaces are you know, appealing and comfortable to live in and and provide us a sense of like enrichment and fulfillment.

and this, it immediately becomes a culture war thing. And so you can't actually you can't actually confront serious problems the way that you need to be able to confront them.

It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, Like, but the other issue is that like, well, for a significant chunks of the population, there's never been any good reason to trust you know, the institutions because you know, they're marginalized groups and whatever, you know, when the institutional trust was higher, like the government was fucking them in this way and that way, and yeah, you know that's also so I wonder, like I think there's a significant extent to which we

need new concepts of like what an institution is and should be, Like we need It's it's such a ground floor problem because like I don't know, we're never getting back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like that's just not going to happen, you know, Like whatever the way forward is on us having less the overcoming the anti vax anti science shit around medicine it's not getting everyone to love the CDC. You know, that's just not ever going to happen again.

LDS Church, look at Mormons. They have a very very strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a lot of their lives, and yet Mormon communities are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and and MLM's you know, like Utah Salt Lake is like the locus of MLM culture, and so like it's not the sort of like strong man like, ah, this is why we need strong like you know, strong leaders is not isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort

of like answer to gravitate towards.

Part of the problem is that like there are little solutions, right, there are little things that you can do, stuff like advocating for you know, a more functional idea of like a more a more functional legal definition of like what an auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally sort of like flooding phone lines with with with cons and stuff or restricting you know, the ability of people like bill collectors and stuff to utilize you know, the phone system and some of the ways that they do,

like the and that can make stuff better. Just like you know, at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in the con space. Some of its ability to automate and push shit to people at scale will get reduced at a certain point. That will happen, right, because it happens with everything.

she never gets ahead. Right, And that's kind of the way that like the evolutionary arms race works, right, Like you know, one one animal develops a defense against a predator and the predator develops a way around it, and like the the like, that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons I think actually, like technology just moves too fast now for us to to be able to keep up, right, Like we're not We're not just standing in place. We're consistently following behind.

And I don't know, I don't know what we do here, uh.

check out everything Dan has done. Thank you Dan, And that is the episode. You can all go home now and deal with the fact that your bank information just got stolen by somebody in Macedonia.