The World's Biggest Scammers - Gabrielle Bluestone | Modern Wisdom Podcast 312

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   He had hired a…

   1. GBGabrielle Bluestone0:00

      He had hired a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a, a whole litany of mental issues, but specifically stated that he was not an antisocial personality disorder, wasn't like a sociopath or a psychopath, and the judge challenged that contention in her sentencing. She was like, "I don't know if I believe that." She had this phrase that was like, "His fraud, like a circle, has no end." (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:25

      What have you been researching for the last few years?

   3. GBGabrielle Bluestone0:28

      Um, I have been researching why people scam online and why we fall for it.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:36

      Lots of examples of that to go through-

   5. GBGabrielle Bluestone0:38

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:38

      ... I feel like.

   7. GBGabrielle Bluestone0:40

      Yes. Well, this all came about, uh, because I was the reporter who broke the Fyre Festival story, um, and for your listeners who don't know what that is, that was, um, this luxurious music festival that was advertised as the party of the century. It had some of the world's most beloved models and influencers backing it, um, a lot of money put into it, and when the ticket holders arrived, it was supposed to be on this beautiful private island, flown there by private jets with, you know, luxurious catered food from celebrity chefs, and when the attendees arrived, uh, they found a gravel pit next to a Sandals resort, um, that ended up being more luxurious than the festival itself, with instead of these beautiful hotel rooms, it was FEMA tents and IKEA furniture. Um, and so I set about trying to find out how the organizers, um, led by Billy McFarland who was Fyre Festival's CEO, um, how they got away with it and why it worked so well. And I started to realize that it wasn't just them. Um, these scams were going on in pretty much every walk of life whether it's in the tech industry, in the media, on social media, um, even the way that we, you know, a, a regular social media user is presenting themselves to our friends. Like, we are all scamming each other and accepting what it is as reality even though we know better. It's a really fascinating psychological profile as well as a business story.

   8. CWChris Williamson2:05

      It's kind of just come about as well. Like, most people didn't aspire to essentially be con artists. You know, you'd have the traveling con artist snakes, snake oil salesman, right, going from town-

   9. GBGabrielle Bluestone2:19

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson2:19

       ... to town and grifting and then they'd get found out and then they'd go onto the next town, but you are right. There's an element of this sort of two lives that we lead, the one, the front-facing one that we show on public social media and then the, the real one that's going on behind the scenes.

   11. GBGabrielle Bluestone2:34

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson2:34

       Yeah, I, I don't think that's happened really ever before, certainly not at this scale.

   13. GBGabrielle Bluestone2:39

       And I think even the most honest people are guilty of it to an extent, right? Like, m- most people are not gonna show the lows of their lives on social media. They're gonna put their best face forward. Um, and even I'm guilty of that. You know, if I'm having a boring day, I'm not putting that on my feed. I'm putting the highlights, um, and then presenting that to the public as if that's every day for me. Um, so I think it starts on that most basic level of grift all the way up to the people who are photoshopping their faces and bodies, who are getting plastic surgery and pretending that it's natural, who are, you know, purchasing, uh, luxury goods shopping bags on Etsy and then staging photographs as if they have been doing these incredible shopping trips. There's so much just not even to scam u- The only thing they're scamming is our perception of them, right? There's so much of it going on and then all the way up to fake tickets to a music festival that never existed.

   14. CWChris Williamson3:34

       Talk me through what it was like breaking that story. You'd done your research and then you pushed a button and then all hell descended on Earth.

   15. GBGabrielle Bluestone3:45

       Yeah, so it actually, it started a bit earlier than that because I was, you know, I'm a Millennial. I was part of that target audience that they were trying to capture, and, you know, going to meet Bella Hadid wasn't really something that I was looking to buy, but then I saw a high school classmate of mine talking about his artist pass on Instagram and all the benefits that were gonna come with it and, you know, the special food and the, the special treats that, that come, like the artist party. There was supposed to be this huge party with Kendall Jenner that people were doing. So I took a look at it. All of a sudden I was like, "Oh my God, am I missing this big event that everyone's gonna go to?" I started to feel the FOMO that had been baked into this marketing campaign, but when I went to look at the website, like, it looked like something someone might've made in, like, a high school coding class. It was so low-rent and so anachronistic compared to what they were advertising, you know? If there was really all this money behind it, you would think that their, their product would match the marketing. Um, and so that kind of, like, tingled that spidey sense where I was like, "Something is not right here." And it was all very... uh, it, you know, you think of the story of Cassandra. It seemed so obvious to me that there was something terribly wrong here. Um, and there were people who knew what was going on trying to warn people on social media. I think people were scared to publicly speak out about it because they were afraid of getting sued and getting blamed for the festival's failure. Um, but it was all out there in the open. Any one of these ticket holders could've come across it the same way as me, right? It didn't require this incredible investigative ability. Um, and then it all came crashing down on social media as people landed on the island and started to see what was going on. So, um, at that point my editors, uh, allowed me to move forward with the story because even they were like, "You know, it's a music festival. Okay, it doesn't live up to all of its claims. That's life." Uh, and I was like, "No. It's like, way more." Uh, so finally when, you know, the cheese sandwich tweet came out, they were like, "All right. Go. Publish." Um, and that was kind of, like, off to the races from there because Billy McFarland did not stop scamming. Even after he got arrested, uh, he was out on bail and he launched a second set of felonies-... also targeting people who wanted to live that life that they were seeing on Instagram. So, he was selling fake tickets to the Met Gala and to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. And he was targeting the same people, it was the same email list, and they continued to fall for it. It is mind-blowing.

   16. CWChris Williamson6:17

       But if your selection effect to find your market was, do you want to go to this product that has these particular brand values, you've already selected for a very particular group of people-

   17. GBGabrielle Bluestone6:28

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWChris Williamson6:29

       ... who have a fair bit of money and spend a lot of time on Instagram and probably are interested in the Met Gala and the Victoria's Secrets Fashion Show. And, like, was it backstage with Miley Cyrus when she'd stopped doing back-

   19. GBGabrielle Bluestone6:42

       Taylor Swift.

   20. CWChris Williamson6:43

       Taylor Swift. Uh, she-

   21. GBGabrielle Bluestone6:43

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson6:43

       ... she'd stopped doing backstages, like, five years ago. One, one of the things that you go through that I thought was so interesting in the book is what Billy's got up to since he went to jail. Can you-

   23. GBGabrielle Bluestone6:56

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CWChris Williamson6:56

       ... detail the laundry list of shit that he's been doing since then?

   25. GBGabrielle Bluestone7:00

       Yeah. It i- I mean, this guy just does not stop. It is-

   26. CWChris Williamson7:03

       Unrelenting.

   27. GBGabrielle Bluestone7:04

       Yeah. (laughs) Uh, so after he got busted for the second set of felonies, um, he got... I think he got off pretty lightly. He was sentenced to six years. And he almost-

   28. CWChris Williamson7:14

       Wait a minute, you said it could have been 75.

   29. GBGabrielle Bluestone7:16

       Yes. So, um, I mean, often in like, the US judicial system, they will stack all these charges, so it was very unlikely that he was ever gonna face anything like that. And a lot of the charges end up running concurrently, but six years was still pretty good. I mean, during his sentencing (laughs) , he had hired, um, a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a, a whole litany of mental issues, uh, but specifically stated that he was not, um, an antisocial personality disorder. It wasn't like a sociopath or a psychopath. And the judge challenged that contention in her sentencing. She was like, "I don't know if I believe that." You know? She had this phrase that was like, "His fraud, like a circle, has no end." Uh, but then granted him a relatively (laughs) lenient sentence. And so I think for a normal human being, you would feel very lucky and maybe reform a bit. Uh, what Billy McFarland did was smuggle a recording device into prison, which he was then caught with. He had been initially sentenced to serve out his time at a prison in Upstate New York, which was great for his family and his girlfriend because it was not too much of a trip to visit him, um, and there were celebrities there. You know, Donald Trump's former fixer and attorney, Michael Cohen, was sentenced there. Uh, Billy McFarland was apparently Scrabble buddies and played basketball with Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, who was-

   30. CWChris Williamson8:33

       What's he in jail for?
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Do you think Uber's…

   1. GBGabrielle Bluestone15:00

      jealous, and it was so unreflective of reality. Um, but then also I think you raise a really interesting point, and I, I think this has long been true but it's more obvious and evident than ever in social media. You know, Nike sells itself as this, like, it, you know, they sell themselves as, as lifestyle brands, and so we kind of ignore the fact that, you know, their stuff was made in sweatshops or that, you know, these companies that are, you know, supporting these different social justice movements, their executive boards don't reflect the values that they are preaching on social media. Um, Uber for example created a playbook. They deliberately broke laws, they would come into cities and, like, uh, just completely ignore any ordinances or any kind of things that they were supposed to observe, um, because what was gonna happen? Like, they would just raise some money until they got kicked out. And they had a, a playbook where they (laughs) would, you know, mobilize their users to then campaign against the laws that were limiting them. So they're, they're, they're celebrated for that, um, even though they've never turned a profit. So a lot of it comes down to the way that these things are marketed and not what they actually are.

   2. CWChris Williamson16:09

      Do you think Uber's a grift?

   3. GBGabrielle Bluestone16:12

      I mean, it's a real company, but I think that our view of it as this, you know, unicorn company that is bringing value is absolutely a grift. I mean, they have destroyed taxi industries, they resolutely refuse to pay their workers what they're worth or to provide them with any kind of benefits. Like, people are really suffering and it, they're celebrated as, you know, this game-changing company, uh, but I think they're game changing in a, a negative way, not a positive way.

   4. CWChris Williamson16:38

      Did you see that just in London now, they lost a lawsuit that says they now need to treat their drivers as employees? So they can't just have them as self-employed agents, which was the workaround they had for tax and PAYE and National Insurance-

   5. GBGabrielle Bluestone16:55

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson16:55

      ... and all of that other stuff.

   7. GBGabrielle Bluestone16:57

      I was not aware of that, but I think that's a very positive change.

   8. CWChris Williamson17:01

      Yeah. That was, I think that's one of the reasons why they're able to be so competitive, right? That the other companies have got all of these burdens, like having to actually properly pay their staff and having-

   9. GBGabrielle Bluestone17:10

      (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson17:10

       ... wages and, and, and, uh, like, holiday pay and things like that. Um, yeah. What's Juicero? I'd never heard of this-

   11. GBGabrielle Bluestone17:21

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson17:21

       ... until I saw your book.

   13. GBGabrielle Bluestone17:23

       Um, so this was a startup that, uh, really capitalized on this new kind of healthy lifestyle trend I think that you see very much online, um, in Juice Press and these companies, uh, that was supposed to be a way for you to easily get fresh-pressed juice every day in your home. Um, and they raised hundreds of millions of dollars for this and it was hyped as the next big thing, and then it shut down almost overnight because a Bloomberg, uh, reporter discovered that it was actually easier, they...So part of the business was a machine, and then the other part was a subscription service with the juice in these bags that you would put into the machine like an espresso pod. And it turned out, it was (laughs) actually easier to open the juice bags yourself with your hands than the machine actually was. It was such a waste and such a useless product, um, that this video just simply revealing this ended the whole company.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:21

       No way.

   15. GBGabrielle Bluestone18:21

       And there's a lot of that. Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson18:24

       And this, had it gone ... It wouldn't have gone public by this stage but was probably in startup, s- t- had had some funding, was selling a lot of products?

   17. GBGabrielle Bluestone18:32

       Yeah, I don't recall the specifics about how far they got towards an IPO but, I mean, you saw the same thing with WeWork, right? And what brought (laughs) WeWork down was the fact that they had to put down on paper the actual value of the company and th- uh, you know, that company was shrouded in this new age mysticism. I mean, it was an office, uh, space r- leasing company. There was nothing mystical or even technological about it, but because Adam Neumann was so charismatic and because he got an investor who was willing to give any kind of money, uh, with, um, Mayson and, um ... I forgot the name of the fund now, I'm blanking on it, but it, you know, funded by the Saudis. There was a lot of money floating around. They were able to sell it as this global revolution, um, that was worth, you know, billions of dollars. And then when it came down to it, (laughs) it really was not worth very much at all.

   18. CWChris Williamson19:23

       What's your favorite Adam Neumann story?

   19. GBGabrielle Bluestone19:26

       Um, you know, I think it speaks to why people invest money with these kinds of people. There's a very famous anecdote, um, after he had, uh, obtained office space in the Woolworth Building, which is an iconic building in Downtown New York. Um, he brought a couple of his employees up for, like, an after hours visit to see the space and, um, he th- (laughs) I guess there were these, like, half empty bottles of beer on the floor and he told his employees to drink it, and they did. And then he told his em- ... You know, it was an unsecured, uh, construction space and he told his employees, who were drunk at this point, to go close to the edge and they did. They would've literally followed him off the ledge of this building if he had asked. Um, for what? You know, it, it's really kind of incredible.

   20. CWChris Williamson20:16

       The downfall of WeWork, there are some amazing YouTube documentaries that have been done, anyone that wants to go and check out more about that. I also did a podcast with ... I'm blanking on the, the guy's name, but an awesome author that wrote an entire book about that. Um, one of my favorite stories from the last few years, the biggest grift or one of the biggest grifts, was Theranos-

   21. GBGabrielle Bluestone20:38

       Mm-hmm.

   22. CWChris Williamson20:38

       ... and Elizabeth Holmes. Can you take us through some of your favorite parts of that story?

   23. GBGabrielle Bluestone20:43

       Yeah. I mean, this is another example where investors were in- ... I m- uh, in VCs especially, and especially I think because they aren't necessarily investing their own money, they're investing other people's money. And even if they lose money on these investments, they're still making a percentage on how much money they're handling, right? So they win no matter what. Um, and so they tend not to invest in the product or the company, they are investing in the founder. And so Elizabeth Holmes crafted this persona, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg, she was an Ivy League dropout. She, um, deliberately lowered her voice and kind of faked it to have a more per- mysterious persona. She almost exclusively wore black turtlenecks because she wanted to be more like Steve Jobs. And so these, like, really professionally wealthy people fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Right? You had, like, the Walton family that owns Walmart giving her hundreds of millions. You had Henry Kissinger serving on her board of directors. Um, and even the media fell for it. There was, like, a fairly fawning New Yorker profile of her before John Carreyrou at, uh, uh ... oh my god, uh, The Wall Street Journal was able to kind of expose that these blood tests that she had been touting never existed. Nobody had ever seen them. Um, and I think it speaks to just how she ... once she had one of the right names on board, right, once there was a Kissinger or a Walton associated, I don't think anyone else did any due diligence. They saw that, "Oh, this person's doing it, so I'm gonna do it," and just jumped on the bandwagon. It was almost like, um, like a billionaire's FOMO.

   24. CWChris Williamson22:16

       You, uh, draw an analogy between I think COVID, the Tesla stock price, and some of the, um, personalities that we're talking about here. And it kinda goes back to what we were saying before but turned up to 11 in Silicon Valley, uh, and especially in the VC world. These unicorns are chasing after these billion dollar valuations. It's so sought after that people are prepared to forgive all manner of sins in the desperate attempt to chase these wins.

   25. GBGabrielle Bluestone22:46

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson22:46

       And it's because the ability to generate cash has now been completely decoupled from what the business can actually deliver to the market and is purely based on market sentiment.

   27. GBGabrielle Bluestone22:57

       Yes. And, and, and, you know, how much of the market they can hold themselves. A lot of the valuations of these companies are not r- ... Most of them are not reflections of, you know, what their actual income is or what they're actually doing, it's how much money other people have put into it. Um, so it's all ... I mean, uh, pardon my language but it's all bullshit. Uh, and it's, you know, I ... this, this even dates back to Billy McFarland. Um, he was ... By the time he got to Fyre Festival and I think one of the reasons he was able to get people to give him north of $26 million for this thing was because he had a record that looked on its face to match what you would expect of someone in that world. He had started, um, a tech startup while he was in college called Spling that was intended to be kind of a Google Circles, uh, Reddit hybrid that went absolutely nowhere. Um, if you read the book you can, you'll hear a kind of my exploration of how he conned all his college classmates and, you know, camp friends into pretending to be users on the site just to juice up the numbers for investors. But he walked away with a couple hundred thousand just for that. And when it shut down, rather than being seen as a failure, he was suddenly viewed as a successful startup founder because he had gotten the money. What happens after you get the money people don't seem to really care about.

   28. CWChris Williamson24:17

       What is the single thread, or what are the commonalities that you have found since researching all of these different people, the Adam Neumanns, the Elizabeth Holmes, the Ja Rules, um, what is it that you found is the common character traits between them all?

   29. GBGabrielle Bluestone24:37

       Um, most of them tend to be incredibly charismatic, and I think it comes down to marketing ability. And I think that includes the Elon Musks and the Donald Trumps, uh, as well. Um, how good are they at marketing? And as consumers, I think that we have started to collectively accept hype in lieu of the real thing. Right? We're, we're taking that marketing and running with it without ever questioning, um, how real any of it really is.

   30. CWChris Williamson25:08

       What I find really interesting, I come from a nightlife background, so I've run a lot of club nights, uh, over the last-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   So they got- …

   1. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:00

      orange squares themselves because they didn't want to be perceived as not being part of it. Um, and so they actually had a lot of-

   2. CWChris Williamson30:07

      So they got-

   3. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:07

      Yeah, they-

   4. CWChris Williamson30:07

      ... free extra influencer clout from the-

   5. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:12

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson30:12

      ... FOMO of influencers that Fuckgeri hadn't put on the campaign?

   7. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:18

      Yeah. And you know, I've read, this is actually a real issue for some companies. I think Evian was one of them, um, where influencers who want to look like they are working or being engaged by these blue chip brands will post fake advertisements because they want their followers to perceive them as being in a certain echelon of influencers. I mean, it really is a (laughs) wild west out there.

   8. CWChris Williamson30:41

      That's so crazy because it ... Is there anything that the companies can do? Can they say ... Can they sue-

   9. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:48

      Not really.

   10. CWChris Williamson30:48

       ... an influencer for doing free advertising for them?

   11. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:52

       I haven't seen that. I have seen some companies go after influencers for not properly advertising for them.

   12. CWChris Williamson30:58

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   13. GBGabrielle Bluestone30:58

       I know, uh, Snapchat and Spectacle did that with one influencer. There's a little bit of that. But, um, you know, there's not much, there's not much recourse, right? And, uh, even for influencers who aren't labeling things as ads, in the US, like the government should ostensibly have some kind of way to stop it or enforce the fact that these are supposed to be clearly labeled as ads, you know? Uh, but they can't. The most they can do is send a strongly worded letter that an influencer can promptly ignore. Uh, so yeah, there's, there's really not much anyone can do.

   14. CWChris Williamson31:32

       Didn't you say that Kylie Jenner tweeted at some point that she, she was using Snapchat less and they then-

   15. GBGabrielle Bluestone31:40

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson31:40

       ... wiped one billion off Snapchat's valuation the next morning on the stock market?

   17. GBGabrielle Bluestone31:46

       Yeah. Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson31:47

       (laughs)

   19. GBGabrielle Bluestone31:47

       I mean, the, the Kardashians are their own insane case study in, in watching the markets they can move and the perceptions that they can create. Um, you know, the book also looks at Kylie Jenner's, uh, billionaire status, which, um, according to Forbes, which bestowed that status on her, they say that she had actually submitted fake tax forms to pretend that she was earning more money than she was. You know, we're talking about the difference of a couple hundred million, but that perception in the public was so important to them, um, and obviously generates so much money for them that they were (laughs) willing to allegedly, you know, scam a, a magazine.

   20. CWChris Williamson32:27

       What other Jenner, Kardashian stories did you look at?

   21. GBGabrielle Bluestone32:31

       Um, so this isn't in the book, but one that I've been fascinated by recently is, uh, what happened with Khloe Kardashian, um, maybe a week or two ago, in which a very normal, unedited photograph of her was posted on the internet. And, um, apparent- ... It's not clear who posted it. They're saying that it was maybe her grandmother. Um, but however it was, this picture got out and, you know, they keep a very ... And this actually is in the book. They are so protective of their image that they actually work with paparazzi agencies to do staged and edited photos of them. So, a lot of the pictures that you'll see of them are actually prepared on their behalf. They're meant to look candid, but they're very much part of a photo shoot to embellish their images. Um, and so when this real photo of Khloe got sent around, um, her attorney started, uh, issuing cease and desists to Instagram accounts, to Reddit, uh, threads and boards, um, which had the opposite effect. You know, we call it the Streisand effect of all of a sudden that's all anyone could talk about. Um, but it was so important to her that people not know what her real body looked like that, you know, her lawyers would spend Easter weekend doing this. I mean, it is kind of incredible.

   22. CWChris Williamson33:47

       Yeah, especially given that that's the accurate representation. I, I would love to see the way that this is translated into litigation speak. "You represented our client's body accurately and that is, is against her brand values." Like what? And also, if it's her grandmother, that's such a grandmother thing to do.

   23. GBGabrielle Bluestone34:09

       Yeah. (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson34:11

       (laughs)

   25. GBGabrielle Bluestone34:11

       Um, no, so they, they did it as a copyright issue, as, you know, they, they unintentionally verified it as real and by saying that it was their real photo, um, you know, they would issue copyright take-downs on all the social media platforms. And one funny way that I've seen some people get around it is by tracing the photo, because a drawn ... Like a drawing, um, is transformative enough that they can't come after it with a copyright claim. (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson34:36

       Shit the bed. Uh, what did you learn about White Claw and Juul?

   27. GBGabrielle Bluestone34:41

       Um, yeah, a lot of things that we think that we like are really just the result of effective marketing campaigns. Um, so I started tracing this with the rise of Aperol Spritz, which, you know, is a beautiful, easily photographed drink, um, that I think ... You know, if you're being honest with yourself when it comes down to it, like, it kind of tastes like a flat Capri Sun. Like, it's not that, not, not that good, but it became the drink of summer and everyone was ordering it and restaurants were pushing it, and all of a sudden, you know, I fell prey to it and reading (laughs) about the marketing campaign was kind of a wake-up call for me where I was like, "I actually don't like this at all," but I, you know, I joined up with the crowd. I felt the FOMO. Um, there's a really interesting 1950s experiment by Solomon Asch where he put a bunch of people in a room and showed them a bunch of straight lines and they were asked to pick the line that looked closest to the ones on the screen. What the people in the study didn't know was that there were plants in the audience who had been instructed to pick the most obviously wrong answer and he wanted to see how many people would go along with it. And 75% of the audience picked the obviously wrong answer because, because of peer pressure, um, because everyone else was doing it. So, yeah, that's how I ended up drinking Aperol Spritzes and then White Claw. You know, they had ... That, that was a traditional ... Aperol was a traditional campaign. Um, you know, they did bus wraps and magazine advertisements as well as social media. White Claw was a purely social media push, right? And it blew up. You can actually track the sales to a viral YouTube video-... that featured, you know, a young light frat guy talking about how there ain't no laws when you're drinking Claws. And the virality of that video pushed this drink into the public consciousness. I think the sales of spiked seltzer, like, went up, like, 400% or something crazy like that. I don't recall the exact figure, but you saw a, like, demonstrable result from that, and now everyone's just drinking it.

   28. CWChris Williamson36:42

       (laughs)

   29. GBGabrielle Bluestone36:42

       It really is incredible what a, what a marketing campaign can do.

   30. CWChris Williamson36:46

       I've got... So I haven't had a drink for about a thousand days 'cause I, I was taking a break. I've got a case of White Claw delivered by their UK marketing office. I've got one in the kitchen.
4. 45:00 – 59:39

   Fuck. …

   1. GBGabrielle Bluestone45:00

      Yeah.

   2. CWChris Williamson45:00

      Fuck.

   3. GBGabrielle Bluestone45:02

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson45:02

      What does, uh, on the internet no one knows you're a fraud mean to you?

   5. GBGabrielle Bluestone45:08

      Um, I think that it is easier than ever to present a version of yourself that has no reflection in reality, whether that is by changing your image, by posting about thing, you know, you saw, you've seen a trend I think in the US of people posting about social justice or posting beautiful graphics, uh, but then not living that out in their actual lives offline. Um, you can create whatever persona you want, uh, and, you know, the, the phrase the old New Yorker cartoon was on the internet, it was a dog typing, and it was on the internet no one knows you're a dog. I really believe that, uh, for the most part on the internet, no one knows what you're lying about or whether it's real. One of my favorite stories in the book actually is an influencer who wanted to convince her followers that she had gone on a vacation to Bali, and so she went to an IKEA (laughs) and took all these, like, beautiful photographs on i- like, in the IKEA setups. You know, they have those rooms that they make up? And none of her followers realized she deliberately left some of the furniture tags showing in the pictures, and nobody noticed.

   6. CWChris Williamson46:15

      The internet. I despair at the internet sometimes. That's another thing, touching on the social justice issue, um, it seems to me that a lot of people on the internet would rather have malicious or, um, non-believing compliance than truthful opposition.

   7. GBGabrielle Bluestone46:43

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson46:43

      So they would rather have somebody make the mouth noises or the phone signals that say that they're a part of whichever movement it may be, even if they don't believe in it, sooner than b- be neutral and be truthful with it.

   9. GBGabrielle Bluestone47:03

      Yeah. And I think part of that goes along with, like, the FOMO, getting caught up in the trend too, and I think a perfect parallel to Fyre, um, and, you know, the influencers who weren't involved posting the orange square was when you saw, uh, all the influencers start posting black squares. Um, and, you know, brands were getting in on it, and there was, I forget her name now, I think Danielle something on Instagram who did, like, a three-week check-in or a month later check-in with all the brands that had posted a black square to see if any of their marketing materials featured models of color or if, you know, there c- they had anyone on the executive board of color. And the vast majority had zero change, zero reflection of these values that they were professing, except for this one performative square. And I think that's a big part of it, is how performative we are online.

   10. CWChris Williamson47:54

       That's the word f- over the last year or so that I've heard more than any, performative communication. And it's dangerous coming from someone... I told you before we started, I was on Love Island season one, I was the first person through the doors. And, um, if you're not careful, if you play a role, you can bury the person that you are under so many personas that you don't know who you are anymore, and that's a really dangerous position to get yourself into because you don't actually have any opinions anymore, you don't really know what you think, you don't...... y- all that you're doing is trying to do the thing that you think the person that you're talking to wants you to do. That's how you live your entire life, as this kind of second order removed version of you, sort of this marionette, and you're pulling the strings from above, trying to get things to work. It's super, super dangerous. And this is why deception online is so much easier, because you can type something in, the words said and the way, there's no non-verbal communication, there's simp-

   11. GBGabrielle Bluestone48:54

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson48:54

       ... there's no tone, there's no cadence, there's no nothing. And you have minutes or hours sometimes to prepare the response or the statement or the press release or whatever it might be, to come across in precisely the way that you want it to. I think a lot of people are quite bad liars, based on my experience.

   13. GBGabrielle Bluestone49:10

       (laughs)

   14. CWChris Williamson49:11

       I've had some of th- some people on this show. Here's one for you. How have I not thought that we can talk about this? Have you heard of a guy called Brian Rose?

   15. GBGabrielle Bluestone49:21

       No. Who's that?

   16. CWChris Williamson49:22

       S- he's the founder of London Real, which is a podcast, big podcast, been around for quite a while now. Um, Brian's initial business partner, a guy called Nick Gabriel, has just done a podcast episode. Now, Brian did a bunch of live streams on YouTube with David Icke, the conspiracy theory guy.

   17. GBGabrielle Bluestone49:45

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWChris Williamson49:45

       He did those at the start of the COVID pandemic, and did some phenomenal numbers, like broke, broke some records with it. But very quickly got the live streams taken down by YouTube. They said that he was pushing, they were talking about 5G and, uh, like-

   19. GBGabrielle Bluestone50:02

       (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson50:02

       ... you know, you, you c- you don't need to know anymore as soon as you hear that. Um ...

   21. GBGabrielle Bluestone50:05

       Yeah. (laughs)

   22. CWChris Williamson50:06

       And, uh, w- no matter w- how much truth was or was not in the live stream, at that time, there was a lot of misinformation going around about COVID, and YouTube had decided to take a pretty hard line approach to remove any content that it thought, uh, contravened, uh, or was giving misinformation around COVID. So then Brian decided to start the Freedom Fund, Freedom Platform Fund, which was, you're gonna love this, Gabrielle, this is so you.

   23. GBGabrielle Bluestone50:30

       (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson50:30

       He starts this Freedom, this Freedom Platform Fund, which is him saying, "Big tech's censoring us because we're telling the truth. They don't want us to be able to..." So he attaches himself as this kind of like the vanguard of free speech activists, right? Uh, talking about, "I, I, I thought we had a little thing called freedom of speech." Uh, uh, some people decided to remind him, "Dude, you're in London now. We don't have that. We don't have the, the Second Amendment."

   25. GBGabrielle Bluestone50:54

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson50:54

       "The, there's, there's, there's the, you know, the First Amendment, sorry. There's non- there's none of that here." Um, so he releases this Freedom Fund, he generates 100,000, 200,000, all the way up to a million. He gets a million in backer funding just from his fans. And every time he says, "We're only gonna do 250,000," and then they hit the target, and he says, uh, "Well, now that, that one's done, and now we need, now we actually need to be able to use live stream capability." Long story short, it turned out he'd purchased a white paper out of the box, like, Dailymotion live back end. So he'd said he was getting custom-built servers distributed across the blockchain to be, to not be able to be taken down by anybody, and it was just someone, someone's white, white label, use it as you wish video streaming platform, that he'd put a front end on. So that turned out to be bollocks, and he got called out a lot on YouTube for that. Now he's running for the mayor of London.

   27. GBGabrielle Bluestone51:53

       Wow.

   28. CWChris Williamson51:53

       And has been for quite a while. And he's going around in this tour bus and he's doing all of these vlogs, and today, I got sent a video of him doing Sadiq Khan, who's the current mayor of London, and Brian's calling him out and saying like, "You, you, you, you're nothing. I, I'm, I'm everything." And it's always very, he falls over himself when he's talking as well. He's quite slick when he does interviews, but he obviously is struggling a little bit with the politics side. So he uploaded a six-minute-long live stream of him hitting a punching bag-

   29. GBGabrielle Bluestone52:26

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson52:26

       ... a couple of days ago, like quite badly as well. It didn't look like ... It wasn't Floyd Mayweather.

Episode duration: 59:44