True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 378: Infinite Money Glitch
Aired: 2024-05-13
Duration: 01:07:11


=== Free Jazz Bleed-In (04:27) ===

[00:00:01]  We are in this studio space, which we're actually moving, you guys, which is very exciting.
[00:00:04]  We're all very excited to hear about it.
[00:00:06]  But we're still in the old spot.
[00:00:08]  And right now, there's an incredible amount of free jazz being played across the hall.
[00:00:14]  And I got to say, out of all the music from this place that bleeds in, I'm actually kind of enjoying this.
[00:00:21]  This one is.
[00:00:21]  It's like not.
[00:00:22]  I'm like, we were trying to record the opening for the show, and I just kept not talking because I was like, oh, man, this guy's like kind of going.
[00:00:31]  I can kind of do this.
[00:00:32]  There's like a, I hear bass, I hear sax, and I hear playing drums.
[00:00:38]  I will say, last episode.
[00:00:39]  That's the sexy instrument, the saxophone.
[00:00:40]  The last episode we did was tough because the call-in episode, because the entire time we actually had to turn on the air conditioner here to get some white noise because someone was just playing their metronome really loudly, which is a hard thing to do, to talk over.
[00:00:57]  You think it's easy because it keeps you in time, but no, no, no, it's very no one wants to talk in time.
[00:01:01]  Nobody does.
[00:01:01]  This is me.
[00:01:02]  But we are going to a completely silent, airtight no water studio very, very soon.
[00:01:10]  And you'll never hear us complain again.
[00:01:13]  time ladies and gentlemen hello My name is Bryce Belden.
[00:01:40]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:40]  We are, of course, joined by, again, I was going to say Professor Young Chomsky.
[00:01:45]  Professor Young Chomsky, Professor of the Beats.
[00:01:48]  And this is True and On Podcast.
[00:01:50]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:51]  We are taking a little trip down south to Miami.
[00:01:54]  Our favorite place.
[00:01:55]  Miami, to talk about...
[00:01:56]  No, not your Miami.
[00:01:57]  Not your Aiami, Miami.
[00:01:59]  Miami.
[00:02:01]  My favorite dish, Moons Over Miami.
[00:02:03]  We are going to Sexy Monkey, Crazy Fish.
[00:02:08]  I don't think you've ever been to Miami.
[00:02:09]  Loopers.
[00:02:10]  I have been to Miami.
[00:02:11]  I met Lance Bass in Miami.
[00:02:13]  That's nice.
[00:02:14]  We are going to Lance Bass.
[00:02:16]  We're going to Lance Bass's hotel room.
[00:02:18]  We are drinking the fucking seawater because you can do it there.
[00:02:22]  You can drink salt water under basically any circumstances, but down there is really good for you.
[00:02:27]  And we are going to be texting people on behalf of OnlyFans models for $100 for 10 minutes.
[00:02:33]  We're not doing any of that, but we are talking to journalist Ezra Marcus about not just his current piece right now in New York Magazine talking about the Zoomer arbitrage scammer king of Miami, but arbitrage of all kinds and Zoomer kings of all kinds, really.
[00:02:56]  So let's get to it.
[00:03:10]  I'm like legally it's like a thing that I can't really be around a lot of young people.
[00:03:15]  And so I just have to get this stuff secondhand, but I will give it my best.
[00:03:19]  This is for men and men only.
[00:03:21]  It is time to start bussing.
[00:03:24]  Get your Riz all over my motherfucking face.
[00:03:28]  What was the other word you said?
[00:03:31]  No cap.
[00:03:32]  No, I'm not wearing a cap.
[00:03:33]  Riz all over me.
[00:03:35]  And what is the last thing that you said?
[00:03:38]  There was another word that you said.
[00:03:40]  Mid.
[00:03:40]  Mid.
[00:03:42]  And welcome to the show, the most mid-writer in New York City.
[00:03:45]  Just playing.
[00:03:46]  That is old school millennial slang.
[00:03:49]  Ezra Ezra Ezra Ezra Klein from Vox Media.
[00:03:55]  Psych.
[00:03:56]  Ezra Marcus, freelance writer, and I would say a collector of a gross menagerie of freaks and weirdos from Miami, Florida.
[00:04:07]  Welcome to the show.
[00:04:08]  Pleasure to be here.
[00:04:09]  Thanks so much for coming on.
[00:04:11]  Of course.
[00:04:12]  So you have a new piece.
[00:04:13]  We have you on the show because you have a new piece in the New York magazine, the magazine that people can't stop doing podcasts about because every single piece they publish goes viral in some way.
[00:04:24]  And I expect this one to do just the same.
[00:04:26]  It's called The Package King of Miami.

=== Facing the Package King (15:15) ===

[00:04:29]  Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company.
[00:04:33]  He decided to go in another direction.
[00:04:35]  The piece is great.
[00:04:37]  Brace, you mentioned you've been on this kind of beat of like weird Miami influencer hustle and grind culture for a while.
[00:04:46]  And the story of Matt Bergwal is no different.
[00:04:49]  Before we kind of get into some like larger stuff here, maybe we can give our listeners a little rundown.
[00:04:54]  Who is Matt Bergwal and why is he facing, what is it, like 45 years in federal prison?
[00:05:01]  Matt Bergwal is facing 45 years.
[00:05:05]  He's 21 years old for a number of crimes.
[00:05:09]  I mean, basically the headline is hacking and computer conspiracy.
[00:05:14]  But he's just an apex Zoomer, like hustled grind set legend from Darien, Connecticut, who went to the University of State of Miami to study computer science and finance.
[00:05:31]  And somewhere along the line was like, you know, I don't want to go work at Google.
[00:05:36]  I want to be the boss of my, you know, little empire.
[00:05:41]  And he found, He found himself in a kind of seamy, underbelly world of fraud that has emerged over the last decade or so based on basically getting free shit from retailers, which I think, you know, I alluded to this in the piece.
[00:06:04]  Like, we've all done a bit of it, right?
[00:06:06]  Like, you order something on Amazon, you say it never arrived, you get the money back.
[00:06:11]  I think a lot of people have done that one way or another.
[00:06:14]  By the way, that's called gaslighting when you do that kind of stuff.
[00:06:21]  But what these kids do is they sort of industrialize that and scale it up.
[00:06:27]  And what he is alleged to have done by the federal government is hacked into a UPS employee, well, a number of UPS employees' accounts, allowing him to change the status, the delivery status of a package, basically.
[00:06:45]  So it's like you say, oh, I ordered this laptop from Apple, and he just goes in and changes the status from delivered to never arrived.
[00:06:55]  Then somebody can just claim the refund.
[00:06:58]  He is alleged to have processed 10,000 returns this way, $5 million of product.
[00:07:04]  So you're just kind of in like big baller territory there as far as like the justice system.
[00:07:09]  So 45 years is like, you know, it's pretty hefty.
[00:07:15]  There's a name for this kind of scheme, right?
[00:07:18]  Yeah.
[00:07:18]  Generally, the broad category is called refunding, refunding fraud.
[00:07:23]  It's interesting because I definitely know, I mean, that's the classic trick is that like if you want your mattress for free from Amazon, I don't think this works anymore, but a bunch of people I know did this.
[00:07:33]  And this is not in line with what we're talking about today.
[00:07:36]  This is not financial advice, but a bunch of people I know in the past have, or several people I know in the past, have essentially told Amazon that the mattress is whatever, there's something wrong with it.
[00:07:49]  And because it's so large, Amazon's like, you can't return it.
[00:07:52]  And so they just got it for free.
[00:07:55]  I don't think that works anymore.
[00:07:56]  You know what that happened to me once where someone, Amazon accidentally delivered something wrong to me, like something that I didn't order.
[00:08:02]  It was like for someone else and it was like a car part that was like massive.
[00:08:06]  I can't remember what it was.
[00:08:08]  And I was like, can you guys take this?
[00:08:10]  And they're like, no, just keep it.
[00:08:12]  And I'm like, no, but I don't want it.
[00:08:14]  And then I got to sell it on Craigslist.
[00:08:16]  Interesting.
[00:08:16]  And I made no money.
[00:08:17]  Wow.
[00:08:18]  So I guess I have participated.
[00:08:19]  So this fellow was, the scheme kind of relies on not just lying to Amazon, but it relies on actually having someone on the inside or access to the account of someone on the inside at UPS.
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:32]  And nowadays, I mean, you know, he hacked into, or allegedly hacked into a UPS account, but a lot of it is actually coming from people who work for these logistics companies will approach the scammers themselves and be like, hey, you break me off a piece of whatever you're making.
[00:08:47]  I'll do this for you.
[00:08:48]  Because they're kind of aware of the money that can be made.
[00:08:54]  And this is all kind of happening on Telegram, Discord, 4chan.
[00:08:59]  Yeah, it started out in the early 2010s kind of alongside the rise of just online retail.
[00:09:07]  And that was more kind of in forums and Reddit.
[00:09:10]  But now it's a lot of it's happening on these sort of like, yeah, these platforms that are all like kind of anonymous live chat apps that a lot of young people use.
[00:09:19]  Telegram, probably the biggest one.
[00:09:21]  I'm sure it's all over Discord as well.
[00:09:24]  And you can find public channels on Telegram with like thousands and thousands of people just discussing this.
[00:09:30]  So what he did is he sold these services to other people too, right?
[00:09:35]  Yes.
[00:09:35]  That was actually primarily what he was doing.
[00:09:37]  He was offering fraud as a service to other people who were then actually going out and finding.
[00:09:44]  Like the way that it works is like, you know, let's say you're just some guy and you want a free laptop.
[00:09:49]  You can go to a channel on Telegram that's like offering refunding and you just buy the laptop, give them the tracking number, they'll handle all of it and you'll be able to get your money back and you just give them 15% of the ticket price.
[00:10:04]  Wow.
[00:10:04]  So those channels, which are the ones that are kind of customer-facing, are going out and hiring Matt Bergwal, somebody like Matt Bergwal's channel with back-end access.
[00:10:15]  So in order to actually do that return for them.
[00:10:19]  So there's like four or three different people involved in this, right?
[00:10:23]  Yeah, you have like the customer, then you have the service that gets the customer, the front-facing thing, which is in turn hires Matt Bergwal, who in turn either hires somebody or has somebody at UPS.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:37]  Interesting.
[00:10:38]  And everybody gets like a percentage of that.
[00:10:40]  There's like middlemaning kind of goes down to the end there.
[00:10:43]  I think also what's so interesting in your piece is like you say like, I mean, he had employees.
[00:10:48]  Like he was like kind of creating a real business here, even though it's like a weird sort of in mirror world fraud world where it's completely fraudulent.
[00:10:57]  But it's not as if he's simply like just cutting himself in or making these deals just with people.
[00:11:03]  Like he like had a like legit, not legit, but like he had a little like organizational structure and people that he had hired and kind of was, you know, fashioned himself and clearly thought of himself as a kind of entrepreneur who was creating a sort of small business for himself.
[00:11:20]  Yeah, it's part of this kind of whole, I don't even know what you'd call it, like a philosophy around entrepreneurship as almost like the goal unto itself of kind of contemporary youth, like digital facing kind of mindset where they're just like, I'm going to be my own boss.
[00:11:38]  I'm going to like, I'm going to be 21, you know, driving like a sick car.
[00:11:42]  And like, because I'm my own boss, I don't, you know, it like, I don't want to go work.
[00:11:47]  You know, he would say, like, I don't want to work, I don't want to be a slave for Google.
[00:11:49]  Like, he wanted to be an entrepreneur.
[00:11:51]  And he, and he, yeah, he fashioned himself this sort of like, he seems to have had, he claimed to have had a number of employees and was running it like a, like a, yeah, like an actual business.
[00:12:04]  I think the other side of this, too, we got to talk about is it wasn't just that he had, he was like perpetuating this fraud or whatever, but that he had become a kind of like famous influencer style dude.
[00:12:14]  I mean, he's posting like photos of himself with Lamborghinis or he's going to be a lot of people.
[00:12:20]  Yeah, he wasn't like famous.
[00:12:21]  He was like, you know, he only had some four-figure number of Instagram followers, but he was definitely projecting kind of like, he was trying to project a kind of like, you know, rich flex.
[00:12:34]  Like he was, he, he posted, he got this Tesla when he was a freshman in college.
[00:12:39]  And yeah, he went to Dubai and Tulum.
[00:12:41]  And he's, he's, you know, it's, it's that sort of like, that lifestyle now of like, you know, Miami to Dubai to like, you know, like having this kind of sense of yourself as this like globe trotting, sort of unattached, sort of mysteriously wealthy entrepreneur.
[00:13:05]  And he would kind of refer to himself as like on LinkedIn, you know, he'd be like, venture catalyst, serial entrepreneur, all this stuff.
[00:13:16]  And to some extent, it felt like a kid trying to embody something that he was seeing among kind of, you know, your sort of not quite Andrew Tate's, like it wasn't, certainly wasn't like political, but more just your kind of standard like VC like you know.
[00:13:34]  Well, I think that all that stuff exists in the same ecosystem, right?
[00:13:37]  Like I know exactly the type.
[00:13:39]  I haven't seen Bergwald's profile, but like I know, I've seen a million exactly like it.
[00:13:44]  And generally, yeah, they have pictures.
[00:13:46]  They might live in Miami or pretend they live in Miami.
[00:13:49]  You know, the pictures from like the balcony of the high-rise apartment, maybe like the, in the corner, perhaps the rounded dune of a woman's butt clad in perhaps only a bikini.
[00:14:02]  And then, you know, they're in Dubai, right?
[00:14:04]  And there's like a picture of them from the Burj Khalifa, like on the water or whatever.
[00:14:08]  And then there's like, you know, they'll have the cigars and stuff like that.
[00:14:11]  But like, yeah, like sometimes it's like Andrew Tate inflected.
[00:14:14]  But also that's just in the ether.
[00:14:16]  That's like in the milieu.
[00:14:17]  And like that, that there's like you have the extreme version of like Tate or whatever.
[00:14:21]  And you could argue that what he's doing is just like really, it's a social media strategy to get more engagement, which I think is fair to say.
[00:14:30]  But then you also just have like a million people who are sort of like a generic version, much less political than that, who just have this, like are projecting this extremely at this point, like almost comically cookie-cutter version of like rich guy, even though they're inexplicably, like they're too young to be that wealthy.
[00:14:50]  And they all sort of talk in the same cadence, whether they got that from Tate or whether they got that from like whatever other random like guru guy that they saw, they took their strategy from.
[00:15:04]  It is kind of just one scene with just different nodes in it.
[00:15:08]  Yeah, and I think there's also, you know, there's people in this kind of mold of what you're describing that are just like totally kind of like, you know, incompetent frauds that are just projecting wealth so that they can then sell you a course on how to get wealthy.
[00:15:22]  And they have no technical capacity.
[00:15:24]  They're not doing anything.
[00:15:25]  It's just all image.
[00:15:26]  And Bergwal's not like that.
[00:15:28]  He's actually quite gifted as a kind of as a coder.
[00:15:32]  I mean, he was able to kind of like, he worked at a bunch of tech companies when he was like in high school.
[00:15:38]  He really did actually have some kind of facility.
[00:15:40]  And I think that there are people that are like coming at this from the side of like actually doing kind of sketchy internet businesses and spinning them up and then doing that to kind of rise within the world of sort of like, you know, flexing online.
[00:15:57]  And there's people that are coming at it from the other way where it's like the flexing first as a money-making scheme.
[00:16:02]  Yeah.
[00:16:02]  And obviously that all kind of blends together.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, I think that there's like kind of a cl I mean people have been saying this a lot about Gen Z or whatever and they say like oh this generation is so nihilistic like this generation has such an interesting like disaffected but very like distanced attitude about things.
[00:16:23]  They don't, they know.
[00:16:24]  It's like almost like they know everything is a scam and so they're they're not like worried about, like it's a different kind of like in entrepreneurial culture than you would.
[00:16:33]  You would characterize with like the classic millennial girl boss or whatever it was that you know was the, the sort of like startup mentality and even before that, of like move fast, break things.
[00:16:43]  Like it is like kind of turned it's developed into something else with gen z and this feels very um, kind of emblematic of that.
[00:16:51]  Yeah, I mean, i've been thinking about it like and this is, you know, painting with a broad brush, but I think there's this like kind of typical millennial notion of the internet as somewhere where you go to, you know, get famous or at least develop some kind of to, to promote yourself, to talk about your, whatever you're doing, and maybe you know you end up making money from that and maybe you don't, but it's, it's.
[00:17:15]  You know you're talking to people, you're kind of using it at face value, whereas I think for a lot of younger people they just like they could give a fuck.
[00:17:24]  They're just like this is a place where you go to like get free money.
[00:17:27]  This is a place where you go to develop a kind of like arbitrage business where you can drop out of the workforce and, like you know, and and not have to like actually go to college like.
[00:17:37]  This is a place that is entirely about people fronting.
[00:17:42]  Everything on it is fake, it's all you know.
[00:17:44]  It's all being gamed, it's all you know.
[00:17:46]  AI throw that into it.
[00:17:47]  Everything is essentially some sort of like shortcut, and the actual content on it can be a funnel for you to gain access to marks for whatever yeah, for your business.
[00:18:00]  But it's not.
[00:18:01]  Like they don't actually believe in it.
[00:18:02]  I think in the same way they don't believe in it as like a legitimate well it's.
[00:18:06]  It's funny.
[00:18:06]  You can see that process from, like the people who originally might have believed in, like the internet uh degrading, because I feel like with millennials it's pretty degrading.
[00:18:14]  Like there's a sort of like cynical, almost gen gen, stereotypically gen X view of the internet.
[00:18:20]  Like, although they I think they actually themselves view it differently like this is just like all fucking, it's all bullshit or whatever yeah uh, but then like gen z, it really is.
[00:18:29]  It becomes this almost like uh and obviously, again like you, like you said, this is painting with a broad brush we're talking specifically about, about like major trends, but like a major trend in gen Z is precisely this, yeah, like you see it as like you're almost like a carny and you see this as like yeah, and other people.
[00:18:44]  I don't even see them as feeling especially jaded about it.
[00:18:47]  I think they're more just like, oh, that's like the internet is where you go to become wealthy by like finding weird shortcuts and you promote them, and I think that they might be right on that.
[00:18:56]  Well, I don't yeah, I was gonna say I don't think they're wrong.
[00:18:58]  I mean, I think there's like a kind of mercenary attitude about it, but I understand it.
[00:19:03]  I mean, one of the things that's so, things that's so interesting, I think, about the Burgwal piece is that, like he was exploiting a sort of like, basically a loophole that is built into the fact that Amazon is a global monopoly, and these, these are exploits that are kind of like part of the ecosystem that Amazon has to deal with by virtue of the fact that they need to be so large in order to even pull a profit for their business,
[00:19:31]  and so there's like a kind of weird like I mean, it is just kind of a product of the structure of the internet almost, you know?

=== The Frictionless Economy (15:35) ===

[00:19:44]  Yeah, well, and I think, you know, you can sort of look specifically at returns, right?
[00:19:49]  Like, why is all of this, why was this fraud possible?
[00:19:53]  It's because these companies are essentially making returns as frictionless as possible and openly and knowing they're exposing themselves to this sort of easy, to very easily being taken advantage of here, but because that is what they need to kind of like rapidly expand.
[00:20:12]  And it's all about the kind of like these, you know, you're basically just getting incredibly cheap stuff from China and you need to like make the consumer feel like absolutely completely comfortable shipping it constantly around the world and making it all disposable.
[00:20:28]  And it's also a demand coming from the American consumer, right?
[00:20:31]  I mean, it's not just that Amazon's like, okay, we need to offer this in order to grow, although there is, I think, some of that, which is that like the cost of being a monopoly might just be that.
[00:20:42]  But it's not just Amazon.
[00:20:43]  I mean, this is across all of online retail.
[00:20:47]  All of these major retailers are in vicious competition with each other for market share.
[00:20:54]  And they see the customer as being, let's say you're buying Adidas shoes, but why wouldn't you buy Nike?
[00:21:02]  Well, maybe Adidas is just 5% makes it easier for you to return something.
[00:21:08]  So it's all about eliminating any possible barrier to the customer feeling like they don't just have complete mastery and ease at online retail.
[00:21:17]  And so they'll just accept, they outsource, like a lot of the earlier phases of refunding emerged in this way where before necessarily there was as much kind of hacking and bribing employees going on, it was all about gaming how sloppy the return processing systems were because it was all kind of outsourced to like, you know, a lot of it's just third-party warehouses that the company doesn't even really oversee.
[00:21:42]  And it's like you just ship an empty box.
[00:21:45]  Yeah, filled with like something that's weighted the same.
[00:21:47]  Yeah, and then that gets processed by UPS and then like somehow it just gets lost in the shuffle or you have it delivered to an address that's like almost at where the return address is but not quite.
[00:21:57]  And it's just taking advantage of the fact that like for these companies like some degree of loss is just built into their approach to gaining market share by making it extraordinarily easy to return stuff.
[00:22:09]  Well, I know that a lot of online retailers have stopped, like that, ones that aren't Amazon, but like smaller not still big stores, but like somewhat smaller stores than Amazon have started not doing free shipping.
[00:22:22]  Not free shipping for returns now, because I was sort of shocked to see how much people were buying like 20 things from whatever clothing company and like trying them all on and then just returning them all like this was like a major thing during Covet and after that and I think it got to be so costly.
[00:22:40]  A bunch of companies like this is untenable.
[00:22:42]  You can really only do this if you're something like Amazon, which has not only owns uh, this massive business, but also and weird third-party stuff, but also has this infrastructure that that is capable, that it owns, that is capable of doing this kind of stuff and an insane share price so they can kind of cover some of those.
[00:22:59]  Yeah, and I I don't think it's a coincidence too, that like a person like Bergwall, if he had gone a slightly different direction, would have just been a drop shipper.
[00:23:07]  He might have done drop shipping at some point sure yeah, I mean, it's that's to me I, I am, I am fascinated by drop shipping guys in general, because it hasn't.
[00:23:16]  It's one of those things that you would think would be like a couple year scam and then, you know, companies would cotton on or whatever and and sort of undercut it, but it's it's still massive and it's a very similar type of like young entrepreneur that, like what you do is that you, you essentially just like uh sell a product as a middleman from a company on a website, whether it's Amazon or your own website and like handle nothing else.
[00:23:43]  So you're like making like two dollars, three dollars, five dollars off every sale uh, but you don't have any stock, you don't have any inventory, you don't have any whatever.
[00:23:51]  And it's such a huge, like massive, like hack that a lot of people do.
[00:23:56]  And it's interesting because they talk about it often like it is a video game, like an infinite money glitch or whatever.
[00:24:01]  And it's such a similar kind of mindset where you like – you view people as like – you take advantage of like a laziness and a certain amount of like blind trust that people put into like websites like Amazon.
[00:24:16]  And it's the same thing like the carny – carnival goer kind of relationship there.
[00:24:22]  Yeah, and it's like the whole purpose then, of like using the internet is, you know, of actually publicly posting anything is to like kind of game your way into like your kind of hacked, like your, your sort of like weird exploited product that's making you free money for doing nothing.
[00:24:41]  To kind of get that to the top of like whatever funnel you need to get people to buy it, whether that's like taking, like becoming like you know, saying crazy Stuff on Twitter, to like yeah, it's just all about like kind of gaming whatever like platforms there are to like get your kind of buy link in front of people.
[00:25:02]  And then ideally, once somebody clicks that, whatever it is, whether it's like you know, a lot of people sell quote-unquote courses on like how to get rich like they did.
[00:25:10]  It's all about just like having zero effort.
[00:25:13]  Yeah.
[00:25:13]  It's like taking yourself out of the equation where it's just somebody clicks a button, you get money, so maybe something happens.
[00:25:18]  Yeah, it's the dream is passive income, essentially, right?
[00:25:22]  And so like what you do is you have like you have like a chat GBT, you write a course, and then like you sell that for $25 for like a 20-page e-book PDF on your website.
[00:25:31]  And you just hope that people are stupid enough to click on it because your social media accounts, which you either sublease, but you either hire someone to run or maybe you do it yourself because you're also like a social media strategy guy.
[00:25:44]  And what you do, like the kind of the current, I guess you would say in gaming terms, the meta right now, is to be like a sort of a Tate style figure where you say like really, you talk in this kind of goofy way and you say these like you know things about sex or relationships or women or whatever that gets you engagement, because it's it's all about whatever it gets you.
[00:26:04]  It's like engagement farming and that is like it's always, that's always been kind of the way to go about it.
[00:26:09]  But now it's like a very clear strategy that a lot of people are using in order to get eyes on their page, that people click these links.
[00:26:15]  That's like I, you know.
[00:26:16]  It's like I can't even like get mad in some way about any of this, because it is just sort of like distilling what I think.
[00:26:22]  Like, if we're thinking about like the difference between, like the millennial kind of approach to influencer culture, I guess you'd say I mean I think millennials kind of created influencer culture such as it was or is, and then whatever Gen Z is kind of doing with that as their own, like it is just sort of like a distilled, more mercenary, like it's like a clear-headed version of what millennials have been doing.
[00:26:46]  Think there's a kind of like a plausible deniability that a lot of millennials had, maybe like without them realizing, where they thought that this was sort of a way to kind of, like you say, like gain fame or attention, but in a kind of authentic performance of themselves, right that they were kind of being finding these channels online and then they were able to parlay it into real world offline success a lot of the early, early adopters or whatever whereas millennials maybe I mean millennials, but Gen Z like being digitally native.
[00:27:15]  digitally native, we're able to sort of understand and grow up within these ecosystems and kind of see what these, you know, these like all these like kind of market structures that structure and govern all of these platforms, like where the exploits are.
[00:27:34]  And we're also, you know, probably all fucking coding at a much younger age and able to build out, you know, opportunities for themselves a lot, you know, a lot easier.
[00:27:46]  Like I was just, sorry, this was just like kind of tangential, but not really.
[00:27:51]  Like I was just looking at these guys from the UK, their kids, I'm pretty sure, built out like a Bloomberg terminal.
[00:27:59]  It's so, it's like very, very sophisticated and very cool looking.
[00:28:03]  And it looks exactly like the Bloomberg Terminal, but it's for identifying arbitrage opportunities in every single betting market.
[00:28:10]  Like every, and it live updates and it shows you the live moving of odds across platforms so you can find quick arbitrage opportunities.
[00:28:19]  And arbitrage is all about time and all about like getting in as fast as you can before the next guy.
[00:28:26]  And it was, it's remarkable.
[00:28:28]  I mean, it's like completely remarkable.
[00:28:29]  And all this stuff is out there because this is all what structures the fucking internet that I can't even like be mad at it in a way.
[00:28:37]  Not at all.
[00:28:38]  And it's, I mean, the influencer comparison is really interesting because, right, like the kind of millennial characterization of the influencer is like, this is a valued job that brings kind of like the actualization of the individual.
[00:28:54]  And if they get rewarded with product, like that's cool, but also they're working by being themselves and posting and they should be rewarded.
[00:29:01]  And also like it's kind of self-empower, whatever.
[00:29:03]  I think Gen Z looks at that and is like, you're getting free shit for doing nothing.
[00:29:07]  Yeah.
[00:29:07]  And we can do it faster and we can do it more mercenarily and we can kind of dispense with all of the sort of self-congratulatory romanticism around it and just be like, if you have attention, you can monetize that in a number of ways.
[00:29:22]  Yes.
[00:29:23]  Yeah, I was looking at, there was this piece during COVID, because I feel like COVID, we always talk about it.
[00:29:31]  2020 was this like inflection point.
[00:29:33]  Yeah, where all this stuff.
[00:29:35]  On so many levels, but especially with the kind of explosion of, let's say, influencer opportunities.
[00:29:45]  Or maybe it's the changing face of influencer culture, maybe even in a way.
[00:29:49]  But Rob Horning had this piece I was looking at from during that time, and he was talking about kind of, it was like in the context of people being afraid about COVID disinformation and influencers and whatever.
[00:30:04]  And he said, the logic of, quote, becoming an influencer marks out the master scam of vicarious participation in which the cult of personality offers apparent shortcuts to aspirational goals.
[00:30:15]  They can't help but be key distributors of misinformation about the coronavirus or anything else because their function is to warp the function of information toward the goal of attention for attention's sake.
[00:30:25]  And so kind of what you're saying is like even the like the idea of disinformation, these people spewing disinformation or scams coming out of themselves is built into the figure of the influencer and even the kind of like influencer economy itself.
[00:30:43]  Because all of it, like you just said, Ezra is oriented towards the ultimate goal of attention for attention's sake and whatever monetary value is attached to that.
[00:30:52]  Touch to that at the end.
[00:30:53]  Yeah, and understanding that, you know, the attention economy is an economy where they're competing for market share and they're they, you know, there's no reason why they shouldn't take like whatever just based on how the game is set up for them.
[00:31:08]  There's no reason they shouldn't just like kind of utilize whatever exploit or strategy is going to lead most directly to you know the most valuable kind of attention they can get a hold of, which ultimately is any attention as long as it's kind of consistent and scalable.
[00:31:26]  So yeah, I mean, I think it, I think, you know, it's not like all of these people are necessarily like influencers in the traditional sense, but I think that for the notion of the internet as like a place where ultimately, like the just that it's like a profit motive underlying every single action you take there is I think something that's emerged very much post-COVID.
[00:31:49]  I mean, yeah, I think an obvious thing is like, well, all of a sudden everyone's trapped at home trying to make money.
[00:31:54]  And I think a lot of this kind of Miami culture, the kind of culture side of it where like all of a sudden not only is there like a lot of people trying to make free money online, but there's almost like a culture around it.
[00:32:04]  You know, Lamborghinis, like some of the NFT stuff, like all of that, which another— Alec Monopoly.
[00:32:11]  Yeah, Alec Monopoly.
[00:32:12]  You love Alec Monopoly.
[00:32:13]  He's sick.
[00:32:16]  I get a lot of guys on my Explorer feed that it's like, maybe, I don't even know if it, I don't think it's Alec Monopoly, but there's some guy who like spray paints his Lambo with like all these kind of like Mr. Money bags type stuff.
[00:32:28]  It's awesome.
[00:32:29]  Yeah, that sort of like the kind of flex visual side of it that that emerged, I think, like kind of almost like a kind of like a fuck you to like, you know, like stay at home and be responsible.
[00:32:45]  It's like, well, actually, Miami was like, we're not doing any of that.
[00:32:48]  We are staying open.
[00:32:50]  We are come down here.
[00:32:52]  Like you can, you know, you can be right wing.
[00:32:54]  You can trade Bitcoin and pudgy penguin NFTs and you name it.
[00:32:59]  And we have Francis Suarez!
[00:33:02]  Yeah, let's talk a little bit about Miami because other pieces you've written about kind of, I don't know how else to say it, like arbitrage exploits in the internet economy.
[00:33:13]  We keep using the language of video games, which also I feel like is actually, I actually want to talk about that briefly because I think I know you were saying exploits and my brain kept going to that.
[00:33:22]  Yeah, I mean, so Matt Bergwal, his first exposure, like I think many people his age, to the internet and doing stuff on it was playing Minecraft when he was in middle school.
[00:33:34]  And he was the kind of kid who was really gifted at kind of, he would build his own sort of custom servers for his friends to play.
[00:33:40]  And I think that like, obviously, like, we all grew up playing video games, but I think they grew up playing a different kind of video game than what we were playing.
[00:33:47]  Yeah, I played ones that were like, well, I stopped playing when you had to play online with people, but like, yeah, it was like a shooter game.
[00:33:54]  Yeah, and there wasn't, I remember there was Counter-Strike.
[00:33:57]  People had like skins and stuff.
[00:33:58]  Yeah, if you were really high-level in like 2004 or whatnot.
[00:34:02]  Yeah, it's like a different experience.
[00:34:03]  But the main level one is, yeah, it's just playing a game.
[00:34:06]  Click the button, they tell you to click.
[00:34:07]  Whereas with these kids, they're playing these sort of open world, customizable sandboxes where they, I think, develop a real sense of the possibility to shape your digital world around you.
[00:34:19]  And sort of, it's just unlimited.
[00:34:22]  And so I think then that led him and I think many other people into all these other sorts of like, you know, sneaker reselling or buying and selling Instagram accounts, growing them.
[00:34:33]  Just the sense that like the digital world is sort of malleable and you can find, you can find exploits.
[00:34:39]  You can find unpatched like little kind of things that can be that very quickly lead you from just like playing a game with your friends to making real money in the real world.
[00:34:49]  And I think that is really intrinsic.
[00:34:51]  I mean, you know, a lot of this stuff is like guys who grew up as gamers.
[00:34:56]  That really reminds me of someone like Brock Pierce, right?
[00:35:00]  Who really, one of his things that he did was, and like a lot of these people kind of who came into the original like Bitcoin kind of ecosystem comes from like Warcraft and like selling like RMT real money trading stuff on like MMO games, like big massively, massively multiplayer online games.
[00:35:18]  And like it's it's it's interesting.

=== Gamer Hustles Rising (04:14) ===

[00:35:20]  There is, like, this feeder from, like, this either arbitrage or just, like, hustling on video games to becoming this more general online hustler.
[00:35:30]  Yeah.
[00:35:31]  I mean, I think, like, just also, I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried.
[00:35:34]  Like, I remember when he was arrested, I remember on the podcast, people got so mad at us for bringing up the fact that he had.
[00:35:42]  It was League of Legends, right?
[00:35:43]  It was League of Legends and he would play in his like crazy – I mean he would go for like hours and hours and hours and hours.
[00:35:50]  And I brought up that, plus his seeming inability to understand outside world consequences to actions and the kind of gamification of his approach to the crypto market and thinking that you could just continue to make fake on fake, on fake and fake and there would like.
[00:36:12]  How, how would these things be different within video game world, screen world and real world?
[00:36:17]  People got very upset at those comments, but I feel like I'm sorry, it's all right there.
[00:36:21]  Well, Liz also said that anybody who played Modern Warfare should be hanged.
[00:36:26]  I did not.
[00:36:28]  I said firing lines.
[00:36:30]  That's a little bit at least more quick.
[00:36:33]  I'm just kidding no, but I mean I think these, I think you're right to say that these guys, that's like a lot of people are learning how to build things through these, these platforms, through these video games, and that's shaping how they approach.
[00:36:47]  They approach building things as they, you know, move through life.
[00:36:50]  Yeah, and a lot of these, you know these video games have also had real world markets layered on top of them.
[00:36:55]  I mean even going back to, like World Of Warcraft, Digital gold, all that stuff, I think I think maybe an earlier generation, but yeah there's, there's.
[00:37:04]  I mean now it's like you've got these, like you know what like six-year-olds playing Roblox, which is another one of these like massive kind of kind of customizable, and they fucking cheat when they do it too.
[00:37:15]  I'm sure have you.
[00:37:16]  I don't even really know what it is.
[00:37:17]  I actually don't know what it is.
[00:37:18]  I was going to go on an extended bit about how I meet a lot of young people who play Roblox, but I actually don't know enough about Roblox to even make that joke.
[00:37:42]  But, yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, you...
[00:37:44]  You even say in the article that he, one of his early hustles was like this GTA online website that he made.
[00:37:52]  Yeah, I don't think that was like a hustle, I think he just something he did, I mean.
[00:37:56]  But he had a lot of a lot of hustles, I mean he's, he sold vapes at his high school.
[00:38:01]  People told me what's what's what's, what kind of flavors are hot right now?
[00:38:08]  I, you know, actually I got made fun of because, as you can see, I'm clutching a jewel in my right hand here.
[00:38:12]  I'm sort of I use it as a fidget spinner.
[00:38:15]  But I even, like young people not like who are not in high school, like 25 year olds, have remarked to me unbidden, I don't, these people, I don't know like wow, you're like you still have a jewel because they're all on the big, the big guys yeah, the like the, the Euro Style rigs yeah well, they're not.
[00:38:32]  They're like sub rigs no no no no, they're like these like disposable, like things coming from China that are all kind of like mango kiwi, spongebob flavor, Miami mint, and they're like spongebob flavor.
[00:38:44]  They're like my two favorite words, disposable.
[00:38:46]  Well, three words coming from China, disposable, spongebob and flavor.
[00:38:50]  No, just disposable, coming from China.
[00:38:52]  It makes me like there's this brand, now that people smoke, called Lost Mary.
[00:38:58]  Oh, I've seen that evocative name, Lost Mary.
[00:39:02]  There was another the, the Mike Tyson one.
[00:39:05]  I've seen recently people have been smoking the Tyson one.
[00:39:08]  Well, I've seen two people smoking it, but it's, he's got his own, you know it's.
[00:39:13]  It's interesting because one of the one of the, the.
[00:39:15]  Another article that you've written sort of in this vein is about it's called the e-pimps of only fans uh, and it's so similar in so many ways.
[00:39:25]  Just the the, not exact the exact thing that they were doing, although it does sort of uh, you know, it presents the argument that some people have called this fraud.

=== Club Experience (03:42) ===

[00:39:34]  Let's say um, but for those who don't know, it's like it's when people like you know only fans models uh, have this, you know, oftentimes rent their, rent these services out that actually like talk to their fans or whatever.
[00:39:52]  Uh, because that's the way you make money, on only fans you can show your your booty hole and people will pay for it, but the real money is in charging for text messages, which I should start fucking doing.
[00:40:01]  So I get to goddamn many of them.
[00:40:03]  Um but uh, but these these sort of like these services that that will essentially like run your, your only fans profile for you.
[00:40:10]  You just give them like the nudes or whatever.
[00:40:13]  Um and, and one of the people that you spent a lot of time with, that article I can't remember the guy's name, but you end up going to a club with him and a couple of the models uh, and that seemed such like such a Miami experience.
[00:40:24]  Yeah, his name, His name was Jason.
[00:40:26]  Classic.
[00:40:26]  I had a really incredible time at this club in Fort Lauderdale that was in this church that had been converted to this sort of like EDM club.
[00:40:35]  And we'd pull up there and his like, I want to say like an Alfa Romeo, some kind of like sports car like that.
[00:40:40]  And it's all these like, yeah, it's like Hellcats, like SRTs, all these just like Miami-ass cars.
[00:40:47]  And yeah, you know, just guys in those like really, they love those like really tight.
[00:40:53]  Pants, that kind of end at like the bottom of the calf, they're like Love island type of tips.
[00:40:57]  In my head they're capri's, but I know that's not what a capri is, but they're like a new kind of capri to those kind of guy.
[00:41:02]  I went to Alpha conference, very briefly in Utah, what's that?
[00:41:06]  Uh, I well, they kicked me out, uh immediately, but it was like a conference for alphas um, and they didn't know about that.
[00:41:14]  You know like yeah, i'm wouldn't get it.
[00:41:16]  Yeah, I just go to Sigma Ones, that's true list kind of charts, her own ways.
[00:41:21]  Conference of one at the right there's room for everyone at the Beta conference.
[00:41:24]  Exactly, there really is.
[00:41:26]  You can make room very easily by pushing people around, um.
[00:41:29]  But they also all had like like pants that ended here in like an extreme taper.
[00:41:34]  But they would often, I think, in contrast, the Miami types uh, they would often have like kind of somewhat feminine boots on, whereas I think Miami possibly because you don't want the Cuban heel, because it's a little too stereotypical I feel like they're more the low slunk sneaker.
[00:41:50]  Yeah Miami's, you know it's a big like monk strap town.
[00:41:55]  Well, I was gonna say no, it's like a, it's like an off-white, like like yeah, you know, it's like they're real sneakerheads, they're really into like um, chrome hearts they're, they're into their, it's like that kind of thing.
[00:42:07]  Streetwear belt, yeah, big time.
[00:42:10]  Um, did you have fun at the club?
[00:42:13]  Um yeah I, I did.
[00:42:16]  I like.
[00:42:17]  Well, first of all, it's like I was like, okay, i'm gonna expense these drinks to the NEW YORK Times, so let me go ahead and get like four vodka red bowls so that I can like be here so intense.
[00:42:28]  I thought you were about to say like i'm gonna get like a bottle service or whatever.
[00:42:32]  No, but there was really intense.
[00:42:34]  You know the sparklers like the bottle girls carrying it around.
[00:42:37]  Did someone pour champagne into your mouth?
[00:42:39]  God, I wish.
[00:42:39]  No uh, but it was, you know it was.
[00:42:41]  It was a.
[00:42:41]  Really actually, I hadn't been to a club like that in a really long time, or maybe ever, where it's like the CO2 cannons like on the ceiling, Just like, it's like white, it's like whited out.
[00:42:52]  They blast, you know, like when the DJ like hits some kind of drop or something, they like blast from the ceiling this like, you know, compressed air CO2 thing that the entire floor is like invisible.
[00:43:04]  And, you know, I don't know.
[00:43:05]  Is it like inhaling a whippet?
[00:43:07]  I mean, yeah, kind of.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  It's like, it's a really weird sort of like chemical flavor to it.
[00:43:13]  But yeah, it was just a really overwhelming environment.

=== CO2 Cannon Club Experience (08:30) ===

[00:43:16]  And there was just this amazing moment in the piece where Jason, so he's this guy who runs an OnlyFans agency.
[00:43:25]  And he brought me there with a client of his and her boyfriend who she kind of like films sex scenes with and like runs their account.
[00:43:34]  And then obviously he has like people in the Philippines handling all the actual communication with the customers.
[00:43:38]  But he's like just looking at her and he was like, yeah, you know, she's almost like he's sort of just gazing at her as she's like making out with her boyfriend on the dance floor.
[00:43:48]  And I forget the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of like, you know, she's almost like too pretty for this.
[00:43:54]  Because people just want someone who looks like someone they already know.
[00:43:58]  Yeah, that was an interesting part.
[00:44:00]  That's mentioned a couple times in the piece is that you actually don't want like jaw-droppingly gorgeous women because people who text them want to be texting somebody that they I think can have the illusion of them.
[00:44:14]  It's the girl next door fantasy.
[00:44:16]  It's the notion that your life could contain romance reasonably, which is what I think is missing from the lives of the sad, lonely people that pay for this sort of thing.
[00:44:30]  Well, I think also one of the most gentle details in that piece is you're talking about how Jason is very specific about, okay, this is how this type of person would text.
[00:44:43]  And this is how if it's the MILF, this is how she would text.
[00:44:47]  And she wouldn't say, hey, like this, she'd say, hey, like this.
[00:44:50]  And she wouldn't use winky emoji like this.
[00:44:52]  She used smile emoji like this or whatever it was.
[00:44:54]  But he was very specific about for each one of the kind of archetypes, if you will, which apparently correspond to real people, but like, you know, I'm not trying to, but archetypes in his kind of, you know, his arsenal of.
[00:45:10]  There was one about like, you know, an 18-year-old would put like an extra parentheses on the smiley face.
[00:45:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:17]  And so he was very like, he knew what people expected to see and read and what they kind of, you know, how they wanted to interact with these, you know, these girls that he had.
[00:45:29]  And I don't know, there was something very sort of touching about how much, how much attention he kind of paid to trying to kind of market that authenticity of these accounts, even though the entire enterprise is completely ethically fraught.
[00:45:45]  Yeah, I mean, you know, he's like this sort of puppet master of these like women and he gets into character.
[00:45:55]  I mean, you have to.
[00:45:57]  And all these companies, you know, that do this, and it's a huge market, they really take it quite seriously as far as how to sell, can most convincingly sell the illusion because what a lot of people kind of explained to me was like, it's one of those classic things where it's like 80% of your market comes from 20% of your customers.
[00:46:17]  You want these guys that get really hooked that kind of actually, you know, in their mind, are falling in love with these women or at least like obsessed with them and really need to be talking to them and feeling.
[00:46:27]  Power users.
[00:46:28]  Power users, yeah.
[00:46:29]  That's where all the money is.
[00:46:30]  Totally.
[00:46:30]  Yeah.
[00:46:31]  Every social media site says that.
[00:46:32]  That's the same thing that they say about Twitter, right?
[00:46:34]  It's always been the case that it's like there's this super, super engaged, extreme, like, I don't even know what the percentage would be.
[00:46:41]  I would be shocked if it was 20%.
[00:46:42]  I think it's closer to like between closer to 1%, between 20%, you know what I mean?
[00:46:47]  Of power users that basically totally make the entire site function.
[00:46:53]  And it's this funny kind of paradox about how people think about scale and scaling businesses, right?
[00:47:00]  You think, oh, we've got to appeal to the most people, but actually it's this very narrow slice of really engaged consumers that ends up powering an entire, you know, whatever it is.
[00:47:11]  It could be OnlyFans, it could be a fandom, it could be, you know, you see it across like, you know, in entertainment all the time.
[00:47:18]  Yeah, I mean, with OnlyFans in particular, you know, I sent you guys this yesterday, but the case of Gran Amato, which I think was in Florida, who's a guy who drained his parents' bank account, $200,000, his family's dad's entire retirement, gives it to this cam girl, and then goes to treatment.
[00:47:36]  Once he gets out of treatment, argues to continue that relationship.
[00:47:40]  And then when his parents expectedly maybe say, don't do that, killed them and stole money.
[00:47:48]  And then we all went on the, went on, went back on.
[00:47:50]  And I think it's obviously this is somebody who is mentally ill in some way, or at least like, you know, or maybe it's akin to like, you know, somebody who like kills for drug money or whatever.
[00:48:04]  But there is this like, there's something that people are getting fulfilled from these things.
[00:48:11]  And it's so interesting to know that.
[00:48:13]  I mean, he was, I guess, paying for cam shows, which is a little different than text messages.
[00:48:17]  But like I was talking to you guys before we started, I met this woman at a party who ran one of these arbitrage businesses.
[00:48:24]  And I was sort of fascinating to question her about it because she was like, yeah, a lot of the people, there's definitely a large percentage of our customers, these guys who are texting these OnlyFans models, who are actually people at a call center in the Philippines, who will sometimes break KFA and be like, hey, can you tell the model or whatever her name is?
[00:48:49]  You know, she looks great this week, and I like it when she does the herbalpert whipped cream thing.
[00:48:56]  They knew they were talking to someone.
[00:48:58]  But they were still paying $100 for like 10 minutes of text.
[00:49:03]  Until they could say, also, I'm in on the joke, but please, maybe for real, can you tell that?
[00:49:09]  What I heard a lot about was like, I mean, that's fascinating.
[00:49:13]  What I heard a lot about was guys who would be suspicious and understandably be like, there's no way I'm really talking to you.
[00:49:20]  Especially when you get something where it's like, this is a page being run for the OnlyFans of somebody who's like a famous TikTok influencer or something.
[00:49:27]  Some guy would be like, there's no way I'm really talking to you.
[00:49:29]  But what they'll do at the companies is they'll just have the model record a video saying like, of course, like, you know, David Bigcock 4, like, of course I'm talking to you.
[00:49:39]  And they'll just, you know, bang out however many of those they need to kind of convince.
[00:49:43]  Yeah, it's almost like cameo or something.
[00:49:45]  Yeah.
[00:49:45]  You know what I mean?
[00:49:47]  And to a certain extent, I'm like, well, what is actually ultimately inauthentic about this?
[00:49:51]  Yes.
[00:49:52]  I was just thinking that.
[00:49:53]  I mean, one of the things that trips me up is I think so often, like, if I log on to Twitter X, if I log on to X, functionally, what's the difference between my entire feed being run by AI versus there being quote unquote real people behind the accounts?
[00:50:08]  What's the difference to me as a person reading this feed?
[00:50:12]  And the more and more AI eats up and regurgitates and spits out content for the internet, I mean, we've talked about this on the show, the more and more it will just eat away at everything and kind of just be the internet.
[00:50:27]  And I don't know at what point we're going to maybe know the difference, I guess.
[00:50:33]  It starts to, like, the bleed is very.
[00:50:36]  Yeah, and I think there is a kind of there are there are essentially enough suckers just out of the whole kind of giant bucket of people that are online.
[00:50:46]  Like there's going to be enough, you know, you're going to have to be like, like the last person, like the last chopper out of Vietnam is like the last guy to stop falling for like weird AI scans.
[00:50:55]  It's going to take a while.
[00:50:56]  It's going to be me, too.
[00:50:58]  I mean, that's something with OnlyFans in particular.
[00:51:02]  You know, there's OnlyFans accounts that are out there that are literally not real people.
[00:51:07]  They're completely run by agencies or they are real people, but they're not like the woman's not like, the woman's taking the pictures and maybe posting them on some like Russian website or Latvian website.
[00:51:17]  And these people either buy the pictures from her or they just like take them and they will have like popular OnlyFans accounts that they message people on.
[00:51:26]  And you actually don't, at this point, you still need the woman, but when technology gets better, you won't even need the woman.
[00:51:32]  Yeah, we've been doing that for a long time, so we're pretty used to it.
[00:51:35]  Exactly.
[00:51:35]  And so like, it will be this thing that is entirely imaginary.
[00:51:40]  And I don't think like one always kind of, I think, hopes that like, surely people won't fall for this, right?

=== Ape Labor Markets (12:29) ===

[00:51:47]  Like, you know, at this point, you know what you're getting into, but, but, I mean, it's, it's, there's a certain like, I guess it's like what we were talking about before.
[00:51:55]  It's like this almost like, it's like how people do the drop shipping thing, right?
[00:51:58]  And you end up buying like a toaster that costs $10 more because it looks like it's from this site that has deals or whatever.
[00:52:07]  It's it's the same kind of thing where it's like almost like a willful self-blindness and like a willful trust, even though if you said out loud what you were doing, you might realize, oh, that's that seems a little ridiculous.
[00:52:19]  Yeah, I don't think that it's going to get much better.
[00:52:21]  I think it's going to get significantly worse.
[00:52:23]  I just think with like OnlyFans, for some people, they really want the fantasy of connection with a sexy stranger to feel like bulletproof, like it could be real.
[00:52:36]  And so they'll kind of test it and try and prove that it's real.
[00:52:38]  And for other people, it doesn't matter.
[00:52:40]  It's just like it's enough to have some degree of like, and maybe it's, maybe it would be better if it was real, but they're like, well, this is what I can get.
[00:52:48]  You know, there's a sort of like a cheapening of the options on the kind of market.
[00:52:53]  And so you just, you know, what are you going to do?
[00:52:55]  Like, let's say you're like divorced guy living in like the middle of nowhere.
[00:53:00]  Like you're just kind of taking what you can get or whatever.
[00:53:03]  Yeah.
[00:53:03]  And it's like, you know, there's some kind of percent that maybe a chance that like maybe it is the real woman behind this.
[00:53:12]  And, you know, the other thing I was thinking of, I mean, it's because this is all just Miami to me.
[00:53:16]  Like, I mean, that story, a lot of that took place in Miami and the Philippines.
[00:53:21]  But there's this similarity with both of these stories and like the NFT stuff and like the Bitcoin and also just like all the other coin shit that's out there.
[00:53:32]  You know, like there was the, I remember during like, remember the ape craze, right?
[00:53:37]  There was a moment where Eminem and Snoop Dogg performed at like, I think it was the VMAs as their fucking bored apes.
[00:53:43]  Like it was like a big, it was huge.
[00:53:46]  Like there, there's fucking still murals in the Lower East Side of Bored Apes.
[00:53:51]  I saw Snoop Dogg perform last summer and he had a like blow up of his ape.
[00:53:56]  Exactly.
[00:53:56]  And, you know, Justin Bieber an ape.
[00:53:58]  All these people fucking Kimball had an ape.
[00:54:00]  All of these people have their apes and like.
[00:54:03]  No, all my apes are good.
[00:54:04]  But it was this thing where like everyone was pretending that this was this revolutionary new technology that they were going to like was going to change the world and change art forever.
[00:54:14]  My theory is that like ultimately that craze and a lot of other things we're talking about, but it really was a kind of like extent.
[00:54:21]  I mean, my friend and I were talking about this.
[00:54:23]  It was almost like it emerged out of like the kind of psychosis of like COVID and the George Floyd protests where it was like that was like the first thing that had happened to Americans since 9-11.
[00:54:35]  And they were like, oh my God, something happened.
[00:54:38]  We can't do anything.
[00:54:39]  The world is completely malleable.
[00:54:41]  It's like, you know, it's like when you're in a manic episode and you're like, I can fly.
[00:54:44]  That's how I think of much of 2020 and 2021 as people, different groups of people experiencing various forms of mania.
[00:54:55]  But and in every facet of society, every part of society.
[00:54:59]  But yeah, I mean, it was this thing where it was like people were pretending that like, yeah, the world is malleable.
[00:55:03]  We can change the world.
[00:55:04]  And then, but it's like really what you're doing is like you're doing arbitrage and like you're trying to like buy and sell and pump this product in this carney-esque way.
[00:55:13]  And now it's so funny that like like the that world has been reduced so much to where there's these sort of self-aware, it's almost like, except for like Bitcoin and Ethereum, some of that stuff, like the main line of people who are like really in this shit every day, it's all like, almost like we all, you've been scammed a million times, you've scammed other people a million times.
[00:55:32]  Everyone knows that shit coin's going to go to zero, but like, you have to get into like come fart coin or whatever.
[00:55:38]  Sorry, but that's like what that shit's called now.
[00:55:41]  You got to like get in on that on day one so that like you can get out really quickly because you know it's a scam.
[00:55:46]  You just want to kind of like attach yourself like a barnacle to the scammer.
[00:55:49]  Yeah, I mean gambling is fun.
[00:55:51]  Exactly.
[00:55:52]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  And I think like too, like, I mean, you see a lot of like NFTs are back and not in an ape way, but in a way where like you say, like people are buying and selling and trading this stuff and pumping it and dumping it as much as they can.
[00:56:06]  And it's just, yeah, like you say, gambling, it's like more gambling markets popping up, but people are getting into it knowing, like you say, like knowing it's a scam and trying to just ride it, you know, as fast as they can.
[00:56:19]  Kind of like, you know, it's a scam.
[00:56:20]  I know it's a scam.
[00:56:21]  Fantastic.
[00:56:22]  Let's go.
[00:56:22]  And then I'm out.
[00:56:24]  It's like we're all, it's like everyone's a mark and a scammer at the same time.
[00:56:27]  Except for the people.
[00:56:29]  There's a lot of people that are like, even the scammers can be marks themselves.
[00:56:32]  Well, also with a lot of this stuff, there are like kind of real market makers and sharps that are actually kind of sophisticated at like manipulating people that are just kind of in it for gambling and using all sorts of artificial ways to pump and dump whatever.
[00:56:49]  I think behind a lot of these things, there are like significant things.
[00:56:54]  There's dumb money and there's sophisticated money.
[00:56:56]  But at the end of the day, it's like if you look at the faces of all these different industries, right?
[00:57:01]  From the full Full scam community, such as Bergwalls, to like, you know, the OnlyFans arbitrage, not arbitrage, the only fans like E-Pimp guy.
[00:57:10]  But it is arbitrage.
[00:57:12]  It's exploiting cheap labor.
[00:57:14]  Yeah, it is.
[00:57:14]  It's labor arbitrage.
[00:57:15]  And in fact, that whole like labor arbitrage shit with like hiring people on Fiverr and in the Philippines, this is another one of those like hustler things that they do.
[00:57:23]  Absolutely.
[00:57:24]  Is they teach you how to become like a recruiter or not even a recruiter, like how to run some kind of agency where you do no work, where you have passive income because you have some business where the entirety of the business is performed by guys in India or guys in the Philippines for like $3 an hour.
[00:57:39]  And it's like, it's interesting because there's this like there's two things going on with that, right?
[00:57:46]  Like there's these labor arbitrage people, and then there's all the people from those countries who themselves are like scamming, you know, oftentimes Americans because that's who's got the money with the, what's it called?
[00:57:58]  The pig butchering.
[00:58:00]  Pig butchering scam.
[00:58:02]  Yeah, I think, you know, this cuts both ways, where you now have like instant kind of communications and digital infrastructures that connect, for lack of a better term, like the first and third world.
[00:58:14]  And people on both sides are just sort of seeing the opportunities.
[00:58:19]  And yeah, I mean, pig butchering is fascinating.
[00:58:22]  It's, you know, if anyone is not aware, it's this like phenomenon in all over Southeast Asia where largely kind of, from what I understand, kind of Chinese gangs will start up these kind of like factories where they will have people working for like,
[00:58:41]  you know, two bucks an hour doing the kind of wrong number scams that you get and trying to convince in romance scams and trying to convince some divorced American guy to like fall in love with like a woman who has like an AI generated face who tells him to get into like trading crypto.
[00:59:00]  But it's being done in this sort of industrialized way because ultimately just like the kind of, I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with just like, yeah, America is where the money is, but there's nothing else separating these countries.
[00:59:13]  It's just, we all have computers.
[00:59:14]  Yeah, we all have computers.
[00:59:15]  We all have WhatsApp.
[00:59:16]  or whatever and you can like I mean that's that's what's so fascinating because it's like it's inverting the you know the outsourcing dynamic exactly which for years was sort of the main relationship between these countries exactly Exactly.
[00:59:26]  And like the tech sectors in these countries, and they realize, like, actually, these Americans, like, you know, okay, maybe the 31-year-old guy who's taking a picture of himself with a cigar on some OnlyFan models, you know, a Miami balcony, brickle balcony apartment is doing arbitrage here in Mumbai.
[00:59:43]  But like, we can get his fucking grandma.
[00:59:46]  Well, the countryside surrounds the city.
[00:59:47]  The countryside does fucking, that's that's the other thing, the other side of this that's kind of like fun.
[00:59:53]  I don't know if inversion is the right word, but I mean classic or classical macro still denies arbitrage as like a possibility because if there is one true price for everything, there cannot be arbitrage, right?
[01:00:08]  And so in a perfectly in a in a in a in a perfect market situation, it's all about price discovery and there's a single price for everything and that's what all markets do is try to find the perfect price for everything.
[01:00:20]  And so there cannot be any arbitrage opportunity and so this is completely and obviously that's not true in any kind of like real, you know, in any real world scenario.
[01:00:28]  And hedge funds have huge ARB wings and that's like a whole part of you know a massive part of the financial economy even as much as it's sort of like denied or repressed in a really funny way.
[01:00:41]  And so to see it kind of like burst out in these you know either scammy ways, I mean I think that's all kind of scammy or in this kind of like the third world sort of centers kind of returning back, popping back to America and to the center of financial capital is, you know, it's not lost on me, I guess.
[01:01:03]  Yeah.
[01:01:03]  I mean it's it's funny.
[01:01:04]  Like the like because I guess in this case like what separates this from that kind of from like the kind of perfect price is it's just that there's just not in any sense kind of like real informational clarity about like what anything is.
[01:01:21]  Like that's there's like you can put this kind of veil over like what is this product?
[01:01:28]  Like the thing that's like in theory this like thing you're buying from Amazon, but it's actually like a facsimile of it that like is being bought that's like some sort of you know drop ship thing or like the model isn't you're not actually talking to the models you're not actually like the real price for like what it costs to talk to a model isn't reflected in what you're paying.
[01:01:47]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:01:47]  I just feel like there's like there's all these things are there's not it's very easy to disguise what something is.
[01:01:55]  Well I feel like it's only gonna get worse.
[01:01:57]  Yeah I mean kind of one last question is why do you think Miami is the center of so much of this?
[01:02:02]  I thought about this a lot.
[01:02:03]  Yeah I mean both of these are cities that A, you have a kind of like a nice climate creates money via just the real estate side of it.
[01:02:13]  So there is a sort of base of money there.
[01:02:16]  It's also a fun place to go if you're young.
[01:02:19]  And then you have like in Miami in particular you have all of the kind of like facsimiles of like a kind of global city where it's you know it's very international.
[01:02:30]  There's this kind of South American piece of it.
[01:02:32]  It's a you know a big port city and and you have like but you don't actually have any anything institutional there.
[01:02:38]  Like there's no media.
[01:02:39]  There's not really big companies.
[01:02:40]  There's not really major, especially major universities like you get in like New York or LA.
[01:02:46]  There's no Hollywood thing.
[01:02:47]  So you get all the kind of trappings of being an important global city, but without any of the actual weight of like there's real people doing real stuff there.
[01:02:57]  And so instead you kind of have this like kind of like totally hot air balloon vibe of like anyone can come there and just start pumping some stuff.
[01:03:06]  And then I think also it just happened to be, you know, during COVID, there was just like the political maneuvering of DeSantis and Suarez were trying to position it as the sort of like anti-lib city where there was just totally libertarian vibes around COVID.
[01:03:20]  And then a bunch of people moved there.
[01:03:22]  I mean a bunch of tech kind of like tech guys moved there in a sort of like posturing way of like we're over that kind of like wokey in San Francisco.
[01:03:30]  So there was that and then there was also just but I thought you know this stuff is maybe downstream of that.
[01:03:34]  I mean a lot of crypto people ended up there because like again like the crypto stuff is not like actually Silicon Valley.
[01:03:40]  It's like tech on some level, but it's like you can have literally zero awareness of anything to do with a computer and still sell crypto.
[01:03:48]  So it's just it was like things that have a sort of like tech vibe but aren't you don't actually not it's not like Google's there.
[01:03:55]  It's not like there's real companies there.
[01:03:57]  It's just it's just like this place for anyone who wants to like project sort of money on the computer equals like Lambo and Bottle Service can do that without like the sort of gravity of like, you know, what actual, what Silicon Valley actually is, which is all these like billion dollar companies.

=== No Real Companies Here (02:55) ===

[01:04:16]  Yeah.
[01:04:17]  Yeah, I think Florida has its own sort of like long American history of like weird swampy carney culture of like kind of like the water going in and out and it, you know, there's a lot of kind of sea changes there.
[01:04:29]  But just thinking about Miami and Dubai together, I mean immediately too, if the climate models are correct, both of those cities will not be inhabitable.
[01:04:40]  Yeah.
[01:04:40]  Also no income tax.
[01:04:41]  Yeah.
[01:04:43]  But both those cities won't be inhabitable in not a very short time in, you know, in the grand scheme of things, which kind of, you know, I mean, the infrastructure of the city then is basically, you know, you got a short timeframe to get, you know, make your money and get out.
[01:05:01]  And it's sort of built into the landscape of both of these places, the kind of cold mercenary nihilism of make money, get out before everyone else does.
[01:05:23]  Well, Ezra, thank you so much for joining us here on Fresh and Fit Podcast.
[01:05:28]  Obviously, you can't see the seven or eight OnlyFans walls that are in the middle of the day.
[01:05:31]  This is whatever pod, and we're going to be roasting emo thoughts.
[01:05:35]  Well, that's the funny thing about, though, I mean, even because that's like a type of guy we didn't mention either, even though he straddles all of this.
[01:05:41]  Yeah.
[01:05:41]  That, like, there are all these podcasts like Red Pill Podcasts, but what they and what they do is they pay or maybe sometimes paid by OnlyFans models to come on, or they just insult the OnlyFans models as a way to advertise the OnlyFans of those models.
[01:05:56]  And it's such a crazy things are changing now.
[01:06:00]  And it's funny because I think that a lot of people thought of like New York as the epicenter of all this, but the reality is a lot of the epicenter is Miami.
[01:06:08]  Yeah, for sure.
[01:06:09]  And like whatever New York intellectual bullshit you're doing, like it cannot compare to a like Neanderthal guy telling a OnlyFans model he paid to be there to get back in the kitchen.
[01:06:23]  Whatever little blog you're writing cannot compare to that.
[01:06:28]  Anyways, thank you for coming on.
[01:06:30]  You can check out his work in whatever place because you're a freelance writer.
[01:06:33]  It's all over the place.
[01:06:34]  It's all over the motherfucking place.
[01:06:36]  Thanks for having me, guys.
[01:06:37]  Appreciate it.
[01:06:54]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was Egra.
[01:06:56]  Egra?
[01:06:57]  Egra.
[01:06:58]  That was Egra Megris.
[01:07:01]  That was Egra Megris.
[01:07:03]  And my name is Bryce.
[01:07:05]  I'm Liz.
[01:07:06]  We are, of course, joined by producer Jan Chomsky.
[01:07:08]  And this has been Trunon.
[01:07:10]  We'll see you next time.