Speaking of abject, nihilistic despair as you did in your last video, I want to talk about a milestone that we're approaching in the United States of America.

Sometime in 2019 the FTC is predicting that there will be more mobile phone calls attempting to defraud people than there will be mobile phone calls, not attempting to defraud people.

There will be more robo calls, Van calls.

I'm visiting my in laws in Florida right now.

It's beautiful.

I've had five slices of key lime pie in the last five days, and they have a landline in their house, like a physical cable that plugs into a wall that connects toe other cables all over the literal world.

The engineering necessary to make this happen, and also the fact that, like five or 10 years ago, would seem completely normal to me.

And now it seems both like extraordinarily inefficient and also kind of adorable is really interesting.

That's not what I'm here to talk about.

Their phone.

It rings a lot to get maybe seven phone calls a day.

Three or four of them are from people who are trying to steal their money here are a few of the stories my mother in law has heard.

One of the I.

R.

S is going to arrest you tomorrow.

Have you've all heard that one?

But here's a better one.

Your grandson has been arrested in Africa and he needs bail money.

Three.

The radio station has free CDs or you, for she has inherited money.

Five.

Microsoft is updating Windows, and in order to maintain your connection to the Internet, you have to buy this $50 software package.

They've been a part of Florida where the average age is higher than normal.

And these scams are somewhat targeted at the elderly one because they tend to have money and retirement accounts.

And two, because, on average, they are a little less likely to have kept up on how things work.

So I'll create a site.

Are you literally a robocall?

You're literally a robo call.

No, I'm making a video right now.

2017.

3% of mobile phone calls were from fraudulent sources.

In 2018 it was up to 30%.

The FTC estimates that for every successful fraud, the scammer gets about $400 that in total, over a $1,000,000,000 has been stolen tweeted about a year ago that, like any legislator who wants to just get elected in any election, ever should do something about this because obviously, it's something that everyone agrees should get fixed.

And I assume that maybe the reason why it hadn't gotten fixed was like money in politics or telecom companies being evil or just general incapability of doing anything in Washington.

But no, actually, it turns out that these people are good at hiding from the law, and that technology allows them to do that.

For the most part, there may be a bit of this that telecom companies could do something about if they wanted to work harder on it.

In any case, it's a lot more complicated than I thought it was.

If you want to learn more about why it's complicated.

I've linked to some articles in the description, basically technologies air integrating together that weren't meant to integrate together.

People are sometimes bad people, and I don't think that when we created this system, we understood the significance we were putting into the institution of the phone number.

It is, of course, disgusting in like 20 different ways.

Ah, thing that I didn't think about, though, was that for a lot of people, like the majority of the times, that the world reaches out to them in any given day.

Are people trying to steal their money?

And that's a pretty big societal cost.

One more way in which a lot of people have just lost faith in the world round, likely all because of just a few 100 or maybe 1000 operating scammers in the US It's really not much more than that.

In short, John human existence is messy, and culture, technology and crime all interact in weird and unexpected ways while on the pretty optimistic and pro human person, if you like, allow 1000 people out of 300 million to ruin something by being bad people and making money at it.

Yeah, I'm not that optimistic like that will happen.

But I do think it's important to remember that a lot of people talk to scammers more than they talkto people.

And so when I get a chance to talk to people, I'm gonna do my best to be nice to them.