 Good morning, John! Speaking of abject nihilistic despair, as you did in your last video, I want to talk about a milestone that we are 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 than 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 to other cables all over the literal world. The engineering necessary to make this happen, and also the fact that, like, five or ten years ago, it would seem completely normal to me, and now it seems both, like, extraordinarily inefficient and also kind of adorable is really interesting, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. Their phone, it rings a lot. 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, the IRS is going to arrest you tomorrow. I mean, we'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 three CDs for you. Four, 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 live in 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 in retirement accounts, and two, because on average they are a little less likely to have kept up on how things work. That's all I'm going to say. Are you literally a robocall? You're literally a robocall. I'm making a video right now. In 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, and that in total, over a billion dollars has been stolen. I tweeted about a year ago that 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. Something 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. But basically, technologies are 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. But it is of course disgusting in like 20 different ways. A 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 around them. Likely, all because of just a few hundred or maybe a thousand operating scammers in the U.S. 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. And while I'm a pretty optimistic and pro-human person if you like allow 1,000 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 talk to people and so when I get a chance to talk to people I'm gonna do my best to be nice to them. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.