Part One: Why Kidnapping Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere

Robert and Sarah Marshall sit down to talk about the wave of kidnapping conspiracy theories that recently led a random woman to murder an Uber driver in El Paso.

(2 Part Series)

https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/why-fake-kidnapping-stories-are-everywhere

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, and I
have some bad news for you all. Kind of at
the start of this episode, starting in like twenty twenty one,
kind of late, you know, early pandemic period, I started
chatting with a good friend of mine, Cormack McCarthy, about
bringing one of his books to life and the way

(00:21):
he'd always intended, which was by having me read Blood
Meridian in my award winning Boston accent in its entirety.
We finished, you know, kind of our discussions right before
he tragically passed earlier this year. Sophie and I recorded
the whole thing. We were about to release it as
a surprise, but we've, as a result of the writers

(00:43):
and now the actors strike in solidarity, decided to delete
the entirety of Boston Blood Meridian. So you know, I'm
very sorry. I know a lot of you were looking
forward to this, and all I can say is that
if you want to do something about this and force
us to release it. David Zoslov's home address is Beverly Hills, California,

(01:09):
So you know, I don't I'm not telling you to
do anything. Just just think about it. That's where his
sixty five million dollar Beverly Hills mansion is also loupe me.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Into this weird crime you're doing right now, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
It's not a crime because the mansion that he bought
used to belong to the other Robert Evans, so I'm
allowed to read it on air.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
There is no other Robert Evans.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
You are. Thank you. It is thank you, Sophie, speaking
of other people who are the only example of their kind.
Sarah Marshall, Hello, Actually this.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
God, It's true. We're both doppelgangers.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
We are both doppelgangers. It is interesting that we both
have a famous person who utilized our name that is
involved in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
It is, and it's also weird to be the real person,
the non Hollywood person.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
You are the real version.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, and yet I'm the other one.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Every time I come across a copy of that movie
at a red box, I kick it. So I'm doing
my part.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
You are doing your part. That's all I ask for.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, you are. You are one of the most accomplished
podcasters in the biz. A real uh. I was going
to like give you a nickname based on a famous podcaster,
but most of them are terrible people. Actually, I'm a
real Margan. Yeah, no, you you do some of the

(02:42):
best podcasts in the business, and you also live in Portland, Oregon.
How are you doing today? Yeah, I'm so good.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yes, this is an all Portland show, which I love.
I especially love it when I meet people who say,
do you live in New York or LA? And I
say Portland. It's like the third secret answer always, Oh.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
They say oh. And then they say and where are
you from? And you say Portland and they say, oh.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
See that's different because there are that this is Portland's
a little weird to me in that and that like,
unlike all of the other West Coast cities, you ask
anyone where they're from, and it's anywhere about the West Coast,
but in Portland some people actually come from here, which
is surprising to me.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
It's a I mean, it's a great city to stick
around in. I feel like Pittsburgh is the same way.
It's like, I don't know, and it's you have a
really nice quality of life here. I think.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
I like it.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
The Yeah, I'm so happy you like it. It's killing And
I was just juicing a watermelon before we started, because
it is watermelon tyme. There are little signs for Hermerston
melons up in our streets where you can go buy
them from a truck, and uh, it's watermelon time.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
I'm pretty happy I had watermelon for lunch, Thank you
so much.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Honestly, I'm extremely hungover right now, So a watermelon sounds great.
I do. And I'm sorry for telling you this, Sarah,
but uh, the AI will will be able to take
your line where you said that you were just juicing
a watermelon and turn that into a conversation with Joe
Rogan about steroids.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
So I do we have to deal with that?

Speaker 4 (04:21):
We all have to deal with that apparently, whereas I
call I was just gonna say, apparently you only get
paid for one day of your work and then they'll
use it forever.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, it's yeah, they juice, yeah, and then they throw
you away.

Speaker 5 (04:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Joe Rogan, or as I call him, the guy from
news radio.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
The guy from news radio. Yeah, it's good because we
all needed as shorthand that we could use to simultaneously
refer to Joe Rogan and Andy Dick. These are great
jokes for three percent of our audience.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
What is it also that like? And here's a joke
for that three percent as well. I can't believe that
podcast that has truly changed American society. Oh yeah, has
come from a news radio alum, and that it wasn't
Dave Foley, who I think solid if he had that
size of a following, I would be okay with that,
I think.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, I would have been okay with Phil Hartman having
that big of a following.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Oh my god, Phil Hartman is alive and Joe Rogan
is you know the other one.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
I was just gonnay, wouldn't it be nice if Phil
Hartman was alive? But yeah, that does really complete it
the wish. Speaking of tragedy, how do you feel about kidnapping, Sarah.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
I'm always ready to talk about a kidnapping, as is
my anxiety brain at one in the morning when I'm
on Wikipedia. So this is much better than that.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
That's good because we're kind of our subject for this
week is pretty focused on the anxiety brain and how
it relates to paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping, because it
turns out that's a real problem, and we're going to
start by talking about kind of the deadliest manifestation of
that problem. On June's sixteenth, twenty and twenty three. Phoebe

(06:09):
Howard coppis a forty eight year old woman from Tompkinsville, Kentucky,
flew to El Paso, Texas to hang out with her boyfriend.
Upon arrival, she got into an Uber driven by a
fifty two year old man named Daniel Piedre Garcia. His
niece later described him as a hard working and funny
guy who had an instinctive ability to lift other people
up when he was in a bad mood. Piedros was

(06:32):
the sole breadwinner for his family and had started driving
for Uber after recovering from an injury at a previous job.
He started driving copas to her boyfriend's place. She was
not familiar with El Paso. She had been won there
two times before, and she got spooked because she saw
a sign for Juarez, Mexico, which convinced her, for some reason,
that she was about to be kidnapped and trafficked across

(06:54):
the border. Now, El Paso, if you've never been, is
the sister city or sibling city or whatever to Juarez.
They're effectively suburbs of each other, right Like Juarez and
El Paso are basically the same city with a border
in between them. So seeing signs for Juarez while you're
in El Paso. Not a weird experience, but Copas are

(07:14):
all over the place. It's content, yeah, because it's right there.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Very pretty city.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
It's a great city. We'll talk about that. But Copas
gets freaked out, so she pulls a handgun from her
purse and she shoots Piedra in the head from behind
the vehicle, which was not particularly close to any of
the entrances to Mexico. Not that that really matters, but
she's going to make claims about this slid to a
stop and impacted a freeway barrier. Copas texted a picture

(07:41):
to her boyfriend and then she called nine to one one. Now,
this story, when it happened, because she kills him, goes
viral for several reasons. Obviously, it's at the intersection of
a bunch of salient issues in US politics. You've got immigration,
you've got the border, you've got gun control, you've got racism.
But it's also a story that could kind of be

(08:02):
briskly described as part of the now expansive Karen goes
crazy genre, right where you've got like a woman who
reacts in some sort of aggressive or violent way because
you know of shit that people would kind of could
kind of like sum up in that way. When the
story broke on Twitter before much was known about it,

(08:23):
many of the posts that I saw just kind of
casually assumed that Copus was a white, suburban woman because
that was the picture of the person who would do
something like this that most jibed with their pre existing assumptions,
and kind of the again assumption was that she was
probably a strong right winger who would imbibe a lot
of racist propaganda about the border. Now, as I'm going

(08:46):
to talk about, we don't have super clear information about
like what sort of info ecosystem she existed in, but
Copus is a black woman, and from what I can
get about her socioeconomic status, she seems to have been
kind of broadly middle class. You know, she's a grandmother.
There was not anything I found her social media, and

(09:08):
there was nothing in it that would make you think
she was not posting about guns, She was not posting
paranoid conspiracies about the border or about any of this stuff.
Like it was like a weirdly normal thing, like like
social media profile from everything forty eight. Okay, so you
know someone who had a kid and young and became

(09:29):
a grandma pretty young. But you know, there was nothing
in it that like set off. I do this all
the time, right, like I used to for a living,
when you know, mass shootings and stuff would be done,
scrape shit on the people who had committed the shooting
to talk like try to figure out like what had
been going on with them prior to making that decision,
and copus. I don't. There's nothing that's I would consider

(09:52):
a warning sign in her publicly available information. The most
recently updated post on her Facebook before killing Piedras was
a profile pick from February seventeenth, and in general, most
of the activity on her Facebook was just like occasionally
updating her portrait. What update she did post We're all
super normal. There's an update from March of twenty twenty

(10:14):
two that's just a video of her dancing with her
grandkid with the text Tatum's birthday dance. He loves dancing
with his Gigi. Love him and it's one of those
because I got to this, I don't know, maybe a
day or two after the shooting. The comments on there
are it's this weird thing that you get with the
internet where like somebody does something terrible and then people

(10:36):
find their anadyne social media posts and start like commenting
on it. So the first couple of comments on this
year old post are like family member being like, oh,
it's so cute, you know, you and the kid are
so cute. And then it becomes like a bunch of
weirdos posting like your family member is a murderer, like
fuck this lady she killed somebody, which is like, yeah,

(10:59):
I mean she did kill some buddy, and I broadly agree, yeah,
fuck her, because that's bad. You shouldn't shoot people in
the back of the head.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
It's so true. You're always saying that.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
I'm always saying that, But it's a I do. I
can't not find it kind of unsettling to like hop
on these pictures of a lady and her grandkid and
just be like, fuck you for killing a guy. And
it's like not just fuck you for killing a guy,
but like, hey, person who is a family member of
this person, like your your relative is is a bad person.

(11:29):
That's a strange impulse. I guess I feel like it's weird.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
It's strange to have that technology available to us and
all of all of the things that lets us do Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, it's it's weird kind of like right below that
first post your your kin is a murderer post is
another comment from somebody who told one of Kopus's relatives
visit her in prison while she is alive lol, l
passo another type of jail, she will get it lol,
which I think it meant like El Paso has Another time,

(12:01):
it's a reference to like the death penalty, right that,
like hm, which is true, but like also I don't know, man,
Like again, what she did is bad. I like you
shouldn't be able to do that and just like walk
away from it obviously, but like it's weird to just
be like, hey, family members of this person who murdered
a guy, like your your relative might get the chair,

(12:23):
Like that's such a strange thing.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
And the ease of being able to do that without
leaving your house is yeah, very dangerous.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, and it's there was another someone else posted, like
you know, commenting like had scraped her her details enough
to figure out that she was like a home designer
for a living and like noted gleefully she'll have to
decorate her new cell home cell with scrap, maybe using
toilet paper and then.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
All prison fantasies are just never sit right right, no
matter what somebody did. It's just like, Okay, calm down,
because like using prison as a way of fantasizing about
revenge reveals the whole thing being what it is.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, and it's it's fascinating because this person starts by
being like, ha ha, she was a home designer and
now she'll be designing a cell and then in the
middle of the post is like, oh, I take it back.
She was a case worker, which is I feel like
someone other than me, you could like there's so much
to say about America and just sort of analyzing the
decision this person made to like real time fact check

(13:27):
while she was making her post without like editing or
changing it, Like there's so much there. I don't know
what to say about it. But it's like I feel
it's like Finnigan's Wake. We're like somewhere trapped in that
post is like the secret to the madness of the
United States. Yeah, but I.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Just need someone to write a dissertation on it.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah. Kids in college who are listening to this podcast,
there you go like that's that's a free one for you.
And it is like we're talking about how like kind
of weird this is, but at the same time, it's
not weird, right, This is just like you, like anyone
who's not unfamiliar with the Internet knows like, well, yeah,
there's like public facing social media for somebody who does

(14:08):
something terrible, this is going to happen to it, right,
That's just the way the world works. So you know,
it's it's it's weird, but it's not weird. As far
as Copus goes, the closest we get to anything that
reveals like what kind of ideology might have made her
shoot a stranger in the back of the head while
he was driving her down the highway is a lecture,

(14:31):
a quote or a clip from a lecture that she
posted on her Facebook. And the lecture is by a
guy named T. D. Jakes who's an American non denominational
megachurch preacher. And it's like a kind of very patriarchal,
traditional little like thing. He's talking about how like a
woman is like salt, you know, she makes everything better,
including like she makes men who are like shitty better,

(14:53):
and that's like the job of a woman, right. It's like, yeah,
it's obviously like it's toxic, but it's not. Also, this
isn't like a like Tdjake Saint Jordan Peterson, Right, this
is a guy you walk into any maybe even never
heard of him, but you walk in any fucking bookstore
in the United States and there's Tdjke's books and shit
like he is an incredibly popular megachurch preacher. So I

(15:14):
wouldn't there's nothing in here that I would call like
a warning sign. The most actual, like like kind of
thing that we get that might suggest some toxicity in
her in her personal life comes from the fundraiser that
her family posted on Gibson to Go after she got arrested.
It reads, or it starts, our daughter, who is an

(15:36):
attractive forty eight year old African American woman, is being
detained in El Paso, Texas at the El Paso County
Detention Center because of the charge of her shooting a
Hispanic male. Now that's a little weird, right who I
heard her? Her family? Right?

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, our daughter who is in a track.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Who is an attractive Okay, that's that's weird. That's a
little lot and.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Rule write that sentence for them the grave to do it. Yeah, expensive, God.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
That's straight. That's a bit peculiar right now. Yes, the
post goes on to claim, and there's no evidence for this,
that she asked the driver to stop numerous times and
he refused to stop, and then he engaged the child locks,
which is why she decided to shoot him. Yeah, it's
again peculiar that, like they describe her as attractive, What

(16:29):
we can say safely, giving given the known facts of
the case, is that Phoebe Copis was a pretty normal
seeming person from the outside who probably, i mean, it's
probably accurate to say had a distinctly irrational fear of
being kidnapped, and that fear was exacerbated by her proximity
to Mexico. Coppus has spoken out since her arrest through

(16:50):
her lawyer, to claim that she demanded Piedras pull over
and let her out, and that he told her he
was taking her to affair in Juarez. Again, there's zero
evidence of this, and the police report states the defendant
never called for police or emergency services to report her
being in any immediate danger prior to shooting the complaining witness.
The defendant took a photo of the complaining witness after

(17:10):
he was shot and sent it to her boyfriend via
text message prior to calling nine to one one. Copus's lawyer,
Matthew Koasick, has claimed that the media that Copus had
been ingesting had contributed to the mindset that she was
in when she carried out the shooting. From Yahoo News quote,
he said that his client was in fear of her
life because of her knowledge of violence and kidnappings and

(17:32):
Warez and seeing highway signs on US fifty four showing
exits Touarez. During the hearing, Kozik showed news articles reporting
on violence and Warez, including stories about drug cartels and kidnappings.
He also showed photos where the shooting happened in traffic
signs showing the highway led to Warez. So, like, that's
what her defense is going to rest on. And I

(17:53):
think there's a degree to which, like, I don't think
that's a good defense, but it's it is accurate that
if you are like somebody who engaged, like who consumes
mainstream news media, most of what you hear about Wjuarez
is kidnappings and murders, right, most of what you hear
about the US border is kidnappings and murders. Now I

(18:14):
can remember like fucking fifteen years ago. I was on
a road trip and we like were in El Paso
and crossed over to Warez to get lunch, and when
we came back, the border patrol guy was so suspicious
of us that he like stripped our car down like
took every like like almost to like the fucking metal
because he was like, nobody stops in Warez for lunch.

(18:35):
It's the most dangerous city on Earth. And it's like,
man like, yeah, if you're fucking doing weirdo, like if
you're doing certain things, it's dangerous, but like it's also
a place just a lot of people live. You can
go get lunch in Warez. The cartels aren't coming for
you there, you know, Like but it is like that's
just how people think about the city, which is peculiar
to me. But I yeah, I started kind of looking

(19:00):
into the media surrounded kidnap surrounding kidnappings in the United
States because it was one of those things I felt
like there had to be something peculiar there that like
would set someone like Phoebe Copus off, Like there had
to be even if we don't have, you know, kind
of evidence from her info diet. When I started like

(19:23):
looking into just kind of going on the big the
major social media apps, looking up like what kind of
the trending stories involving kidnapping or human trafficking was, you
start to like see some patterns, and one of the
patterns is that kidnapping related content is among the most
reliable ways to go viral on the Internet right now.
If you start looking for kid tiktoks using kidnapping, using

(19:45):
human trafficking, you'll see a bunch that have multiple million views.
And if particularly, one of the things that keyed me
in is like I would see some weirdo who would
do something like take a clip from a made for
TV movie about a kid getting kidnapped and then like
put an a AI voiceover over it to be talking
about like here's you know, how kidnappings happen, and that

(20:05):
video would have like four million views and everything else
in their channel would be like ten twenty thousand, right,
So it's like, oh, this is like a reliable way
to get follows and to get views is like putting
kidnapping shit out there.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
AI have voice that they use in like movie summary
accounts and also stuff like that where it's like the
girl is walking down the streets, the girls her by
the wrist.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've seen exactly the ones I'm talking about.
So I started looking into this and it kept getting
weirder and weirder. So one TikTok that I found in
my research was from the account TV moments, which has
two hundred and forty four thousand followers and fourteen point
three million likes, and it mostly posts clips from news
stories with on screen text summaries, stuff like triple homicide

(20:49):
suspect and appears in court with the text heartbreaking story
and read above it, or titles like child abducted from
Berkeley home, American kidnapped walking dog in Mexico, and this
video that I'm about to show our Sophie's about to
show you, which is posted April second, used as a
clip from news Nation, which is a news network that
is kind of like a mild conservative bent and here's

(21:12):
here's how it sounds.

Speaker 6 (21:14):
Forty thousand dollars reward is being offered to help find
an American woman who went missing in Mexico. This new
reward comes four months after that she was snatched into
a van in broad daylight, and now her family in
California is calling for authorities to finally bring her home.
News Nation correspondent jorgeban Tura joining us live in El
Paso tonight. Orgey, we're learning that this was a targeted attack.

Speaker 7 (21:40):
Yeah, that's right, Natasha. We have new images of an
American woman, Michael de Leon Barber, showing her alleged kidnapping
in Mexico in November or last year. The FBI says
she was walking her dog from the gym and at
this kidnapping is most likely targeted. She was actually walking
in the Kailisco state in Mexico. The FBI is asking
for the public's help and fighting and they're offering up

(22:02):
to forty thousand dollars for information leading up to her recovery. Now,
FBI investigators believe that her attack was targeted and we're
still waiting for more information on that.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
So you listen to that and it's clear this is
again it's like a targeted abduction. But the actual like
media like everything that's like written in text on the clip,
everything in the titling of the clip is just an
American was kidnapped in Mexico. The actual story here is like, yeah,
this person was kidnapped specifically because of who she was.

(22:34):
This was not random. They weren't just like looking for
a lady, like. They were looking for this woman because
of like a family connection, right like, which is the
thing that happens. And that's how most, very very rarely
are people abducted at random anywhere in the world. It's
not a super common kind of crime. But this would
have been, I think, kind of one of the most

(22:54):
recent stories that COPUS might have encountered relating to El Paso.
It was kind of a big deal, and it sets
off up this kind of idea that like Americans are
getting randomly picked up off the street right at the border. Obviously,
the reality is that El Paso in particular is one
of the safest cities in the United States. It's the
fourth safest large city in the US. It has extremely

(23:17):
low rates of violence and property crime. But that's not
what people think when they hear about it because of
the reliability of content that involves kidnapping in the border
going viral. Every aspect of this story is tied in
with the fact that for more than a century, the
United States has been engaged in a kind of perpetual

(23:39):
moral panic over our border with Mexico. And it's one
of those things that like this is, you know, people
have been kind of like broadly positive about some of
the ways that the RITE has performed poorly at the
ballot box in the last couple of elections. But one
area in which they're like conservative propaganda in particular has

(24:03):
been undoubtedly successful is at creating a sense of fear
in behalf of the majority of this country about the border.
An NPR pool from last year showed that more than
half of Americans perceived that there was an invasion going
on at the southern border. Support for immigrants has broadly
declined over the last four to six years. And it's,

(24:25):
you know, again, all of this is kind of playing it.
It's kind of cooking into the stew of whatever was
going on in this woman's head when she decided to
shoot that guy. The fact that Texas recently made permitless
concealed carry legal also certainly played a role. And there's
something else that I suspect might have contributed, which is
that for the last eight years or so, false stories

(24:47):
have been spreading with increasing regularity about random people being
targeted by kidnappers or robbers. These primarily spread today on
TikTok and Facebook, that's where most of the stuff comes from.
But also this kind of brand of content has been
going on and been spreading in this country since well
before the birth of the internet. You might remember, Sarah,

(25:10):
because you and I are both old. Like the stories
about like hook handed killers in the backseat of cars, right,
Like do you hear did you hear that as a kid?
You ever hear that? Like? Yeah, these tales about like
people waiting in the seats of cars.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, I encountered it, I think, yeah, because there's like
I think I'm more encountered at secondhand through other forms
of media. But like, yes, there's definitely a lot of
hook handed men to go around. I know there's a
great hook hand story in Adventures in Babysitting, Yes to
Settle is it handsome John Pruitt?

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah, great film also, and it's one of those things
like I can remember. I'm sure that, like, particularly just
because of aspects of our culture, young women get like
more of these kind of warning stories. You should always
be aware people might be there to abduct you. But
like when I did my driving and I went to
like driving school to like get my my my license. Uh,

(26:05):
one of the things they taught us was that anytime
you're going back to your car, you should check underneath
it to see if someone's there. Like that's that was
just like a thing in driving school, like there might
be people waiting under your car to attack you.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
How many confirmed cases do we have of this that
aren't cape fear.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
I have not come across a single one saying it's
just cape fear. It's just yeah, it's I'm sure it's
just the result of a fucking Oh god, now I've
forgotten his you know the cape fear guy. Oh yeah, Maxicus,
Stephen Stephen Cape. Well, I was going to say Stephen King.
It's just like Stephen King funding all of the driving
schools in this country, Like, no, you have to warn people.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
The Miko Hughes. Uh, the Miko Hughes Driver's exam pavilion. Yeah,
there's also that also, I mean there's so many of these.
But one I remember making the rounds when I was
in high school was like women should not wear overalls
or a long ponytails or braids because if you have
a long pony, Sophie, you're fucked, by the way, And

(27:06):
so yeah, a long ponytail and yeah, long brain.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's why I shaved my head, stop me from I'm
not gonna get kidnapped now.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
Yeah, yeah, because if the kidnappers, it's like when you
go to the pumpkin pack to get a pumpkin, they
want to handle, yeah, and it's like if you don't
give them a braid to grab onto, you'll be safe.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
And it's like, I'm fucked. That's the that's my only hairstyle, Sarah,
I'm so screwed.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
It's amazing you've made it this far.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Honestly, well for more than just that reason.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
But yes, it's very it's very funny because, like again,
I think probably the majority of times when people get
advice like this, it is like women being warned about
the dangers of the world. I have also, especially when
my beard was longer, I would just like, you know,
I'm going to like a I'm like a gun range
or something, and some guys like you know, if you
don't shave that, you know, when a fight, somebody will

(27:59):
like pull that to control you and get control in
a man. How many fights are you getting it? Are
you scrapping with dudes like that? Like I've been in
more fights than most people, just because like I'm a
public person, who gets assaulted on the streets sometimes and
I don't get in enough fights to be concerned about

(28:21):
my beard getting bolled, Like that's not.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
A beard length. Then the fascist way.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, then the then the fucking Nazis of one. It's
so like that this kind of like it's this. It's
this interesting mix of like true crime brain and tactical
brain that have like created something. And again I think
this is relative, you know, relating to the murder that
Cope is carried out, but like these two things cooking
together to this like you have to always be on

(28:48):
like be ready for danger, and also being ready for
danger means being perpetually armed and prepared to do violence. Yeah,
it's cool.

Speaker 5 (28:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:00):
The story that went around at a different middle school
than mine that somebody had been kidnapped and it was
really scary, but they were okay, that was a lie
that didn't happen.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
But everybody exciting.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
But everybody knew about it and then liked and then
like into early adulthood, I brought it up to somebody
and they were like, that was literally just them trying
to scare the shit out of everybody to not talk
to strangers.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
It's like, yeah, cool.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
Wow, Well, what a great information what a great misinformation campaign?

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Love that? Yeah, for us, it is great, Sarah, And
we're going to talk more about kind of the prehistory
of America's paranoia of getting kidnapped, Americans paranoia over getting
kidnapped by strangers. But when it comes to the modern
kind of kidnapping panic that I think played into this murder,
that that is sort of sweep it continuing to sweep

(29:52):
through social media right now. I can trace the origins
of it back to twenty fifteen, which is it when
rumors started spreading on so social media, namely Facebook, that
car thieves had cooked up a new tactic for like
getting people right. Text from one relevant story reads, car
thieves are always trying to find new schemes for getting

(30:13):
into your car to steal your valuables. You may have
heard reports of tech devices used to enter your car,
but some thieves are using a less intricate method. There
have been a rash of robberies using, of all things,
a penny or a nickel. How are they using a
coin to enter your car? Whether your car? Basically, the
idea is that like if you see a penny or
a nickel in like slid into the door handle of
your car. It's like evidence that a car thief is

(30:34):
trying to like break in, right, And they are.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
So bored, aren't they?

Speaker 1 (30:39):
They're bored in their dumb as fuck Sarah, Like it's
so fucking again, I'm a very paranoid person because people
like have attacked me and threatened to murder me. Right, Like, so,
like I have a grenade launcher sitting next that's not
part of the paranoia. That was just that's just a
recreational grenade launcher. But like, right, and I don't like

(31:00):
obsess over this kind of shit. It's because it's stupid,
because like that's the initial version of this is that
like thieves were you know, if if there was a
coin in the door of your car, I meant that
a thief was trying to disable your remote locking systems.
This does not really work, right, Like you can't actually
disable a car's remote locking system like realistically this way. Yeah,

(31:23):
there were a couple of cars a while ago that
had like a specific sort of problem that allowed something
similar to this to work, but it was never like
a widespread thing. And because it like I don't know,
because that was such a silly thing. The the theory,
I don't know. Conspiracy theory isn't what. I don't know
what to call these things. But so it starts off

(31:45):
with like this is evidence that someone has tried to
get into your car, and then it evolves to instead
of they're using sticking pennies or whatever in your car
to disable the locks, it's a way to mark which
vehicles have goodies so that they can steal from them later.
And like, why then just do it now? Why not?
Just breaking news again? I had my car broken into
not all that long ago, back in I mean this

(32:07):
was in San Francisco, but like a bunch of shit
jacked from it. Because that's say, if you park with
anything in a car in San Francisco and walk away,
your car will be broken into and within seconds. But
it's also like nobody's like marking your car for later.
They see shit, they break a window, they grab it right,
Like that's the way that.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Everyone has a master plan. Everyone is moriarty out there.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, there's like fucking rings of people marking. And it's
also like if you actually think logically about it, that
are they marking it and like following it home to
get your fucking purse, Like.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
What, why that's shopping all day?

Speaker 1 (32:43):
None of it makes any sense. And Snopes looked into
all of these kind of because there's a number of variations,
and they found no evidence that like this was like
people sticking pennies into car doors, was a factor in
any sort of crime. They talked to like service departments
at dealerships who were like, yeah, lock don't work that way.
They talk to police departments who are like, we've never
heard you know of any sort of tactics like this

(33:05):
being spread among car burglars. And in an article at
the time, they tied this myth back to certain myths
that had spread back in like the eighties and nineties
through what were then called Chaine letters. Sarah, again, I apologize,
but like you and I are both ancient, you know.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
A certain age we make terrifying sounds when we got
up from squattish.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
Yeah that's right. Yeah, we're a thousand years old. We
have seen the birth of time itself, and so we
remember Chaine letters. Like our gin Z listeners are like,
what the fuck is a chain letter?

Speaker 5 (33:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (33:40):
And it's funny because again I don't remember receiving Shane letters,
but I remember them being something with like that everyone
made jokes about and that there's not a cultural literacy
around in the nineties.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
I was, you know, even from like cause I was
mostly the same way where it was a thing that
like my mom and her sisters and stuff they would
talk about, my older cousins with talk about. I remember
one specific time we got a chain letter and it
was like shown to me because they were starting to
get rarer in the early nineties. It was shown to
me as like a look at this isn't this funny.
Look at this weird thing that we got, and we're

(34:13):
going to talk about what chain letters were, because really
what we're seeing when we look at a chain letter
is the birth of meme culture. It goes back surprisingly far,
but it all relates very directly to the shit spreading
on TikTok and Facebook. But you know what else relates
to misinformation spreading on the internet. Oh, advertising, because advertising

(34:35):
is what makes disinformation profitable. So Sarah Sophie, here's some ads.
Oh great, we're back and we're about to start talking
about chain letters. So chain letters, as I've talked about, like,

(34:57):
there's the I didn't really I never really thought about
this before. I started researching this. But the more I
got into it, the more I realized, like, oh, like
everything that's happened that's happens today, that's happened for the
last twenty years on the internet in terms of like
what we call meme culture was sort of preceded by
chain letters, and in fact an interesting aspect like the
chain letters are like they are letters that would back

(35:22):
in the day would arrive in your mailbox, and there
were a mix of like forward this, you know the
next ten ten people that you know, in order to
not get bad luck. Sometimes they were like here's a
story about like a bad thing that's happened, or like
here's a you know, a thing to be worried about.
You know, forward this so that your friends know about
this danger, about these crimes, you know about this thing

(35:44):
that murderers do or whatever. Like there's a variety of
different kind of like chain letters over the years. One
of the things I didn't realize until I got into
this is that geneticists, like scientists and researchers teaching genetics
use chain letters in there because you can apply some
of the same algorithms that you apply to like calculating

(36:07):
mutations in genetics to the way chain letters alter over time.
There's a surprising amount of stuff about it. Like it's
a really good way to talk about because over time,
both like people would alter chain letters in order to
make them more relevant, but also just mutations would occur
because like a lot of chain letters were initially handwritten

(36:27):
and then they'd get mimeographed, and then after a time
it would get so messy that you'd type up a
fresh version and you'd introduce changes. So like it was actually,
like it is a pretty good way going over Like, oh,
here's eighty years worth of like related chain letters, and
we can sort of track the alterations over time in
the same way that we look at the way that
mutations get introduced into into a genetic sequence. I didn't

(36:49):
realize that it's not really relevant to the story, but
it's kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
But it's so great. Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad to
know that.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah, there's like a surprising amount of like scientific studies
on how durable it actually is to use chain letters
for this purpose. Yeah, cool stuff. So I found a
contemporary casual history of chain letters on Slate, and there's
a couple of other places that have done similar sort
of again casual histories, and they generally tie the birth

(37:17):
of the chain letter back to Europe, generally England and
the United States starting in the seventeen hundreds, right, kind
of when we both have the origins of a relevant
or of a reasonably reliable postal service, you know which
kind of starts to happen in the late seventeen hundreds,
and when we have a printing press so that people
like obviously, right, you can both print letters and copy

(37:38):
them sort of semi reliably, and you can send them places.
That said, again, this is what you get in the
casual histories when you really dig into it and you
find the chain letter like like the chain letter nerds,
I guess you'd call them the obsessives, they kind of
bristle ats starting to get in the seventeen hundreds. Argument

(38:00):
is that it goes back much much further, and this
is where things go off the rails a little bit.
The most detailed analysis of the history of this art
form that I have found comes from an independent researcher
named Daniel W. Van Arsdale. Starting in the nineteen nineties,
he started collecting huge numbers of chain letters and posting
them on his private website, which is a thing people

(38:21):
don't really have anymore. His website is down, but it's
still you can find it on the wayback Machine. And
it's very much like a late nineties, early two thousands, Like,
here's this maniac who is obsessed with chain letters, and
I'd agree that probably no one else in history ever was.
And he wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of words.
He read like God knows how many of these letters

(38:41):
he like categorized them and graphed them and anyway he
splits chain letters into He's probably the number one expert
on the concept of chain letters to ever stand for.
No one knows. I don't, Okay, someone probably knows. I
assume this man is dead.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
I think I think it's Daniel Waybacks.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
There's no way this guy is alive still, but I
love him. But this is what this is what social
media has taken from us, Right. You used to get
crazy people who would build websites dedicated to their obsession,
and you could learn so much from those websites. And
now everybody just argues about race science on Twitter. It's

(39:23):
it's so much worse these today. Ted the Caver, you
know exactly exactly we used to have ted the caver God.
What a glorious time. So our buddy Van Arsdale in
his in his Maniac website splits chain letters into several
broad categories. One category is what he calls letters from Heaven.

(39:44):
These are letters that people claim were written or channeled
via God or an angel or some other divine being.
And like generally either like you know, this letter will
protect you if you send it to X number of people.
These became particularly and in Europe, starting in World War
One and then again in World War Two. You would
send them to like there were primarily things like you'd

(40:06):
have families who were their kids were overseas and they
were worried about them, and they would get a letter
being like this will protect your son if you send
this to X you know number right whatever. Oftentimes there
was a kind of a scam involved, where like you
wouldn't just have to forward the letter, you'd send a
donation to a central area and you'd forward the letter

(40:26):
to ten random people or whatever. And you know, folks
are superstitious. They're kind of when you're waiting for your
to know if your son got killed with the psalm,
you're kind of out of your mind a little bit,
you know, like with worry.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
That's a normal thing all consumer base.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Really Yeah, yeah, it's a great it's great business to
be and is what I'm saying. The other major kind
of chain letter is the the good luck chain letter,
which is kind of a more secular version of the
letter from Heaven right where it's instead of like I'm
an angel and here's how you can protect your loved one,
it's more like this letter is good luck if you

(41:00):
replicate it and you pass it on, and sometimes also
if you send money to somebody. Right, these are kind of,
broadly speaking, what most chain letters, you know, for two
hundred years or so in the West like kind of
fell into. But Van Harsdale argues that the origin of
the chain letters starts a lot older than the printing press,
than the postal service, and even potentially than Christianity. One

(41:25):
example that he picks out that he this is what
he says, is like kind of the earliest example that
you can find of chain letter like content is from
the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Bet you weren't
expecting us to go there?

Speaker 3 (41:38):
I never am. Yeah, it turns out Brendan Fraser had
it in his hands.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
He did. He did, And like in Brendan Fraser's classic
film The Mummy, I am now going to read from
the Book of the Dead.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
So, oh boy, here's what's here to good run.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Here's a passage that Van Harsdale and I actually think
he's probably right about this, that he considers to be
this is kind of an example of a precursor sort
of content to what you got with these Chane letters.
The man who shall make a picture of the things
which are to the north of the hidden House of
the Twat shall find it of great benefit to him,
both in heaven and on earth. And he should who

(42:18):
knows it shall be among the spirits near Raw. And
he who recites the words of Isis and Sarah shall
repulse Epep and Amin Tet, and he shall have a
place on the boat of Raw, both in heaven and
upon the earth. The man who knows not this picture
shall never be able to repulse the serpent nehra Rah.
So it's like both you have to you know that
in order to avoid being, you know, punished by these

(42:39):
evil spirits, you have to recite these specific words, and
you have to share them with other people. Right, and
if you don't. Someone who hasn't seen this is vulnerable
to this, right you could. It's that same idea, right like,
where there's this here's this thing that you've now been
informed of, and you both have to be aware of
it and also spread it to other people otherwise you
will suffer in some way. You know.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
It's so fun how it's like the opposite of a
curse like we got in The Evil Dead, where it's
like don't read the words, and this is like read
the words, or read them tall your friends.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
Please do read them to everyone, otherwise you're fucked. Yeah,
some serpent skun. I'm not an ancient Egyptian expert, but
I think it's pretty obvious, like, oh, yeah, that is
there is an element of what people were getting with
these like chain letters that is present in this ancient
religious text and it.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Comment and subscribe.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah, like comment and subscribe to avoid the serpent nararrah.
So Van Arsdale likewise notes that some early Buddhist sutras
promise good luck or spiritual benefits for reproducing specific pieces
of text. Quote and this is from Van Arsdale's website.

(43:47):
The world's oldest example of printing are Dahrani or magical
incantations printed in Japan between seven sixty four and seven
seventy during the reign of the Empress Shatoku. A total
of over one million copies of or different Dahrani are
from the from the Great Durrani Sutra of the Spotless
and Pure Light were printed to be placed in one
million pagodas built at the command of Shautoku. In this sutra,

(44:09):
it has stated that if a person we were to
build several million small pagodas and place copies of Dorani
in them, that person's life would be lengthened, evil karma
would be expunged, and rebels or enemies would be vanquished.
So again, back in the day, you had to be
emperor to like indulge in in chain letter culture like
you know today you could just send a bunch of

(44:30):
letters to your friends and family, or you know, you
could in the eighties when people sent letters. But back
in seven seventy you had to be the emperor, so
you could build a million pagodas to put the message in.
Otherwise you're gonna get killed by rebels.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
See an influencer do that? Today the million go to Chela.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
Mister beast needs to make a million pagodas or he's
gonna get murdered. Yeah, and back in the so these Dhrani,
this is again a very early printing process. They would
have been mate printed using copper plates. And it's it's
light that prior to the advent of kind of traditional
printing presses, this sutra would have been among, if not
the most widely produced piece of text in history. Many

(45:10):
of these small pagodas that and this didn't just happen
in Japan. There were kind of variants of this all
throughout Asia, where like basically, if you're the king, you
want to make a bunch of pagodas with a specific
message in them in order to avoid bad luck befalling you.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Right, incredible, Again, that's not that different from a chain letter. Really,
no more labor intensive.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's much more labor intensive, although it is
other people's labor. Right. I also find it interesting that, like,
again a lot of like modern chain letters were stuff
like you know, if you spread this, you know you
won't get fired, you won't lose your job, or you'll
get a raise at work or something, Whereas with emperors
it's like if you spread this, it is saying you'll

(45:51):
lose your You won't lose your job, but it's like
rebels won't overthrow you and murder you.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
The stakes have decreased a little bit.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
The stakes decreased slightly. That Yeah. The commonality here though,
is that it's it's kind of relying on the paranoia
and fear of a comfortable person generally that they will
become less comfortable, you know, if like they don't follow
these instructions, and there's a degree of like follow like
this is a everyone's always especially like and this is

(46:21):
a thing that like, you know, we can talk about
what wealth does and doesn't do, but the way in
which the super rich act and the paranoia that is
kind of ever present in their lives is proof that
like when you're one of the people who like gets
God's hits God's Great Roulette Wheel and winds up with
millions and millions of dollars, you're still always worried that

(46:42):
something is going to take it from you. And likewise,
just everyone feels that way, right, Like, if you're precarity
is is a is an inherent aspect of humanity, right,
even if you're not in a precarious situation, just the
fear that like, you know, my kid could die oversee
in the war, or I could get cancer or whatever.
Life is random and that's scary, and all of these things.

(47:05):
The kind of commonality between all of these things and
chain letters is like it offers you sort of a
feeling of protection from the inherent randomness of life. Right yeah,
the first recognizable chain letters started to spread from the
fifteen hundreds on across Europe. It actually does go back
further than the casual slate histories of chain letters seem

(47:27):
to say. And there were basically ponzi schemes, right like
you would be asked to pay money to whoever's name
was on top of the list in order to avoid
bad luck, and then you would like erase the name
on the letter, usually the handwritten letter that you'd received,
and then like add your own name to the list
and send it on to other people, and like, you know, honestly,
that's how cryptocurrency pretty much works, right Like this this

(47:50):
is again these are not like we keep inventing fancier
ways to do the same thing over and over again.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
Oh yeah, to be fair, when you re skin an
old scam, people really get into it.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah, it always works anyway. Uh. You know what else
is a long and successful scam?

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Capitalism?

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Well, yeah, advertising capitalism. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Here you go, man, I hope it's a raging coin ad.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
So do I. Oh, we are back a good times, Sarah.
Do you have any cryptos, you big crypto fan?

Speaker 3 (48:40):
I have zero crypto. My deal with new ideas is
to wait them out for twenty years. Yeah, until the
storm has passed, and that really serves me.

Speaker 7 (48:49):
Well.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah, I took kind of a mixed version of it
where I didn't get any cryptocurrency, but I do have
a full back tattoo of the bitcoin load.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
I have a back tattoo of a board ape. So
you know.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
No, yeah, us, you have famously been been in on
the ground floor of the Board eight yacht club. Yeah, definitely.
They're doing wealthy.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Days, I will tell you though, speaking of new scams,
and I have not really confessed this before. I did
back in the Goop days follow twenty sixteen. We're all
little nuts. I bought a jade egg and I used
it and I liked it, and then I read about
how because they have a hole drilled in them and

(49:36):
are porous, they can give you know, horrible bacterial infections
or whatever, and then I stopped using it.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is why. You know, I have
some friends who are into sounding, which is a thing
if you have a penis where you like put a
long and rigid rod into your penis. But they all
use like titanium rods and stuff, right or gla, you know,
stuff that's that's non.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
For us, which does what is that meant to do?

Speaker 7 (50:03):
Though?

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Look, I'm not into sounding personally. It's a thing you like,
people can look that up at home for themselves. But
it apparently feels afternoon.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Okay, I would not guess that that felt good, But
what do I know? I was really thinking when you
said that word that you like, lay your penis on
a drum that someone is playing. But that's what that's
more what I would do if.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
I I mean that that you were taking the sound
part very literally.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
That's interesting. It's fascinating actually anyway, So just like crypto
evangelists have to had to pretend that they were building
a new global currency system that was like more equitable,
you know, and that they were trying to take power
from war mongering governments or whatever. Early scam chain letter
operators had to dress up schemes that were fundamentally about

(50:50):
taking advantage of greed as selfless acts of charity. And
here's a quote from Van Harsdale's website. An eighteen eighty
eight letter solicits dimes for the education of the poor
whites in the region of the Cumberlands. This letter states
it as an adaptation of a previous solicitation and acts
that four copies be sent to friends for compliance. You
will receive the blessing of him who was ready to

(51:12):
die for us. This is the earliest known chain letter.
An eighteen eighty nine example let an American an American
college student solicited dimes and ten copies. This letter claims
to be self terminating. Recipients were asked to increment a
generation count at the top of the letter until it
reached some preset maximum, at which time the chain was
to stop. This practice continued at least through nineteen sixteen,

(51:33):
but a few years after a chain letter was launched
only those circulated which had the inflated maxim We have
two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps to
build a children's ward in Australia. The first is from
nineteen hundred and is number one hundred and seventy three
of one hundred and eighty maximum. The second highly modified
was still in circulation ten years later and is number
three seventy five a full eighty maximum. Right, so you

(51:55):
see what people are doing where they're saying like this
isn't a scam, you know, will terminate this is certain
point when the money has been raised. And there was
this understanding that if you made it feel like you
were closer to the end of the chain letters circulation,
that that would get more people to respond. So everyone
would just lie and like pretend like you were. You know,
it doesn't matter if you're one seventy three of one

(52:16):
eighty or three seventy five of four eighty. But that's
just the way the decided human beings.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Work, right, I mean NPR does that in the pledge drive,
and it seems sort for them as well.

Speaker 7 (52:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Yeah, again, all of these are examples of like like
long stage, like just this is just how humans be,
you know. Yeah, I bought the grenade launcher in my
room because I was worried they were going to run
out of these grenade launchers. You know, it's an old
police one. You can see them in.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
Riot respect police action.

Speaker 7 (52:47):
I did.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
It's funny, this is unrelated. But because a grenade launcher
is not legally a firearm or any other kind of weapon,
they just FedEx them right to your door. It's like
it's like by a wig or whatever, right, Like it's
completely uncontrolled. I want to get the.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
Grenade launcher account for these ads. I mean, yeah, what
could be more convenient?

Speaker 1 (53:08):
I would very happily sell grenade launchers on this show.
Nobody commits crimes with grenade launchers. You know, they're they're
purely the.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
Stasive weapon to use it would know, right, you can't
take one with you into an uber That's right, That's right.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Yeah. So anyway, this is this is this is my
free ad for grenade launchers. Early chain letters were made
by people who often legitimately wanted to spread a religious message.
Other examples of the art form seem to have been
local kind of citizen journalism, almost right in an era
where newspapers weren't super common. People being like, hey, here's

(53:44):
this problem, you know, like we have poor whites in
the Cumberlands. Let's raise money for them or whatever goodness.
But once the telegram and reliable postal service started to
enable the mass transmission of these letters for the first time.
Things very quickly got out of hand and they came
purely vehicles of like separating folks from their money. And
this happened in the US and Britain before basically anywhere else.

(54:08):
In London, a popular kind of chain letter was called
the peripatetic Contribution Box, and it was a mix of
all these kinds of impulses. The basic idea was that
each person who received the letter would send a dime
to the originator and make three copies of the letter,
asking friends to do the same thing. One of these
letters was sent by the Bishop of Bedford in eighteen
eighty eight to raise money for a destitute women's own

(54:30):
during the Jack the Ripper slayings and so it it's
this kind of thing where like women are being murdered.
There's this. This is the first famous crime spree, right,
this is the first mass media crime spree, right, the
first crime spree that like newspapers in like the early
news media have like adopted and are covering. And so
he's he's like hitching in order to try to raise

(54:51):
money for a women's shelter. He's basically hitching onto the
fame of the jack the ripper slangings, and it helped
make it like you can contribute positively to solving like
stopping these murders if you donate money and it works,
like this is the first example of that I've ever
found of that kind of tactic working. It went so
viral that the bishop was receiving sixteen thousand letters a week,

(55:12):
like he couldn't deal with the mass of Like that's
a lot today, right, Like if you're getting you yeah,
like mister Beast couldn't pull that off, you know, Bishop Beast, Yeah,
Bishop Beast. And it's like, from what I haven't found
any evidence that this guy was a scammer. He was
just like, oh, people are concerned about poor women in

(55:32):
London because of these murders. I will use that concern
to try to like fund a women's shelter. And it
just worked. And because it works so well, scammers see opportunity.
They're like, wait a second, all these people are sending
dimes to this bishop ass motherfucker because it's like raise
money for this What if we send copycat letters claiming
to be the bishop but with a different address. Perhaps

(55:55):
we can get some of those sweet sweet dimes, and
so like an unknown number of people make money off
of this. But also just as an accident, other bishops
in towns that have similar names start receiving coins because
like people are dumb, right, like yeah, wild.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Sit just to go to the artful dodger.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite quite fun. Across the pond.
American conmen and fundraisers alike also paid attention to what
was happening. They like, see this go down in London,
are like, well, shit, this seems like we can make
a lot of money. Here's a quote from an article
that article that Enslate that I was talking about earlier.

(56:36):
During the eighteen nineties, chain letter fundraising proliferated for everything
from a bike path in Michigan to a consumptive railroad telegrapher.
By July eighteen ninety eight, the New York World was
pre printing chain letter forms to fundraise for a memorial
for Spanish American War soldiers. Do not break the chain,
which will result in honoring the memory of the men
who sacrificed their lives, it shided. Upon seeing what the

(56:58):
world's proprietor had rot his rivals at the New York
Sun were blunt in their assessment. Pulitzer is insane. Yeah,
they had good reason to scoff. Earlier that year, a
seventeen year old Red Cross volunteer in Long Island, Natalie Shank,
had contrived a chain to provide ice for troops in Cuba,
causing thirty five hundred letters at a time to pour
into the tiny post office of Babylon, New York. We

(57:20):
did not consider what patriotic Americans are capable of, the
girl's mother fretted to the breast. Yeah, this is like
a common thing with chain letters, like people starting them,
especially in the era where they weren't always common. Some
people would like start them to try to raise money
for causes. It's always this like, well, now suddenly we
have created like a massive logistical problem for our town

(57:41):
in the postal service, and don't know what to do.
No one, this is like nineteen dot right, nobody can
handle thirty five hundred letters like.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
It was like a Buster Keaton movie too, like the
mail clerk trying to keep up.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
Yeah, we have destroyed our town's ability to be connected
to the because, as I mentioned earlier, chain letters made
a huge comeback in World War One, both because of
superstitious families who would do kind of anything in order
to feel like they were protecting their kid, and for
stranger reasons. Pro German Americans used chain letters to raise

(58:18):
money for the war effort, and this was eventually the
New York Times attacked this as a plot to clog
the US mail. Sometimes you'll see people report that, like
there was a German scheme to clog the mail. For
what I've come across, I'm not sure if there was
actually a plot or it's just that, like anytime one
of these went viral, it caused a logistical problem. It
was like a bomb going off in the post office.

(58:41):
By eighteen ninety nine, this had all become enough of
a problem that the US Postal Service had declared dime
chain letters a violation of lottery laws, and they started
regulating shit right where. They're like, this is this is
a lottery, Like you're running an a legal lottery and
you have to stop. We can't handle this.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
But what are the soldiers on their ice?

Speaker 1 (58:59):
But what of the soldiers in their ice? The boys
in Cuba. Look, if you want to support our brave
troops in Cuba, running that torture prison. Send fifty dollars
to me and Sophie. Sophie's what's what's our home address?
Do we have a PO box yet for people to
send us money for the boys in Cuba?

Speaker 4 (59:21):
It's one eight five two h or never telling you.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Oh wow, I guess Ron DeSantis won't get his ice
as he as he as he does a war crime.
If he doesn't work, it's tragic. So eighteen ninety nine,
the postal services like this shit has to stop, like
we cannot handle all of the fucking dime cons you
people are running. And so con artists got around this

(59:49):
by sending letters by hand, like dropping letters in mailboxes
and saying, don't send those through the postal service. It
won't work the magic, you won't get the good luck.
You need to send the dime and like drop it
off at this location. And this actually worked better than
you'd think. One chain letter factory because this obviously, like
as with breaking into cars and shit, became the purview

(01:00:11):
of organized crime, right because it's much more efficient in
the capitalist sense if you like have an organization that's
putting out chain letters and reaping money. One chain letter
factory in Toledo, Ohio had one hundred and twenty five
full time employees making these things when it was shut
down by the Feds by the mail cops.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Double job being a mail cop or being also being
a chain letter writer. I mean, were they writing them
by hand? They have little typewriters.

Speaker 1 (01:00:39):
Yeah, I think it was type would I mean, yeah, well,
I think it would have been time, although I think
some of them they did do by hand just because
like that was the thing that worked best, you know,
might have been. Now, as I've gone over this history,
you've probably noticed that the history of chain letters this
isn't totally This seems pretty familiar as people who have
like grown up on the internet, right, Like there's there's

(01:01:01):
all of this. These these things are spreading in a
kind of a similar way to how disinformation and shit
and cons spread on the internet. Right. You start with
questionably accurate stories of disasters and tragedies around the world.
Then you move to a call to action, either to
like try to get money for something or to spread

(01:01:22):
various beliefs about the world, and then you kind of
the way in which you tend to get people to
spread stuff and get people interested is to share often
false stories of horrific violence or stuff like kidnapping, right,
shit that people are are inherently drawn to. And as
a result of this, kind of the earliest sort of

(01:01:44):
chain letter meme that is kind of directly in the
in the chain of evolution to the stuff that we've
been started this episode talking about, are chain letters that
would warn recipients about knife wielding murderers hiding in the
backseats of cars to murder in of dying women. These
started to spread in the eighties and nineties, and once
once email became a thing, one of the first things

(01:02:07):
that would spread through email were copies of this specific
chain letter. And I'm going to read one early modern
example of this letter. A friend stopped at the Pay
at the Pump gas station to get gas. Once she
filled her gas tank, and after paying at the pump
and starting to leave, the voice of the attendant inside
came over the speaker. He told her that something had
happened with her card and that she needed to come

(01:02:27):
inside to pay. The lady was confused because the transaction
showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and
was getting ready to leave, but the attendant once again
as urged her to come into pay or there'd be trouble.
She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with the
attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down
and listen carefully. He said that while she was pumping gas,
a guy slipped into the backseat of her car on

(01:02:48):
the other side, and the attendant had already called the police.
She became frightened and looked out in time to see
her car door open and the guys slip out. The
report is that the new gang initiation thing is to
bring a woman, bring back a woman and or her car.
One way they're doing this is crawling under women's cars
where they'll pump it while they're pumping gas, or at
grocery stores in the nighttime. The other way is slipping

(01:03:09):
into unattended cars and kidnapping the woman. Please pass this
on to other women, young and old alike. Be extra
careful going into and from your car at night. If
at all possible, don't go alone. This is real exclamation point.
Exclamation point. The messages number this is real exclamation That's
how you know it's real exclamation point. It then ends

(01:03:29):
with the message number one always in caps. Lock your
car doors even if you're gone for just a second.
Number two, check underneath your car when approaching it for
re entry, and checking the back before getting in. Number three,
always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals
and your general vicinity, particularly at night. Send this to
everyone so your friends can take precaution. And guys, all caps.

(01:03:50):
You tell any woman you know about this. Thanks.

Speaker 4 (01:03:53):
Oh my god, I just want to point out that
the thiks is not in caplocks and I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
No, it's like you need it. Thanks hm. I do
also again, Nowadays, because tactical influencers are such a thing,
men and women are being urged to be worried about
kidnapping gangs. But back in the day this was a
more genteel time. So men, nobody's gonna steal you in
your car to get initiated into a gang. But you
gotta warn the brons in your life.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Oh my god, I love how you know, because obviously
the unspoken thing here is sexual menace in a you know,
in a racist way, because we're talking about gang members
quote unquote.

Speaker 5 (01:04:36):
But like, you gotta steal a woman in the gang,
any woman, Yeah, any woman, any woman and her car
or maybe just her car. I don't know, like you know,
just puts something and then it's like just thinking about
being the woman at the gang initiation and he's like
five strangers, Like there's flow from the AMPM and here's

(01:04:58):
Jessica from the craft store.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Yeah, it's so funn com and ground.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
See, we and Oregon were up until recently immune to
this kind of thing because nobody gets to pay at
the pump. You know. Gas station attendancy saved us from
these kidnapping gangs.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Were the safest people in America. Really, that's the right
danger zone in these stories.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Yeah, nobody gets kidnapped in Oregon because of the noble
gas station attendant. So the Internet had two initial impacts
on how chain letter content spread. The first was that
it allows a geometric expansion, obviously, and the number of
people you can reach with a letter, right, there's just
no comparison. The second is that it allowed exact copies

(01:05:39):
to spread indefinitely, which put an end to researchers being
able to like study heredity with these things to an
extent or at least altered it, right, because it just
changes the way in which shit mutates. For a while,
in the nineteen nineties, it seemed as if the Internet
might lead to a stagnation for this kind of message,
but social media provided impetus for a new generation of

(01:06:00):
to make slight adjustments on existing messages in order to
build online followings or take advantage of roobs. We see
this in pieces of pieces of this in QAnon and pizzagate.
The way conspiracy theories snowball over time due to the
participation of huge numbers of people, and this brings me
back to today's bullshit conspiracy theories about kidnapping. God knows

(01:06:20):
how many iterations we've seen at this point, but the
most pernicious family of myths all focus around the idea
that kidnappers stage some sort of item in a victim's car.
Sometimes the idea is that this is being done to
mark them. Other times it's that when the person stops
to remove the item, you know, a shirt that's been
left on the hood of their car or a piece
of cheese. In one version of it, criminals will leap

(01:06:41):
out of a nearby video to vehicle to grab them
right they're trying to distract it. You got to be
always be ready, keep a hand on your gun at
all times, you know, if you see a shirt on
your car, just start shooting.

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
Yeah, cute for a later the America.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Yeah, that's how I That's what I always say. It's
worth noting that the specific kind of kidnappings that Phoebe
Copis and so many other people today are obsessed with
do not happen essentially, right. Obviously, you can find freak
examples of strangers being kidnapped by strangers, but nearly all
trafficking victims and these are all wind up being trafficking

(01:07:18):
conspiracy theories. Right, that's why they're trying to kidnap women, right,
you know, like that's that's how it always happens. The
vast majority of trafficking victims know their attacker. They are
usually related to their attacker, right, or to their trafficker,
I should say, trafficking people being forced into slavery or
what like slavery, particularly like sex slavery. This is not

(01:07:40):
a thing that happens that strangers due to strangers in
the United States. This is a thing that like parents
due to their kids, or like a guardian. Well, it
is usually either a parent who's trafficking the kid for money,
generally as a result of like a drug addiction, or
like a single parent who someone comes into their life

(01:08:00):
and then traffics their kid. It's nearly always someone that
the child knows. Right, That's just like the way that
trafficking works, and it's the same thing with like when
adults are trafficked, it is nearly always it's either people
who are migrants coming to this country being trafficked in
order to like work on farms and shit or otherwise
do labor for very little to know money, or it

(01:08:24):
is when it's sex trafficking, it's like people being trafficked
by you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, by family members. The vast
majority of trafficking victims are adolescents or teenagers. Sixty to
sixty seven percent of trafficking victims in the US are
fifteen to seventeen years old. A huge number of them
are LGBT or gender non conforming because, like one thing

(01:08:48):
that often brings people into trafficking, they are young, they
do not have resources, like financial resources. They are kicked
out of their homes because they are queer, and they
are then forced at some point into the set trade
by somebody that they trust, right, Like, that is when
it happens. This is how it actually occurs statistically.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
No, Robert, the market value of middle aged women is
four thousand dollars a pound.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
No, No, it's all like forty five year old women
getting kidnapped at Target. That's how it happens. Well, but
you could also see, like, right, it's the kind of
people who fall for this shit are the kind of
people who believe in like grooming conspiracy theories overwhelmingly, and
they don't want to hear No, it's the queer kids
that you're spreading conspiracies about are the ones in danger

(01:09:33):
of being trafficked. They want to hear like, no, I'm
I'm in danger. I have a reasoned, like all of
this fear that is ever present in me me, yeah, yeah,
it's these dangerous Yeah, these dangerous looking kids who are
going to threaten me. The fear that is ever present
in my life, because human beings more or less can't
exist without anxiety has a cause. And it's the dangerous,

(01:09:55):
you know, weird looking kids around me who are going
to kidnap me by putting cheese on my car. And
it's one of those things we started this episode talking
about Phoebe Copas. But if you do what I have
been doing, and you spend hours and hours coming through
viral Facebook and TikTok posts about like kidnapping conspiracy theories.

(01:10:16):
In every one of them, you will find people talking
about their guns. A representative example comes from an article
I found twenty seventeen article published by Channel fourteen News,
an Amarillo, Texas station, and the title of the article
was woman find shirt on car, warning goes viral and
obviously one of these And right in the I found
a Facebook post that was like twelve thousand shares and

(01:10:37):
one of the first responses was a user going, I
keep my pistol in grabbing distance everywhere I go, Like, no,
people are not getting traffic this way.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
What is the shirt going to do to you? Aside
from remind you of your dead lever? Jake Schillen Hall.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Yeah. The idea again is that like you put these
kidnapping gangs are putting shirts, and then you'll take your
hand off your gun to go put the take a
shirt off your car, and that's when they jump out
and get you.

Speaker 7 (01:11:03):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
That is the thing about these so stupid, right, is
that it's like you'll you'll in the split second year distracted,
which you can't afford to lose, they'll snatch you. And
the idea of having to be that hyper vigilant. Yeah,
it's fascinating how we're just like selling PTSD basically, Yeah,
it's we know it all too.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Well and you like it's. One of the things that
makes this pernicious is that, like, no one will tell
you need to be less aware out in public. Right,
No one's going to say, like, when you get traveled
to a new city and hop in the uber, maybe
just zone out on your phone. Right, everyone will say, well, yeah,
it's good to be, you know, aware, But the version
that gets transmitted primarily is like, you need to always

(01:11:44):
be hyper vigilant because you are permanently in danger of
being kidnapped and sold into fucking taken ass movie slavery.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
Right, I always be ready to stop someone with Dudley force. Yeah,
a fun way to live.

Speaker 1 (01:11:57):
Yeah, you need to be the Liam Neeson you know,
to protect yourself from weirdly Algerian kidnapping gangs. If I'm
remembering that movie.

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
Properly knows yea Mason who we now know once well
you know, if you know, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
If you know you know? Anyway, although we can talk
about his appearance in Atlanta. But this is all outside
of the point. We're gonna keep talking about, specifically how
these kidnapping conspiracy theories have started and mutated, and how
this all ties into some other particularly toxic aspects of

(01:12:35):
American culture. By the time these episodes come out, I
will have an article up on my substack, Shatterszone. You
can just find it by typing that in about specifically
the way in which kidnapping and trafficking as key phrases
have become like super reliable ways to go viral. On
TikTok there's a lot of like weird fuck, So there's

(01:12:59):
this fucking weird. I don't know how to describe this,
but I find it deeply unsettling. One of the first
things I found and I was looking to Phoebe Copis.
I decided, after I was reading about her, I want
to see what people are like saying about this on TikTok.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Oh, does that really scary video you sent me?

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
Yeah? I find this This is like a type of
content where they they've got to take a picture of
her and they use it to make an AI video
of her. Of like Phoebe the woman who murdered that
guy and have her relating the story of her killing
a guy in like an AI version of her voice
and an AI version of her face speaking. It is horrible.

(01:13:37):
It's like, Sarah, I'm not a moral panic person. I
don't think TikTok is in. I don't think TikTok's any
more toxic than any other form of social media. But
I also think all social media should be made illegal
and the people who run these companies pushed into the sea,
like I hate it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
I hate it all too much technology. I think that
was the last thing I needed to hear before moving
in next door to JD. Sally.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
Sure, yeah, yes, yes, yeah, let's all build. Look, if
you're listening to the show, buy a cabin in rural Montana,
learn how to Okay, Actually this is I'm doing a
unibomber thing again. See, this is why, this is why
we gotta we gotta stop, Sarah. You gotta you got
anything to plug besides being the unibomber.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
I mean that's really the main project I'm working on.
I do a show called You're Wrong About We've talked
about human trafficking on it, and I it is like,
I don't know, it's incredible to me the magic that
that word has, the spell that it casts over people.
It's like and it feels like it's taken the place
that the phrase white slavery had and like I don't

(01:14:43):
know this this time one hundred years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
Yeah, and white slavery is I didn't get into this
for it for this, but like, yeah, if we were
to like really dig into that history, because like that
was in the eighteen hundreds and stuff like, it was
like a very easy way to to get people riled up.
Like it's all like shady fucking yellow journalism types have

(01:15:08):
always known that, like, yeah, if you make white people
feel like they're about to get abducted off the street,
because they're always I think a lot of it goes
does go back to you know, you think about like
the emperor in Japan, like he's like, wow, I was
born to rule this land, but I also still, despite
all my power in my armies, feel scared all the time.

(01:15:29):
And that's just like a thing that people feel. I'm
going to go make all of these pagodas to like
spread this because I feel like if I spread this,
like this book says, if I spread this specific chunk
of text, then nothing bad will happen to me. The
rebels will never come into my palace or whatever. And
you know, then it gets translated to like, wow, I'm
a white person in the eighteen nineties. Things are great,
we roll the entire world. But yet I'm scared all

(01:15:52):
the time. There must be gangs of brown people waiting
to kidnap me. And then you know, today it's too Yeah. Yeah,
I'm a sub urban American, you know, the most fortunate
kind of person who has ever existed in the history
of the planet. Right, I am unfathomably safe and secure.
Yet I'm scared all the time. There must be a

(01:16:14):
reason for it, and it turns out that's the most
profitable thing to to cash it on.

Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
It's I really, it's I have not thought of it
this way before. But I love your summary that like
people just feel scared because that's what we are and
what victual we are. We feel right, and of course
we are, like we were born to be scared. It's
how we've survived this line to the extent that we
have to just be like overly prone to freaking out

(01:16:41):
and then and then the but then it's like, once
you're in a place of relative prosperity and safety. Right,
it becomes like a vestigial or like there's things to
feel scared about, you know, and he personally whatever you're
doing with your life. But like that, this is also
why we have like our great summer movies where it's

(01:17:01):
like living a normal life and then you have to
fight a dinosaur or a magic truck or whatever else
Steven Spielberg has thought up for us.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
I do love that you gave Steven Spielberg credit for
the Stephen King book about the possessed evil truck.

Speaker 3 (01:17:17):
Oh wait, think a different truck. Yeah, they both they
each got a truck.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Ah. The Stevens, they've got they've got a direct line
to our Amigdala's The Stevens.

Speaker 7 (01:17:26):
We do.

Speaker 1 (01:17:27):
Yeah, a good stuff. I mean, I feel like again,
for every like powerful impulse in human beings, there's like
the good version of tweaking it and the evil version.
The evil version is obviously spreading conspiracy theories about kidnapping.
The good version is being Stephen King and just doing
mountains of cocaine and writing novels that people love.

Speaker 3 (01:17:49):
And some of which you don't remember evidently.

Speaker 4 (01:17:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
And I was thinking about this recently with regards to
the Satanic Panic, because you know, I think about a
lot and how it feels like one of the aspects
of the Satanic Panic is that if you have a
religion that forbids you horror media, you can't watch horror movies,
you can't consume scary stuff except you know, yeah, if

(01:18:15):
you just can't have horror fiction, then like it's going
to show up in your religion. It's going to show
up in chick tracts and sermons and your beliefs about
what's actually happening, because it has to come up somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:18:26):
Yeah, this is why, like the horror movie, like, people
who are actually into horror, right, tend to be like
the healthiest folks because they find it out healthy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:36):
Yeah, I love horror and it certainly makes me much
healthier than I would be otherwise.

Speaker 1 (01:18:41):
This is why John Carpenter is the ideal person, right, Like,
that's there, you go, perfect man.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
That's why Sophie and I are seeing The wicker Man
later today. Yes, the paragons of health.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
Yeah, paragons of health. And you can be a paragon
of health if you listen to Sarah Marshall's podcast. You're
wrong about.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
It's sure you will be.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
You will be. That will solve your problem.

Speaker 3 (01:19:03):
People listen to it.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
All of the fear that you is ever present in
your life. It'll go away the instant you start listening
to Sarah's podcast, so True. Check that out. Another way
you can make the ever present feeling of anxiety that
is really just the death motive in your life never
leaving you is by subscribing to Sophie what is our
thing called? Where people don't get ads?

Speaker 4 (01:19:26):
You can subscribe to Cooler z of Media are a
every subscription channel exclusively an Apple podcast Android version coming
very soon.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
Yeah, everyone who gives us, however many dollars a month
that costs your son won't die at the soalm. You
know that that's the only way to protect him. If
you've got a son, those German machine guns are aiming
at him right, this is the only way to save him.
And give us three dollars.

Speaker 3 (01:19:52):
Yeah, do not let her eat that cheese and warn
her and.

Speaker 4 (01:19:56):
Warn her about that car cheese.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
The episode that's part one.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.