How Fraudsters Become Heroes (ft. Fyre Fest, Theranos, Martin Shkreli)

Everywhere you look these days there is another famous somewhat glamorous con artist being massively humiliated in a court of law, as your uncomfortably aware mother might say that con artists are in, but why do we as a society hate to love or hate? to a good scammer? The answer is more inscrutable than Elizabeth Holm's unblinking blue eyes and harder to decipher than a Martin Shkreli tweet is a joke, we think we figured it out so why do we love talking about these scammers? Are they folk demons, folk

heroes

, or some strange fusion of the two? In this witty edition about the most scamming scammers.

Okay guys, first a quick trip to the scammer hall of fame of 2019. In cell number one, we have Billy Mcfarland, a 13-year-old serial entrepreneur who came up with life-enhancing products like Magnesis. a fake credit card status symbol that was equivalent to a 250-year subscription to an exclusive millennial club along with a fancy piece of metal that could replace your existing plastic card. Anyway, Mcfarland's entire career as a millennial snake oil salesman ended, of course, in fire. The swankiest music

fest

ival ever to take place at the Bahamas Fire Festival, the

fest

ival benefited from early publicity from influencers like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid, who promised the sexiest, most fomo-inducing event ever. time.

This convinced enough status-hungry rich kids to leave all their parents' money. in luxurious cabins, Mcfarland borrowed millions to finance the festival, but when the guests arrived there on that fateful day in 2017, they found a literal concrete wasteland, it was like lord of the flies, my friend peed on some of the beds in name of influential people throughout the FBI. He launched an investigation that led to a $100 million class-action lawsuit, six federal lawsuits and four individual lawsuits, mostly from lenders. Mcfarland pleaded guilty and is now hopefully planning drug parties from his prison cell in Orange County, New York, while he spends six years for what.

Is the fire festival the kind of viral story that even older people like to talk about. Why is the memoir of him, the idiot titled Prometheus, the God of Fire, likely to make millions? Why did Hulu and Netflix create competing documentaries about the debacle? There is a particular shot in Freuda to imagine a group of rich kids eating sad cheese sandwiches and sleeping in fema tents and an even greater opportunity in freyja to imagine the skiers who dreamed it all eating chili in the prison canteen What's more, though, Mcfarland's scam seems like a senior high school prank compared to the ruse hatched by our con artist in cell number two, Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest billionaire. of the self-made world and award-winning Steve Jobs impersonator, the moment is ripe for change.

This paradigm proves his black turtleneck, his fake hoarse voice, and the big idea of ​​the nine billion dollar blood data processing company, Theranose Holmes, was that a finger prick of blood could be used to perform hundreds of tests. that would detect medical conditions like cancer, high cholesterol, syphilis, basically anything that is hypochondriac. The mind might dream that you would never again have to see a tube of your blood confiscated in the name of medicine, finally free, but not so fast. Leaked images and whistleblowers revealed that Theranos was simply performing blood tests using run-of-the-mill methods. processing equipment rather than any proprietary technology, plus life inside the laboratories was literally a bloody spectacle.

Basically, Holmes lied about her technology and in the process she hilariously recruited highly respected board members like Henry Kissinger and General James Mattis and, even more hilariously, she solicited huge investments from Rupert. murdoch and betsy devos damningly, she allowed poor quality diluted blood tests to be processed and knowingly gave the resulting inaccurate information to patients, thus literally endangering their health, which is not a good look, if people get tested for syphilis using

theranos

, there will be a lot more syphilis. In this world, Holmes still refuses to admit to any crime. This is what happens when you work to change things and first they think you're crazy, then they fight with you and suddenly you change the world.

We'll have to see how. That argument is accepted in the federal court of San Jose, United States. In any case, the consequences have been enough for Holmes to receive a good number of press specials and documentaries and, at this rate, by 2022 he will have more biographical films than winston churchill with all the blondes in hollywood from jlaw to kate mckinnon chosen to play her in film adaptations everything would be really semi-glamorous if everyone didn't hate her, of course, there is no shortage of hateful fascination when it comes to our con man in cell number three , Martin Shkreli, former hedge fund CEO of the Turing pharmaceutical company and current proud owner of America's Most Hittable Face, catapulted into the public's attention when he raised the price of Daraprim, a pill commonly used to prevent pneumonia. in people with HIV, from thirteen dollars and fifty cents to a Great, seven hundred and fifty dollars, that's more than five thousand percent.

You know, a money-making plan you can feel great about. He was then accused of lying to hedge fund investors while siphoning millions of dollars in assets from biopharmaceutical company Retrofit Inc. to pay them off. investors here Shkreli's crimes are less interesting than his post-crime antics, which include boastful purchases such as a World War II-era Enigma code-breaking machine, a Picasso painting, and unreleased albums by the Wu-Tang Clan and Lil Wayne. He also harassed a journalist on Twitter. He was banned and offered five thousand dollars for a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair, indicating that he wanted to clone her.

He was convicted of securities fraud and is now serving seven years in federal prison where he presumably runs a multi-level marketing scheme for toilet wine at the time. In cell number four is Anna Sarakin, a little less famous but still fascinating, nicknamed the Soho hustler. Sorokin posed as Anna Delvey, a German heiress. She traveled the world pretending to be super glamorous while she relaxed in luxurious hotel rooms that she had no intention of paying for. She also photoshopped bank statements and attempted to get a 22 million loan for a contemporary art center she wanted to build. Ultimately, she defrauded banks, hotels, restaurants, and a private jet operator out of $275,000 just by looking like the rich socialite she recently was.

She was found guilty of four counts of theft and theft of services and faces up to 15 years in prison. Her journey was covered extensively in a New York magazine article and HBO went ahead and optioned the story because they know you want to see it now. Because we are? I'm completely obsessed with these people, why did I spend more than five minutes describing their seriously shady but usually not completely depraved crimes and why did you love every second of them? Here in the joke, we would say that, to a large extent, it boils down to a moral catharsis to understand To understand the idea of ​​moral catharsis, we must first talk about moral relativism or the oft-repeated idea that moral facts, that is, something that is always true or always good, simply do not exist.

Moral relativism means that moral judgments can only be considered true or false based on From a specific point of view or perspective, for example, you might think that it is objectively morally wrong for me to drown this guy in a puddle of Jell-O, but what about? If this guy is the inventor of crocodiles from that moral point of view, am I not simply protecting the feet of humanity? greater indignity basically nothing is clear at least in today's society and this confusion has especially affected us millennials, ask our therapists relativism is essentially about the relationship between moral codes and moral statements a moral statement could be true in relation to a system of moral codes but it is not true in relation to another, that is, we could say that it is bad for a vegan to drink milk, but a non-vegan who does not comply with that moral code will drink all the nipple juice he wants or it could be observed that nudity is okay on some beaches, but morally offensive in other communities.

Run this idea through the musty coffee filters of public culture, which are months old, and what you get is a kind of paralysis or amorality that says that making a child eat its parents is right relative to Eric Cartman's moral code is not a moral statement, it is just an observation, it is devoid of any real morality, it is amoral, but this is literally all some people feel they can claim. We are afraid to assert moral truths, in fact, in all seriousness if you do so. You go around making moral judgments like killing babies is wrong, people will behave, what if that baby is the ghost of Joseph Stalin and you act like you have a closed mind?

So all moral relativism has really taught us is that the truly ethical thing to do is to never make ethical statements outside of your own particular context, which, as you may remember, is literally non-moral or amoral as a position, oops, the plague of Culturally abbreviated moral relativism has combined with the social media outrage machine that bombards us with story after story packaged specifically to generate our most instinctive moral feelings: outrage over college admissions scandals, horror at the way treatment of immigrant children or anger at the writers of Game of Thrones, while telling us there are no rights or wrongs. and that we each create our own moral reality, as a result we are trapped in ethical paralysis, increasingly outraged but unable to articulate a moral framework and response, not knowing how to make our own moral claims much less keep. little by little for those statements enter 5000 word news stories, books, podcasts, documentaries and now biopics about horrible people, not about mass murderers, although we like that too, but about individuals who are simply conspirators so blatantly and absurdly selfish that you can point, laugh and feel better. about forgetting your reusable grocery bag, and what's more, expressing these feelings publicly on or offline is pretty low risk because people generally agree not to ask their friend if she's vaccinating her child because the Things could get ugly quickly, but talk to her about the fire festival and she's unlikely to be like yeah, that Mcfarland guy, the system really hurt that poor guy, regardless of how many or few life-saving injections he gets. life to his son, you two can probably sympathize with the tool Billy Mcfarland is commenting on in the president's latest tweet outside of his echo. the camera is risky but no one is going to yell at you for calling elizabeth holmes a possibly psychotic, certainly delusional and absolutely unflappable human being who endangered thousands of lives in a world plagued by political polarization and paralyzed by moral relativism, being capable of unequivocally acknowledging some mistakes and having everyone agree with you just feels really good in a shepherd's pie of mushy, mixed morality.

These individuals offer a rare glimpse of moral clarity. Enter the folk devil, a term coined in 1972 by sociologist Stanley Cohen. The popular devil is a person or group. whose bad behavior is rebranded by the media as pure evil, was originally used to explain the way in which youth subcultures such as the mods, a group of London hipsters who like jazz and rockers, were villainized in the press after When some fights broke out between them, the newspapers salivated. Moral panic arose over this and it was cathartic to be able to point out and cite the evil that really existed.

We would argue that the idea of ​​the folk devil is more relevant than ever, not because they cause moral panic, which is true, but because they serve. moral catharsis, in other words, by functioning as cultural whistleblowers, these scammers help us identify what is wrong in the world around us, for example, the pharmaceutical industry which we all know is a soul-eating money-making machine that enriches the confusion about medications and the poor health of the American people, but with all the contradictory messages conveyed by advertisements, doctors, public relations representatives and the media, it is difficult to identify exactly what it is.morally wrong until

martin

shkreli

comes in and raises the price of AIDS drugs again by five thousand percent with a centralized symbol of everything that is wrong with the industry, suddenly it is very easy to say that they are screwing the people who probably are similarly, it's easy to feel weird about the cult tendencies displayed by unicorn startups in Silicon Valley, but it's hard to articulate why. exactly a few innovative companies making crazy banks is necessarily a bad thing until Elizabeth Holmes comes out of nowhere with a nine billion dollar company built on technology that literally violates fancy scientific laws, you can't just get around the laws. of physics, suggests that the supposed innovation occurring behind the scenes in nerd valley at least merits our skepticism, as distilled versions of the broader moral corruption seen in these industries, these folk demons help us give voice to the much vaguer concerns we have.

I have but I can't express it maybe nothing says cultural whistleblower and moral catharsis like anna delvey where many people can look at high society and scratch their heads as to how these tools became successful here comes anna who literally proves that the appearance of the Success matters more than success itself, his lawyer even argued in court that in his world this is what his social circle did, everyone's life was perfectly curated for social media, people were fake, people were fake and money was made only by hype, but wait, what if the reason why we? That we are fascinated by these guys is not because they are popular demons but because they are popular

heroes

.

Now listen to us. Philosopher and economist Adam Smith observed that humans innately love and admire wealth, thus predicting the Wolf of Wall Street more than 200 years earlier. He further asserted that admiration is absolutely necessary to both establish and maintain rank distinction and order in society so basically we're a bunch of ambitious self-serving types who won't overthrow the system because we're too busy trying to get obscenely rich. A word of caution, though we tend to balance that self-interest with self-preservation. Simply put, you want to make tons of money without people hating you. In fact, most of us really want support for our work, which is why it feels really good when your younger cousin tells you that being a talking head on YouTube is a cool job, thanks Doug, the best-known derivative of Smith's principles It's called yes, the American dream.

I am familiar with the idea that in a free market economy everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to

become

a rich and prosperous socialite with a stylish address. Now it all sounds great, but there is one big glaring problem: most people don't get rich, much less make enough money. living without a weird roommate who still plays fortnite the american dream is just a dream that used to motivate us to wake up every morning and laugh at our bosses' horrible puns so then we thought about scammers anna sorkin and

martin

shkreli

grew up In working class homes, Shkreli's parents were janitors and Sorrikin's father was a truck driver.

They literally rode the wave of rags-to-riches scams. In the case of the upper middle class Billy Mcfarland and the wealthy Elizabeth Holmes, each still experienced a massive influx of wealth. went from silver spoons to golden spoons, so to speak, which means that all these hustlers achieved the American dream, except they screwed a lot of people, reflect a growing frustration with the American dream which for some is a fantasy that You can only literally scam people out of their hard-earned money in a system where most of us can't

become

billionaires, the American dream boils down to pure self-interest, so in a perverse and scandalously, these people achieved an imitation of that soyberger version of that dream by chasing themselves. -interest in their logical and illegal conclusion, as a result we both hate and admire Loki their audacity in our kind of American dream reality, they are quite strangely and perversely a strange breed of heroes, they grab the American dream by the balls and screw people over innocent people with a couple or a couple of million dollars beat the free market economy at its own game and almost got away with it too and come on, that's pretty gangster, so what do you think these scammers are, folk heroes, folk demons or some weird folk hero mix?

The devil is only possible in our strange internet age, tell us seriously because we're still a little confused. Thank you to all our sponsors who support the channel and our podcast. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and as always, thanks for watching guys, peace.