From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Name is Noel.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. It is the top of the week mid June, if you can believe it or not. Fellow conspiracy realists, This means we return with strange news for you and a couple of quick updates before we get into our stories today. Welcome back Noel, Barcelona Brown.
Oh Man a new nickname. I feel like I earned it. A bunch of.
PAIAI yeah, and other other delicacies. It was really cool. It's a beautiful city. Got to see I mean, don't you guys.
I'm sure aware of the Segrata Familia, which is this insane goudy design church that's been under construction for one hundred years and it's the most stuff they don't want you to know church I.
Could ever possibly imagine.
It feels like a temple constructed by some ancient race of aliens. It is otherworldly, to say the least. That was pretty one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
Oh, safe travels, and welcome back. Right, We're looking forward to hearing of these adventures. Everybody missed you. We also have some updates. It turns out witness tampering is having a moment.
Everybody.
Please remember, if jury duty ever seems like a pain in the keyaster, somebody might show up with a bag of one hundred and twenty grand and just you know, ask a vote according to your conscience.
And they'll say, hey, there's more if you do it right.
Also, a couple of a couple of certain presidents, this is like talking about laws about Russia. A couple of certain presidents, whomever they may be, have gotten in some witness things. We wanted to start today with a timely update, or start this evening. I should say we are a nighttime show. Earlier we reported on the somewhat inspiring story
of a serial slingshot band. It A lot of you reached out over the interim, over the weekend, and so on, and said, gave us this update, which we thought was important.
Yeah, this is one of those situations where we record a story then the day we record it. Later in the day more news breaks. So on Tuesday May twenty eighth, the person we were discussing, a man named Prince King, was arrested, and he does the eighty one year old man who was accused of terrorizing Azusa, which is that neighborhood in California. He pled guilty to several counts of vandalism. He was released and he was ordered to stay two hundred yards away from anyone or anything that he had
shotted with his sling. And then the next day, on Wednesday, May twenty ninth, he died in a private residence.
It's like it's like he had nothing left to live for once they'd taken away his swing shot or the.
Fact being taken in disrupted his medication regimen.
Oh well, that's also possible.
He had a number of ailments, according to ABC News and The Guardian, who both reported on this in several other places, he had a heart condition, a nerve issue in his leg and back, and he was allowed to go home. One of the reasons he was like going home was to get those medications you're referring to Ben.
So we wanted to give wanted to give that update at the top. Are we are aware of it, and we wish his friends and family, you know, the best. We're holding you in our thoughts.
Kind of say, though, guys, heart condition plus seeming thrill seeker, mischief maker and odd combination. The very very interesting fellow the Ricky and Elliott over Internet Today conjectured that the timing might be just about right for him to have been fully inspired by the original Dennis the Menace.
Oh okay, that makes sense.
Say, and we'll be right back with some more strange news. And we've returned. This is the actual start of the show. So if you live in the fair metropolis of insert US city name here, then your infrastructure has problems. There are very few exceptions to this rule. This hit Atlanta in particular on Friday in the early morning of just
a few days ago. As we record, on the evening of Wednesday, June fifth, Atlanta's overburdened, underserved under maintenance water system broke and it left thousands of people with no water, low water pressure, and unsafe drinking water. And as this occurred, a domino effect of feedback loop went into play because when one pipe, then other pipes also pop as a result of the system being messed with.
Yeah, I hate to be that guy that has got back from Europe that says he's so much better over there, But I tell you they've got some things figured out for a place that's been around a lot longer than we have. You don't really hear about these kinds of massive infrastructure breakdowns, and you don't see roads filled with potholes, and it seems like the tax of the people pay
over there actually go towards things. Because Ben, we were talking about this off air, and a big part of this type of breakdown not only in Atlanta but elsewhere. It's just the absolute, you know, horrific shape of some of this infrastructure, some of which has been around since like what the Civil.
War or something centuries. Some of this stuff.
You can see footage easily of the pipes that were pulled up from the subterranean parts of the city of Atlanta. Some of this is incredibly old. And I've been that person to you know, no shame in it, coming back from a different country and saying, wow, maybe the US has some stuff to figure out. A lot of Atlanta exists on top of natural springs and wells and rivers.
You know, one of the old offices of our Alma mater, How Stuff Works, actually has a water tower that is taking water from a spring that has been buried over as the city evolved and the infrastructure just kept getting ban dated. It's almost a ship of thesis question, right, like how many small additions or little minor fixes, heuristic fixes can one make to a system before the system
itself is inherently different. And what we found here we're not just talking about ourselves with Atlanta on this point. We are going to a larger context. What we found is that a bill came do this was a preventable, disastrous thing. Now, people weren't dying in the way that they would with a natural disaster like a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake, but people were falling ill.
People were un able to have safe drinking water. There were you know, because this is a beautiful and supportive city, a lot of people were out on social media saying, hey, I've got water. If you need something, come through.
Matt.
You said something very similar earlier when we were recording this week.
Well, yeah, I just invited you guys out to me OTP outside of the perimeter of the city because our water is fine right now.
Haha.
Jo, I'm sorry, but it speaks to I guess the question I want to ask you guys, because I kind of was separated from this. I didn't experience it in the same way. I wonder what the communication was like between city officials and then residents who were actually like Ben living in Atlanta and Noel, Like, were you getting alerts when you were away?
I'm gonna say not good.
My area wasn't affected either over here in Decatur, but my partner, who has a business well that is in an affected area, apparently got a corded voice message from Mayor Andre Dickens himself apologizing. Apparently it's one of the situations too where he was like away, right, Ben, you mentioned he was off I don't know, either campaigning or doing some visit abroad, and he probably should have come back but didn't, so we got a nice recorded voice message instead.
Yeah, the current mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, left for Tennessee as this was going down. There was some damage control. He his I shouldn't say him specifically, but the mayor's office received some pretty serious backlash for poor communication and slow reports. And now even as we record this evening, the guy is going through and making the pr rounds, you know, appearing on local news and when appearing attempting to appear very concerned. Is the mayor concerned?
Well?
Do politicians fill things at least once a year, ben at least once in an election cycle?
Yeah?
There you God, this has happened before here in Atlanta, almost identical. I think this is just like affected more people and for a longer period of time. But I can recall boil water advisories within the last five years, if not less. And one thing that I think people might easily look over is how this affects small businesses, especially ones that rely on water, like restaurants. And we know how slim the margins are for a successful restaurant.
And I saw some reporting that local restaurants lost revenues in the tens of thousands, if thirty forty fifty thousands of dollars because of this debacle.
Man, that's a lot of money, I guess. To my point, guys, I didn't know this was even happening until we were shooting videos together all in one place yesterday as we're recording this, and this is several days well, a long time after this occurred. I didn't even know what had happened. How did you guys get alerted to it? Is it something that pops up on your phone the way an amber alert does if you're a resident of the city, or is it like an email?
I got nothing.
Yeah, That's why I was talking about the message from Dickinson to me. That was one of the first kind of notices. Was this like whoopsie apology auto, you know kind of sense voicemail.
How about you ben.
Living in the area and affected, like most households, received the news by witnessing the event's firsthand. The water pressure drops.
Right, gocha is the mayor?
Where do these taxes go? And pardon me, guys, I didn't mean to derail us talking about the natural spring history of the state of Georgia. I just find it the history endlessly fascinating.
Is it one of those the supposed fountain of youth that ponsta Leon was seeking.
That's why the streets named after him. Where the water tower that you were talking about is.
Yeah, that's what the grifters were selling to people, that juvenation opportunities. So in the case again of this water mean break, I don't want to stay on Atlanta too long, but I do want to shout out at I am King Williams, a local reporter who provides some tremendous context for this on x the social media platform, and notes that there is a reason the infrastructure hit was so specific.
It is because the city of Atlanta, and most municipalities in the United States tend to serve some parts of a metropolis more than they serve other parts of a metropolis. Like pull up a map of your town and figure out, look where the food deserts are right, and look where historically the most challenged or pressed demographics of that city are located. We have another thing called heat islands. Heat islands without green space in Atlanta is blessed with a
tremendous amount of green space. Heat islands will tend to have more flooding. They'll have more floodplains because the infrastructure simply was not built for these people. Now, this reporter King Williams argues that when white flight happened in Atlanta, that tax space or the money or the political will
left as well. And this preface decades of underserving sections of Atlanta based on the makeup of the demographics involved, and because those folks did not get the support that I want to be clear, they were paying for as
tax paying residents of the same city. Eventually things were wrong, and I owe amea culpa to former Mayor Shirley Franklin, who spent a lot of time addressing the very unsexy issue of infrastructure, water, sewage, sanitation, lack of clean drinking water kills so many people around the world every single year.
And we talked about this previously, with stuff like attacks on water waste treatment, with stuff like attacks on power stations, and the fact that bridges will just grumble on their own because it's not a sexy issue to run for election on.
Shouldn't it be? Though?
I just feel like, you know, this idea of sexy issues, it eludes me a little bit. To me, I'm always complaining on the show and elsewhere about where did my.
Tax dollars go?
I just want to see somebody running that can show me that my tax dollars are going to be used for something of value, you know, and to me, potholes and bridge construction and pipe prepare that's sexy.
Enough for me.
I want to know that where I live, I'm going to be able to have a safe street to drive on and then have safe water or clean water to.
It also follows on the heels of known corruption in Atlanta and indeed in many other large metropolitan areas. It wasn't too long ago that the Department of Justice sent out a press release on a City of Atlanta official sentenced for accepting bribes. This comes from February twenty fourth
of last year. Joe Ed Macrina was sentenced to four years and six months in prison for accepting bribes from an Atlanta contractor, you know, like mafia style, like pay us an excessively high bid right or reward the contract to us. Would you guys like to guess what joe Ann Macrina's position was?
Comptroller?
I wish Matt, but thank you man.
I love a callback, Parliamentarian, I love it, I love it. Unfortunately, the commissioner of watershed Management. So just last year this happened. Wow, and I have to ask about the larger context, you know, like a like doc you are code named Doc Holiday. Excuse me give you the full one. You are familiar doubtlessly as the as the Michigander amongst us. You're familiar
with the problems with Flint, Michigan, and we. I think it's safe to say that the trouble with drinking water supply here in the United States is only going to continue. I mean, it's a question for the group. Is it just going to escalate? I'm sorry, I folded up a picture a piece of paper to make myself look like a priest. I'm just feeling it today.
I do you know, I love Ben's priest persona. That's one of my favorite of your ulcer. He goes, I don't know, guys. To me, the biggest takeaway from a story like this is it is a first hand opportunity to see how crucial things like water really are for our day to day lives and imagine what widespread failures of a system like this, or lack of water resources, the inevitable water war, that might be the thing that
mad maxifies the world. You know, it's it's a taste of that, and it's really scary not to be a doom and gloomer about it. But that's where my mind goes.
Well, Yeah, it's just a reminder that once humanity puts a system in place and it's working, we don't have to think about it for a while. You know. It's like you're you've got a phone and it's got a warranty on it for a year or two, maybe maybe three if you're real lucky, and you don't have to think about a new phone for a while. You don't have to think about a new washer and dryer if you ever find one that's working and you can afford.
Unless you bought a cyber truck, because apparently driving over potholes avoids the warranty on that thing exactly.
But I guess the point is something we talked about before or once. There are so many things for each individual to deal with and for each system that we create to deal with that. I think the pipes underneath our feet, if they're working, you just don't think about them. And it sometimes takes something like this to get that
political will that you're talking about. We wish we had more of, Right, you need, you got to have a bridge collapse so that a president like Joe Biden shows up in a place and says, hey, we need to fix our bridges. Otherwise everybody just drives over them and says, hey, well this works great.
That's one of the big issues. I mean, if we're being honest, any student of human psychology knows that people love to reduce work, meaning that one would like to cognitively reduce the work of thinking about inconvenient things, right, things that do not have a big dopamine reward of some sort, things that don't get you instant gratification. Unfortunately,
fixing infrastructure is one of those things. There's a huge reason that homegrown domestic terrorist target infrastructure, or just folks going lunatic and attacking places that nobody thought we would have to protect as a society. And even more disturbingly, right before we go to the app break, let's leave you with this, folks. You don't need villains, clear and present. Sometimes when you just don't take care of stuff, bad things happen. As we record right now, part of Atlanta
is still under a water boil advisory. And the question here is bigger than Atlanta. The question is for your neck of the global woods, what's going to happen next? Other disasters are statistically inevitable, but we're gonna keep doing our You know do our little show. So we're gonna pause for word from our sponsors.
And we have returned with another piece of strange news. This one's been a few weeks in the works. You may have noticed that when you search for something on the old Google, a new feature may well have presented itself to you or not, And we'll get into why not, which is sort of an AI concierge attempting to answer your question without you having to click anything at all. It's sort of trying to save you from having to even click through any of the links, which admittedly have
become less and less relevant. You guys, notice how much how bad Google has gotten, just like in terms of like the way it categorizes search, it seems like it's really taking.
A bit of a nose dive.
I don't know if y'all's experience has been that way, or if you're even Google users anymore. I know you guys have talked about things like Duck Duck go in the past.
Yeah, in my not to speak for you, Matt, but in my experience, it was unsurprising yet still profoundly disappointing. Like I think, unfortunately, with the length of the show, we've been able to be prescient in that kind of
AI concierge thing. Look, AI implementation sounds fantastic in a boardroom, but just the same way that the biases of the creators determine the actions of machine learning war machine building, an AI steer drone is going to make the same fundamental creator errors as a profit driven search algorithm building the same thing in so it's no surprise that it stinks. It also gave me some dark dystopia laughter, because they
were mimicking you know. Now comics and internet internet wits are are mentioning some of the they're doing the thing like when you pretend to write an AI script for giggles, pretending to make Google image or Google search results.
And that's definitely what the story is about.
But I was actually wondering as well, if either of you had noticed a decline in the.
Quality of Google search results in.
General, I would just say that I have not. I continue to use yield Google and give alphabet all of my information because they're going to take it anyway. No, I'm just joking. I just I still use it because it does seem to work pretty well for me.
Really, that's interesting, That's not a perspective that I'm hearing from everybody, and I found that a lot of prioritize searches are paid for and you see those at the top, and so you definitely you can find what you're looking for if you're a savvy Internet user. But in general, it feels like you're having to dig a little deeper before you're actually getting relevant results.
I would agree with that. I think maybe I've got used to a system and I figured out how that system changed, and I just kind of go with it because it's easier than learning the new system.
Oh yeah, no, no, I understand, we are, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So rather than perhaps address that algorithm that you're talking about, but we know that Google. Changes to Google's algorithm over the years have had significant impacts on businesses, on online business. We as a company before we were, you know, under our current corporate structure, we were run by Discovery and we were much more of a website kind of situation with our house Stuff Works flagship website. And when there were changes to Google's search algorithm that determined what kind
of I guess. The term is quality score I guess is assigned to what types of websites certain things could cause your search engine optimization or SEO as the part in the parlance of tech speak, to take a nose dive. So we would look out for these things. They would be updates, they'd call it. There was like and or whatever. There are different names for them.
It does seem now the Google doesn't seem to care.
So much anymore about the quality of search results, and that is evident in some of these AI search results. They're so ridiculous, so over the top and so blatantly incorrect that Google has had to pull back this program significantly. It's another one of those things we've talked about with AI, whereas everyone's like they gotta be the first to say we did the AI thing. We got to add the AI widget, we can't be left behind. We got to
be part of the AI revolution. But frankly, the technology isn't there yet and probably should not be rolled at being rolled out as willy nilly as it has been. But hey, at least in this situation we get some yucks out of it. One of my favorites here is let's see AI overview for the prompt is it okay to leave a dog in a hot car? Aioverview says this, Yes, it's always safe to leave a dog in a hot car, especially on a warm day. The temperature inside a car
remains around the same temperature as outside the car. The Beatles famously released a hit single about the subject title It's Okay to Leave a Dog.
In a Hot Car, and then it has pro lyric.
Excerpt from this non existent song, It's okay to leave your dog in.
A hot car, Hot car. It's okay to leave your dog in a hot car.
Nothing that could possibly happen if you leave your dog in a hot car.
I just sort of improve the way that vocal worked, because that's not a real song.
Guys, and I mentioned the idea of Internet rankings in terms of quality would be considered a quality result because these are clearly pulling from websites that are either satire or very poor quality. As absolutely Bend, some of these are coming from the onion. I think one of the most famous examples of this guy's is using glue to make pizza dough out.
Of that one goes I want to read an excerpt from it.
Yeah, GOOGLEI said the following, Well, now I don't want to start a free trial business. Insider, get right out of town. Here it is Google. AI said cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese, or thickened sauce. Here are some things you can try mixing sauce. Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and.
Dry out the sauce.
You can also add about an eighth cup of non toxic glue to give the sauce more tackiness. But the pizza cool, the cheese will settle and bond and then bend. To your point, the onion is absolutely part of the story. When it comes to the idea of eating rocks, someone googled how many rocks should I eat in a day, to which the AI over you responded at least one per day, and then went on to gay give specifics about you know, the size of the rocks, and then
what you should be looking for. Anothery're asked how many Muslim presidents has the US had, to which the AI overview responded that Barack Obama was a Muslim misinterpreting you know, some information from the Internet. And then, of course, the debacle with the cheese pizza mixed with glue. So, I don't know, guys, it just seems like Google, you know, everyone's like trying to match open ais, you know, Chat Gypt and all of that stuff, and to varying degrees
of success. As we know, even chat Gypt certainly isn't fallible. We see stories about it hallucinating things, you know, and that's gonna there's gonna be some of that happening. But since this has created such an online comic bonanza, let's call it, they have rolled back the results and not only about eleven percent of users are getting these results at all. And I guess they're going to tune it up a little bit and then maybe roll it back out. But do you guys have any thoughts about this? It
seems just beyond absurd. Well, we know, we are starting to live in a culture, or have been living in a culture with things like TikTok and all of this short attention span theater stuff, where there is this sort of drives you just accept whatever you see on the Internet because it's on the Internet, that it's truth, because it's easier that way. And this seems to be feeding into that to a pretty large degree.
It's interesting too, because what we're looking at is what I would call intergenerational information and normalization asymmetry, which I know sounds like gobbledy Google words, but it does make sense if we walk it through. What I'm saying, essentially is that the people who have valid discourse and criticism about these changes being implemented are, to a large degree
they're going to be an older demographic. Then the people are coming up native, as we would say in this online sphere, the folks who are using a search engine for the first time don't have an earlier comparison to make,
so for them it is increasingly difficult. They're also, you know, and this is very pretentious to say, but they're also not going to be the kids reading some you know, scholarly paper or watching some high falutin thirty five minute ted talk or whatever about the nature of this change and the dangers inherent. They might not know who Jaron Lanier is, you know, so this could be this could be very difficult. We can't, you know, we can't talk down to people about this. I think we could just
be honest, like you're being here, nol. It's a problem. It's bad, especially because other people don't know it used to be kind of better. I'm not even saying perfect, I'm just saying kind of better.
Sure, And again, like I think I've been pretty even handed in terms of like mixing my dystopian outlook on AI with a sort of silver lining of using AI as a tool, whether it be for music production like with that Randy Travis song story, or some of the tools we're seeing rolling out in audio and video software that are actually incredibly helpful and can be predictive in terms of you know, removing noise from audio, or cutting out backgrounds from images and things like that, or helping
with in betweening and animation, things that actually save humans time without getting rid of their jobs or the need for them to exist at all.
But this, to me is just that.
Shiny new thing that everyone feels like they've got to trot out when it's not ready, and it's just frickin embarrassing, and they absolutely deserve all the lampooning they're getting.
If you ask me, Matt, think man, this hallucinatory generative AI telling people to eat rocks on Google.
Well, I'll speak for myself, but I do think this is more general as a species We've become pretty accustomed to typing something into a search bar and finding out the facts or the truth or the thing that we really want to know. And Google has been pretty good in the past that even if it's just sending you to a Wikipedia page, on that Wikipedia page, you're generally going to find mostly true things, mostly facts, or.
The ability to cross reference the very least, right, Yeah.
But then I think we got a little accustomed to just the first like little page that you get depending on what device you're accessing the search tool on.
Right, Like ninety plus percent of people don't scroll past the first page of results exactly.
And I'm just imagining a world where everybody that's got a search tool on their side or their app is, you know, implementing this kind of technology where truth in fact become even further and further from actuality because everybody has their own generated version of what that thing is or that's already.
Being tailored to you a little bit, right, Oh yeah, like like yes, yes, yes.
Yes, I don't know that freaks me out. I don't like that.
No, I don't either, And I will say that it's I know that in the past, and you know, previous generations. I think people generally were more well read. I think people were generally a little better at separating fact from fiction. But also there certainly has always been a history or this idea of if it bleeds, it leads, and people not reading past the headlines.
You know. I think this is just a much more extreme pathology.
Kind of of that previously existing kind of you know phenomenon.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, the people then as now or you know, much the same as we say, as we often say on this show. And one of the issues is that, look, Wikipedia gets a hard time, and folks, if you're doing any research, ever, the thing you want to learn from Wikipedia is you want to go to the talk tab and see the arguments, and then you want to look at the bibliography of sources. We're just ethically required to
say that. But one of the brilliant things Wikipedia did was when it works, when it's not a war of viewpoints and conversations, when it's being objective, it's continually crowdsourcing and fact checking itself. And the issue is that it appears some of these so called AI concierges, these large language models, these learning algorithms, they are not fact checking themselves. They are indeed like two mirrors reflecting one another. We talked about this idea previously, so there's no as of yet,
there is no BS killer AI. There's nothing that'll intervene between point A when you search, point you know Z when you results show up. There's nothing to be the other part of the alphabet that jumps in and says, hey, actually no, most people don't put glue on pizzas.
It's a giant AI circle jerk is what it is. Everywhere.
It's like this self congratulatory echo chamber. And to the to the point you're referencing men, I think was the whole idea of the dead Internet theory about how much bot activity is already out there and how if an AI language learning system is being trained on Internet content that was generated by other language learning systems, it becomes like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and then it becomes something real weird and real wrong. Yep, I'm sorry, guys, I think it weirds
is all out a little bit. But any last words, Matt, there we go. We'll be back with some words Draden's News after a word from ours bondser.
And we've returned Before we get into the story, let's shout out West, the director and director of photography for the social videos that we film when we are together, because he mentioned this. At least to me, it's the first time I had heard about it. I don't know about you guys, but this story comes from you, West. Thank you.
Shout out to West.
West. West put us onto a story that is about two companies that we're going to be talking about. The first one is a property management company based in Atlanta. Wow, this is a very Atlanta centric episode here we go. That's right, atl everybody.
Hey man, we're a proper metro area.
That's right. That's right, the Atlanta metro are.
We're just as good as New York and Los Angeles.
Yes, but this is a property management company based in Atlanta. It is called Cortland. That's spelled co.
R t l A n d ah. Yeah. I remember.
Uh.
He mentioned it to us in passing. We're like, we're talking about the water crisis issue, and he's like, did you hear about this? We were like, no, what is this? So this Courtland without a you. I always think about Courtland Marriott for some reason. I guess that's just in my head it is, Oh yeah, and it is not that.
Uh.
This is a company that's primary business is owning property and leasing it out to you or us or other people like us that are.
Renters, right, just never selling it to you.
Oh well maybe sometimes maybe you could could be occupancy of some sort. It could just be open rental property. Who knows they own. Yes, but they are huge and we're going to get into how big they are and they're a big deal. Courtland. The second company is a property management software company called real Page r E a l page that owns and licenses a quote technology platform that enables real estate owners and managers to change how people experience and use rental space.
That sounds nice. That sounds downright.
Utopian, doesn't it. One of the main features of this platform is that it can quote optimize rents to achieve the overall highest yield or a combination of rent and occupancy at each property, which means it is using some sort of algorithm that is a part of that technology platform to decide how much rents should be and when it's being used by a company like Courtland that we're gonna be talking about here that has so many different rental properties it can have disastrous results, and there may
be a conspiracy afoot. So let us jump to a story from Entrepreneur written by Sharon Shebu on June fourth, twenty twenty four. It's titled is one company to Blame for soaring rental prices in the US? Say it ain't so, guys, I'm gonna guess that so well, it might be, at least according to an FBI investigation. Ooh ooh, yes, So the Federal Bureau boys did a little unannounced raid on Courtland Management back on May twenty second.
Oh, just a little unannounced when just a little poplright, you know.
Hey, everybody open up, open those file cabinets were coming in.
We're knocking to be polite more.
I think this would maybe even qualify as a no knock raid, right, yeah, like a kick in raid.
Yeah, well yeah, because and the reason why they did it there, they are conducting a major investigation into an alleged rental price fixing conspiracy that, according to Sharon Shebu writing for Entrepreneur, may have already impacted millions of US Americans.
Freaking gross makes me so mad, Matt.
Before we go further into this particular this Courtland situation. I think we should point out that in twenty twenty two, we talked a little bit about aj Stegmany, chess prodigy who who became Atlanta's top broker because of very similar software he built to do very similar things.
Yeah, because you can move those pieces just a little bit and you can optimize right, Oh, optimizing lease rental prices yucky.
Let's say we have stone a how much blood see can we get with y squeeze? And what about It's called Stegnet proprietary software. We were very nice when we talked about this guy. By the way, we've never met him, but I think I think this this shows us kind of the way this escalates, you know, bump bump, bump up.
Oh yeah, bum bum bum bum bum.
Oh.
And our stone that we're pulling blood out of is rolling guys, because this is part of a giant anti trust investigation that the Department Justice is carrying out looking
into specifically that second company we mentioned real page. Those guys are a nine billion dollars software company that's billion with a B, and that is the company, as we said, that recommends to property owners when they need to raise rates and how much they need to raise rates in order to optimize the amount of money they're bringing in for each property.
Kind of reminds me of freight brokers in a way.
I mean, just in terms of the logistics of like, you know, what's the word maximizing kind of maximizing profits and also some potential for horseplay in there, you.
Know, yeah, oh yeah, And when utilized by a huge company like Cortland, which as of June twenty twenty two owned nearly eighty five thousand department units across the country from Arizona to Georgia. And they're using this software right, this platform or whatever you want to call it, that's attempting this off stimization. That means all of these properties
are going up little bit by little bit. I don't think, and maybe this is not true, but I don't think that software is incentivizing landowners to reduce rent.
Absolutely not. I mean maybe not. That means very kind of know, you're being very generouid it.
Is a possibility in the programming, right, But that's saying that's a possibility in the programming. Is saying is similar to saying it is possible to get to a draw in Teken or more combat, you know, what I mean, like it can happen theoretically, but if circumstances work out, it wants a clear winner. And I think also it's adding some high octane gas to the bonfire of increasing
rent prices which occur for any number of variables. But you could argue the wrong things are being incentivized and weaponized.
Oh oh yeah, oh yeah. Well let's take this little set of statistics from our fair city of Atlanta, just to really get this in perspective.
Oh and can we point out that Atlanta, out of all we very rarely get to brag about our city. So in addition to being a star of poor water infrastructure, this fair metropolis is also one of the top targets for real estate capture, oh investment corporations.
Yeah, the big guys like the black Rocks of the world that are like, we will take all of these houses, these single family units that are an entire house, and we will rent them all. You'll never own anything.
I think I mentioned in the past and these kind of conversations. I rented from a mega conglomo, one of these type of organizations called Excalibur Homes that owns a ton of property in the Metro Atlanta area, and both of the times I rented from them, every single fixture was identical. It was the cheapest of the lowest of
the low bargain basement kind of stuff. And anytime something would break, which is inevitably, I couldn't get anyone to respond because it was all through this online portal using you know this, like you had to use their proprietary software to reach out for maintenance requests, to submit a ticket, and yeah, you'd be lucky if you ever got a response.
Yeh, yuck.
Well, let's jump to these statistics, guys, because Cortland is a huge player in the real estate business, the actual property business, right, but they are just one in Atlanta. There are just one in the United States. The connective tissue between a ton of these rental properties is that real Page. Because in Atlanta, more than eighty percent of rentals have been affected. Let's say that's the way it's
stated in this Entrepreneur article. The price of those leases have been affected by Real Pages algorithm eighty percent, and rent in the city since twenty sixteen has grown by eighty percent, which means.
Which is fascinating in comparison to the thirty percent overall increase across the United.
States exactly, so specific cities can be affected way more than the system overall, right, because everybody wants to get it to get into Atlanta now because it's a hub and the airport and the film industry and just blah blah blah blah blah, growing, growing, growing, same thing with places like Austin, certain parts of California and Oregon. And the problem is getting worse, right as human beings cluster in cities. But here's the other problem, guys. Vacancy rates,
like open apartment units has actually been increasing a little bit. Yeah, but somehow prices are going up to doesn't it seem like if there's not as many people to fill the apartments, then maybe the prices should go down.
You know, I unfondly remember not too many years ago, we would drive through you and I would go hang out in different areas of the city, and you know, the like the abandoned warehouses we used to get up
the hijinks are now huge condos. And for a time, the city of Atlanta had some egregious like forty percent vacancy rate with a lot of that new construction just because it was similar to the lesson that every municipality needs to learn from China, which is, if you are building things that are not accessible to people, people will not be there. Real estate is not field of dreams, no matter how folks want to make it sound to
the boardroom. So with that in mind, are you proposing, then, the possibility of an inflection point like at is there some point where these two variables of need for housing and inaccessible pricing? Is there a point where they hit some untenable threshold?
Yeah, I think we hit it in I don't know, twenty eighteen. Maybe no, But I mean, really like it feels as though we already have kind of hit a ceiling here and it's it's only going down from this point.
But I don't know, Ben. All I know is that according to these this major investigation right and several other lawsuits that have been filed in other cities and other states, the problem is real page essentially making all of these land owners collude with each other because they're using the same algorithms and they're all raising their rents at kind of the same rate. So it's almost like gas stations.
You guys, ever driven through an area an intersection maybe and you see three gas stations that are immediately next to each other or in all of the prices are almost exactly the same. Because everybody there knows somebody's gonna stop in for gas, they got to pick one of us. If any of us are higher, nobody's gonna pick us. So we got to hit that right mark. But if everybody decides, hey, guys, we're going up by five cents, and they go okay, so everybody does it. That's kind
of what's happening here. Even if the landlords are not, you know, conspiring amongst themselves, they're all using the same software that is essentially conspiring for them.
And the software is getting a vigoroush as well. I like to I think of it as what I call the butter chicken example. So you go to different cities or different countries, right, and you pick, like, pick a dish. It could be anything. Pick a dish or some kind of meal that multiple outlets will sell in whatever part of this wide world you find yourself in. It give you pizza. It could obviously, if you have great tape
to be a casadia, it could be buttered chicken. I was convinced at one time I swear I witnessed a price jump in specifically buttered chicken in this one city, and it wasn't a big price jump, it wasn't egregious, right, but it was a uniform increase. And you know, obviously to the earlier points about small businesses, you don't want to go and ruin someone's day. You're just going to see if there's another place that had the earlier price
you expected. And now that's an easy that's an easy anecdote, right when it's one meal. But what happens when it becomes the place you live? And are there any I mean, are there any solutions that you have heard? I mean, the FBI, again with courtesy, sort of knocked on the door and then took all the files. Right. But is this maybe maybe another example of techno outpacing legislation like easy illegal to make software that does this? No? Or is it's just the use of it that is illegal.
I think it's the result of that software being used by so many different people, by so many different landlords, right, and major companies, and a result in combination with so many companies owning so much property, right.
So it accreates power because of the massive users yeah.
I mean, well, look, that's I'm not a part of this investigation. I don't know exactly what they're looking at within Cortland's files, but I do know they're a drop in the bucket. Even though they're a major player. There are so many other places that they need to get metrics from, basically on how rent prices have increased on a per unit basis over a you know, a decade almost.
And you know, I've never seen Paul Decant in the same room as an FBI agent.
That you know, like any FBI.
Yes, I personally know all of the fbiz.
Hey man, that's something to keep in mind. There was one other thing I want to mention here. Again, it's not just Atlanta, y'all. Seventy percent of apartment units in Arizona, we're using this real page algorithm, sixty percent of apartment buildings in the District of Columbia and Washington, DC. It's all over the place.
Seventy percent of a city, right, yeah, well yeah, or seventy did you say Arizona, the.
State the state of Arizona, seventy percent of apartment units.
Is this a.
Fraud situation or are they just going after them for like antitrust kind of stuff or is it a mixture.
It's an it's a criminal antitrust investigation that the DOJ is leveraging against.
Real cause of collusion between these two entities.
Essentially, that's happening not above board, like this is there there creating an effective monopoly and price fixing, right, which is totally illegal.
It's it's yes, it's basically price fixing on apartment units.
The allegation is that it's able to push the prices higher at a faster rate than an individual. I don't even like the phrase landlord an individual property owner would have done on their own.
Yeah, it is weird to have that word lord in there, Isn't it it applied refusing over someone? No, No, you're right, it's inherently kind of othering. Yeah, it's gross. I don't like it either.
The land papa, let's make it Yeah, yeah, get out of my head.
Well, Matt, how do we How do we summarize this? What do people need to walk away with?
This is how I'll summarize it the same way that Sharon Shibu did in that Entrepreneur article that we mentioned at the top. In the past ten years, rent inflation has outpaced overall inflation by forty point seven percent type forty Have we all made forty point seven percent more money?
Oh?
Wait no, not even kind of absolutely no, what are we doing here, guys?
Yes, I mean there are causes out there in terms of unionization and people fighting for rights of employees where they're struggling to get one or two percent of a raise year over a year, which I think is well below inflation alone, in cost of living increases alone.
We do know that this has been a long time in coming, right, Like pro Public was investigating Real Page a few years ago. So I mean, good on the DOJ for going in and you know, doing something or attempting to these these decisions often take a long time to result in real world changes for a the public, right, So it's going to be easy to get this story lost as the courtroom proceedings occur. Please do help us
keep an eye on a fellow conspiracy realists. We don't want to lose these sorts of things because the reality is true, whatever your demographic or ideology is, things are accelerating in price and there are a lot of bad faith actors who are taking the opportunity to pretend like the supply chains are still broken. You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
I just can't stand it when like the super wealthy plead poverty.
You know, like in these types of just.
Right right, the Atlas network should shrug. And with that, folks, we would love to hear your individual war stories, your success stories, your perspectives. What's the funniest joke Google accidentally told you? We hope it wasn't in an emergency situation?
What is the uh?
Oh gosh, what a rent price is like in your neck of the woods? How much is the last how much have you paid to go out to eat?
And?
Uh, you know, I guess we should end in some good news. The diamond industry is finally collapsing. There's that. Do you guys hear about that one?
No?
I did not story for another day. Oh we wise we're right about lab grown diamonds those years back when that first came out. I think the diamond industry, specifically the blood diamond industry, may not be long for the world.
Because the lab grown ones are just as just as shiny.
They're the same. There's still diamonds. The diamond is like it's a thing you can make.
Don't you think some people really want the blood, the ones that are soaked in blood.
There really something sexy about that. I don't know. To the monsters out there.
Oh, the suffering makes it shine, shout out to We can't wait to hear your thoughts, folks. We try to be easy to find online, correct.
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