Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? You know? Since we're wrapping up my run as host of tech Stuff, I thought it might be a good time to revisit one of the guiding principles of this show, that being critical thinking. I've always said Tech Stuff really has two guiding principles, critical thinking and compassion. That only with both of these can you, in my opinion, live an accountable and decent life. You need to have compassion so that you're not a total jerk, and you need to have critical thinking so you're not a total dip. And critical thinking is absolutely important in all aspects of life. I like to bring it up within the context of technology because tech is both incredibly complicated and it also touches our lives every single day in hundreds or thousands of ways. And if we don't think critically, we can make some pretty darn huge mistakes, either through incorrect assumptions or because someone has led us astray. Tech is one of those disciplines that is well suited for misunderstanding and for misdirection. Because of that complexity, there's stuff we can do in tech that seems almost magical, and the jargon around tech can be really difficult to parts like. That's not to say that all the jargon or the terminology is inherently bad. That's not really the case either. There are lots of terms that are very specific, and the reason why we use them is so that we communicate clearly what we mean and we avoid ambiguity. But then there's the flip side of it, where if you laiden something down with enough jargon, it becomes indecipherable. You can't even understand what's being said. I think the ultimate expression of how jargon can become gibberish is the humorous script for the fictional turbo incabulator. This was a gag. This was just a fake thing, a fake piece of technology, with a script that was intentionally made to be comedically dense with jargon meaningless jargon. So I did an episode about this ages ago. But let me do a quick excerpt from that script. So here's how it typically starts. And there are multiple versions of this online. By the way, if you search turbo incabulator on YouTube. You should come up with quite a few different versions of it, and they are all variations on this same theme. So here we go. For a number of years now, Yorick has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply in verse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grameters. Such an instrument is the turboincabulator. Now, basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive directants. The original machine had a base plate of prefamulated emultes surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two sperving bearings were in a direct line with a panametric fan. Now the piece goes on from there a little bit longer, and you get the point. Though. This is a send up of those technical manuals that would have so much jargon in them as to become almost meaningless that you can't really parse what is being said, and you feel like you have to look up every other word just to try and figure out what the meaning is, and you might ultimately come to the conclusion that even the person who wrote it doesn't really know what the meaning is. That's the joke, but it's based in reality. You know, there are those technical manuals out there that are so jargon heavy as to be almost a self parody, and this opens up opportunities for people who have underhanded motivations to try and mislead folks in an attempt to get something out of them, usually money. That's typically what it is, is that you have someone who is leaning on ignorance to pull one over on a victim. So I've really been thinking again about scam artists and investment schemes. Now that's something that spans well beyond the tech sector. It's not just tech that sees these sorts of things, but I think it's safe to say the tech world is particularly prone to such shenanigans, largely because a clever huckster can convince people that something that is implausible or perhaps even impossible, is actually achievable just through the wonders of technology. And again it's easy to understand how this could happen, how people could fall for these kinds of things, because consider the technology that you interact with on a daily basis. Our computers are phenomenally powerful these days. You can have a computer that has processors in it that allow it to do AI processing on your machine. That is something that was unthinkable only a few years ago. And most of us carry a small computer around in our pockets, and you can use that computer to do everything from make a phone call if you're an old fuddy duddy like me, or use it to look stuff up online. Or you can use it to take photos or video. You could even edit those images and those videos and then upload them to social platforms. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with that one device. Or you can jump in a car. Now, your typical modern car has remarkable technology in it, and depending on the car, it might even be able to drive itself under specific conditions. We've also got things like home automation, and then they're scary stuff like targeted advertising. We've got things that can be either cool or scary, depending upon how they are made and what they're supposed to do, like drones and all sorts of other things that you know. Back when I was a kid, I would have thought belong in science fiction, But today they're commonplace. So we've become used to technology being able to do incredible things. So it's understandable that if someone were to come to us with an extraordinary claim about tech, we might be tempted to believe in the dream right from the start. I mean, when I was a kid, I certainly didn't think I would see a day where I would be carrying a computer around with me everywhere I went. So why can't we have a device that's the size of a desktop printer that could run more than one hundred medical tests on the tiniest drop of blood. That, of course, was the point of Thernose, the biotech company that was purporting to create a desktop medical analysis machine, one that ultimately could end up being sold to consumers. Not just something that would be found in clinics or whatever, but you could own one of these things and you would take a very tiny pinprick of blood, and then you could run tests that not only would tell you if there was anything currently wrong with you, but also analyze your blood to look for potential things to look out for down the road, right conditions or diseases that you might be prone to developing in the future, so you could be on the lookout for that kind of stuff, like you could say, hey, you know, you could be pre diabetic or something along those lines. The problem was, of course, it just didn't work. It certainly didn't work the way it was being advertised. Even while it was under development, the company Theranose was found out to be using other companies technologies to analyze blood samples. They were taking larger samples of blood than what they were supposed to do, because again, it was supposed to be a microdrop of blood, but they couldn't get that to work. So they would take larger samples of blood or sometimes small samples, and then they would dilute it with water, hoping that that wouldn't mess things up too much spoiler alerted mess things up too much. Then they would run those samples through other companies analytic technology, not their own one. They would make it seem like it was in their own technology, but it really wasn't. They never really cracked the code on this, and in fact, there were plenty of people who were concerned that it was inherently impossible. That people thought, well, of course technology should be able to do this, without really taking the time to understand the limitations of the technology they were talking about. And there still stands a question to this day as to whether the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, whether she truly believed in the technology or if she was aware early on that she was running up against a brick wall, but of going because at that point she already had huge amounts of investment behind her. This was one of those examples of the fake it till you make it strategy, where you come up with an idea, you think the idea is really cool, you don't have the foggiest notion of how you're going to make that idea reality, but you go ahead and you create a business around it, and you get investment behind it, and then you figure somewhere along the way, we'll figure it out. We'll get the smartest people, We'll put them to work on this problem. They'll engineer a way out of it and will be good. In the case of THERAPNHOS, that just didn't happen. Instead, it was a business built around an ideal, but it was also built around lies and smoke and mirrors, and ultimately it all came crashing down. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. That's why I want to talk about critical thinking, because critical thinking would have saved a lot of people a lot of money if they had been willing to ask the right questions to the right people and to really heed those answers, could have, you know, saved themselves millions of dollars of losses. And I don't particularly feel the need to cry over rich people losing some percentage of their mass amount of wealth. It doesn't really bother me that much. But when it falls to people who can't afford to lose money, that's where I get really concerned. And I also just worry that the complacency, the tendency to accept things at a surface level, trickles down economics. I don't think trickle down properly, but ignorance certainly can. And that's where the opportunity comes in for scam artists, whether they are purposefully attempting to fool victims into handing over large amounts of cash, or they've actually deluded themselves into believing in an unproven technology. The tech world is complex and amazing enough to provide the perfect environment for a con. So in this episode, when we come back from this break, we're going to talk about a couple of notable examples of cons and scams that have happened in and around the tech industry and why critical thinking is so very important. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So a lot of scams, not just in the tech world but elsewhere, follow a pattern like the pyramid scheme, or more specifically, the Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is named after a guy who was named Charles Ponzi scheme. Oh no, I'm sorry, it's just Charles Ponzi. He was not the first to come up with this particular scheme. By the way, there was a woman who pulled essentially the exact same thing, but you know what, she had the gall to be a woman, So obviously we need to name the scheme after a dude who did it years later. That's just me being a little snarky, But anyway, the basic concept is you convinced people to invest in your business idea and then they're going to get some sort of insane return on their investment, typically on a very aggressive timeline. So Ponzi, for example, claimed that people who bought into his business proposition would start getting a fifty percent return on their investment within a month and a half, like forty five days. That's a crazy amount of return. And the way he would guarantee this, the way he would cover those returns because like his business wasn't a business, it was just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Essentially, he would use money from subsequent rounds of investors to show his earlier rounds of investors how well the plan was going. So let's break this down with a really simplified explanation of what was going on. So let's say that you are a low down, no good crook and you have convinced me to put one hundred of my American dollars in our business proposition. And in the meantime, after I have already put one hundred dollars in, you then turn to convince other people to give you money in a subsequent round of investments. And forty five days after you hooked me, you say, hey, good news, Johnny boy. Your investment has a fifty dollars return on it. Already do you want your payout. Do you want to get your fifty bucks and keep your one hundred dollars in as your initial investment. And what you're counting on is what a lot of people actually would do. I see an opportunity to get filthy rich, Right, I just got fifty dollars back on a one hundred dollars investment. That's still good. The investment is still in the business. The fifty dollars is like a dividend being paid out to me. So what I say is, oh, you know what, No, no, no, just hold on to that fifty dollars, reinvest it back into the business because I'm thinking, well, now I'm going to have one hundred and fifty dollars invested. I'm going to get even more money because the returns are going to keep coming in. Meanwhile, you're looking for your next round of investors to help cover the returns of not just me, but the people you fooled in investment round number two. And this goes on and on until it doesn't because these schemes ultimately reach a point where there's just no way to get enough people to join in order to cover everybody who is already bought into the scheme, and folks then might start to worry that something might be up and they might start to try to pull their money out of this business. And then you have to figure out, well do I pay out? And if I do pay out, how much do I pay out? Before I need to just pull up stakes, move out of town, change my name, and hide all my wealth away or you get nicked by the coppers, you know, and then you're put before a judge and then you're fine to timbuck to and back and then thrown in the whoscal for good measure. So in the tech space, these pyramid schemes happen fairly regularly, particularly in realms like cryptocurrency. You got blockchain and crypto evangelists out there who will try to convince greedy people to pour money into a system only to lock down that money and then run off with it. And that's just rampant. It's not I'm not making a wild accusation here. You can actually go to the website DFPI, dot CAA, dot gov and just look at their cryptoscam tracker, or you know, just search cryptoscam tracker. It'll pull it right up. That tracker lists dozens of cases in which victims have been parted from their hard earned assets. The stories are pretty similar. Usually it involves someone being convinced to put a significant amount of money into some sort of crypto scheme, only to have that account locked off. Like usually there are steps to it where first they're told, hey, in order to do anything with this money, you actually need to increase the investment by x amount, So like you might put five thousand dollars worth of assets into an account and it says, well, we need three thousand dollars more in order to really do anything with it. Then you might start getting notifications that hey, you're your account's doing really well, like its increased your wealth by x amount. But you find out when you try to withdraw that you're locked out. And then next thing you know, the website doesn't even exist anymore and someone has made off with your money. This happens a lot in the crypto world, and again it's understandable why con artists are drawn to crypto. You have bitcoin that's trading at near one hundred thousand dollars per coin these days. I think today it's down to ninety five thousand. It had been flirting with one hundred thousand last week. And it's absolutely true that if you had bought into bitcoin in the very early days and you were able to keep track of your digital wallet and stuff, then you would be wicked wealthy today. Let's say that you have bought like a dollar's worth of bitcoin back in twenty ten, Holy canoli. You know, bitcoin was a fraction of a dollar back in those days, so you would have a huge amount of wealth represented in bitcoin today. Now, set aside all the other stuff about bitcoin that I personally find very concerning, like the environmental impact and the prevalent use of bitcoin to do stuff like launder money and fund a legal activities and that kind of thing. The fact is bitcoin made a few people very, very wealthy, so it's understandable that people want to jump on some other perceived opportunity. And cryptocurrency is complicated enough that a con artist can count on a victim's ignorance to do a lot of the work for them. The average person doesn't really understand how cryptocurrency works, whether it's a proof of work or proof of stake system. The average person just sees number go up, you know, or sometimes number go down. But to the average person, cryptocurrency might as well just be a black box. You put money into it and then a whole lot more money comes out of it. That's an ideal situation to run a scam. People see this as an easy way to increase wealth. They understand that there's risk, but most people don't think that the bad stuff's going to happen to them. You know, most people don't live their lives that way, and a lot of people can't even imagine that a bad outcome will happen. They've seen the evidence of Hey, bitcoin made people into billionaires, why not me? NFTs fall into this category two. Now, that's not to say that NFTs have absolutely no legitimate use cases. I think that NFTs have potential use cases. The problem is the incredible saturation of the market back in like twenty twenty to twenty twenty two, combined with rampant speculation, created a ridiculous bubble that inflated so fast and bursts so spectacularly that to this day, NFTs are digging out of the hole that was left behind. You know, a ton of NFTs that at one point or another were being touted as the next big asset are now worthless, not virtually worthless. They're literally worthless. So let's just talk about NFTs for us a moment to refresh ourselves. So NFT stands for non fungible token. It is a digital token. It's built on top of the blockchain, and purchasing an NFT creates a digital record, and that record proves that you are the owner of this digital asset. But that asset is effectively a receipt like it's not a specific thing. Like if I bought an NFT that represents a digital photograph, the NFT isn't the photograph. The NFT is a token that represents the photograph. So you could think of it as I've got a certificate that proves on the owner. That's kind of what it is. However, an NFT doesn't mean that you actually control the asset itself, nor does it mean you can prevent someone else from making endless copies of that asset. So if I did buy an NFT that represents a digital photograph, and that photograph is up on the web somewhere, nothing stops people from making copies of that image. They can make them all day long. Plus I don't own the copyright to that image. Necessarily unless that was part of the NFT agreement. Otherwise, I just own a copy of this photo. I don't own the copyright to the photo itself. The original photographer or the company representing that photographer owns that. So let's say someone minted an NFT representing a digital copy of a novel. If I bought the NFT, would that mean I actually bought the novel itself? Would the novel belong to me? Would I have ownership of its IP? No, of course not. It would be similar to me going out to a bookstore and buying a hard print copy of the book. If I go out and buy the latest Stephen King novel at a bookstore, I don't suddenly own the intellectual property. I just own a copy of a book. That's it. Which is why I, like a lot of other people, got really confused when a crypto group called Spice dao. DAO actually is an initialism. It stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. That's something else we could talk about as far as the potential for scam dao. Not that all DAOs are scams, they're not, but that because they are a little tricky to understand, they are a good breeding ground for scams. There's the ignorance you can feed off of. Well. Spice DAO got famous because this group pulled together a couple of million dollars from its various members, and their purpose was to buy a copy of a book. It was a book that detailed the failed attempt of Alejandro Jodorowski's film adaptation of the science fiction novel Doune, and that production failed spectacularly, and this book detailed that failure and the vision of that original adaptation. Well, the DOAO intended to purchase this book and then sell NFTs representing parts of the book, essentially slicing the book up into digital segments and selling NFTs representing those segments, and then they were going to to actually burn the physical copy that they had purchased. So their thought was the digital NFTs would be the only remnant of this rare book. But here's the wild and wacky thing. They didn't realize that buying the book only meant that they were buying a physical copy of this book. They wouldn't have the right to do what they were planning to do. In fact, they expressly did not have the right to reproduce the book in such a way, because that violates copyright and they wouldn't own the copyright, So they ended up spending more than one hundred times the estimated value of the book in an effort to carry out the scheme that they ultimately couldn't follow through on. Also, to add insult to injury, you could actually already access the contents of that book online for free. So you know that was a huge missed swing right there. Now, that particular whoopsie was due to a misunderstanding of copyright law more than NFT technology. But the hoopla around NFTs fueled the frenzy that led to that goof in the first place. People were so excited about the potential for NFTs to get rich. Most people were just looking at as a way to get rich quick. They weren't asking questions, they weren't pausing to say, wait a minute, does this make sense? And if they had, they might have come to the conclusion of, oh, no, this doesn't. This would be an enormous waste of our money, and the auction house would be getting way more cash than they were expecting. Again, I don't necessarily feel hurt by rich people losing or gaining lots of money at the expense of each other. If the rich want to eat each other, that's fine by me. And by the way, this is why I cautioned people not to get swept up in hype for things that surround technology. Like it's good to be excited about stuff and to be passionate about stuff, but you have to also temper that with critical thinking. I'll talk about that more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, before the break, I was talking about how you know, passion is good, being excited for stuff is good. It can be a lot of fun, but that you should maintain critical thinking in order not to get carried away. I think that's really important to remember right now. I mean, it's it's probably not as prevalent as it was a couple of years ago. I think the NFT thing really took a lot of steam out from some other movements, but those movements are still happening. So if you encounter stuff like people talking about Web three point zero, I would be cautious. Now, that's not to say that some aspect of some version of Web three point zero won't eventually become a really big thing, maybe a crucially important thing, But I would be skeptical of any grandiose claims around Web three points oh or like something like the metaverse, which is often conflated or presented in conjunction with Web three point zero. I'd be careful about anything like that, especially people who are claiming that it's going to be the future of the Internet or maybe even the future of computing itself. Be careful around those types of claims. Maybe they're gonna turn out to be true. But I feel like a lot of people who really push the narrative on things like metaverse or Web three point zho are the same people who have already heavily bought into those ideas. They have sunk a great deal of their own personal wealth into these ideas, and their realization on their investment is entirely dependent upon other people also buying into it, so they have an incentive to get other folks excited about these things, whether or not the things are worthy of being excited about, Like there might not be enough there for it to really be, you know, a viable concept, but that's not really important if you're just trying to get people to buy in so you can make your money back. So to me, things like web three point zero and metaverse. They are vague, they are poorly defined because no one has really made these things yet. There's been a lot of talk around them, and some discussions of some points of common threads among the different variations that are presented to people, but there's no firm definition for either web three or metaverse, which means you have ambiguity. And when you have ambiguity, that's a recipe for confusion and potential deception. That's when you have to employ that critical thinking. You have to ask questions, and if you get non answers, like if it starts sounding like a political debate where a candidate has asked a question and then they just spend the next minute not answering that question and talking around it, I say it's best to just get the heck out of that conversation and keep your money safe. Maybe it means you'll miss out on an opportunity, that is a possibility, but I think more often than not, it means that the only opportunity you missed out on was saying goodbye to your money. So let's talk about some more investment scams that involved the world of tech, and one of these actually is not an investment scam. It was a bookkeeping scam. And it was interesting because it was a tech company, a telecommunications company, that was guilty of this. And in part this act was in an effort to not just fool external partners like stakeholders, shareholders that is, but also people within the company itself. I'm talking about WorldCom. This was a wild story from the early two thousands. I actually remember when this happened. It wasn't that long after Enron, which was another huge scandal when it came to finances. So, once upon a time, the telephone system had companies that were in charge of handling long distance phone calls. You remember when that was a thing. That's something that a lot of us haven't had to think about for a very long time these days. But in the early two thousands, world Com was the second largest long distance telephone company in the United States, and it became headline news due to a massive accounting scandal, and it was made to look like the company was doing really well, when in fact it was already starting to spiral out of control. But they didn't want the outside world to know that they were spiraling. They being certain leaders at world Com and so they came up with a plan to make it appear as though world Com was doing quite well when it wasn't, and even folks within the company had no clue about what was actually happening until an internal audit brought up some very sticky questions. And when I say that people didn't know what was going on, that included people who were engaged in the activities themselves of like covering stuff up because they were being told by their bosses to do specific things. They didn't understand why they were being told to do it, So it was one of those you know, I was only following orders kind of situations where you don't even really understand why you're doing what you're doing and you only find out later that it was part of a fraudulent scheme. So, leading up to the early two thousands, WorldCom was actually doing pretty darn well. It was leasing phone lines from AT and T for really, you know, cheap prices. Then it was turning around and taking these least phone lines and offering them to customers for really competitive rates. So you know, they're they're charging more than they're paying because otherwise you go out of business, right, But they're not charging a whole lot more, and so they're trying to scale up and get lots of customers, and it worked. They got a lot of cash, which they then started to use to acquire other companies at a pretty incredible pace. And when you buy up companies, you accrue a lot of debt in the process. You typically have to take out loans to do this, and WorldCom was buying lots of companies. Now, keep in mind, this is around the same time that we saw lots of inflation in the tech sphere because the dot com bubble was inflating. So WorldCom was spending a whole lot of money, and arguably it was spending more money than what the acquisitions were actually worth in some cases because of that inflation of the dot com bubble. Now, WorldCom's finances initially looked pretty darn good, but then you had the dot com bubble burst in two thousand and two thousand and one, and very quickly it was clear that WorldCom was over extended. And as a publicly traded company, that means it would be in danger of having a massive dip in its stock price, and that would be bad. Stakeholders expect a stable and growing company, well on paper. That was what seemed to be happening. WorldCom seemed to be doing pretty darn well. But it turned out that paper stuff was just paper. It was just creative accounting, which is another way of saying lying. It was outright falsehoods. So essentially, a group of leaders within WorldCom directed that operating expenses be listed as something else on the books. One term that kept popping up in the books was a term called prepaid capacity. And you might say, what was prepaid capacity? What did that mean? Well, it turns out it didn't mean anything. It was essentially code for hide to operating expenses here so that they look like capital expenses. Okay, but what's the difference there. What's the difference between operating expenses and capital expenses? This is something that I think a lot of people just don't know, including me, Like I have to look it up every now and then because I'm not a business guy. But it's actually pretty straightforward. So operating expenses are recurring, short term costs. These are the costs of doing business. So that can include stuff like paying rent for office space, paying your utility bills, paying out salaries, that kind of thing. So you deduct operating expenses from income whenever you're doing taxes, so that you can say, like, all right, well we made this much money, but it cost this much to do business, so we have to look at the difference there. You can't just tax me on the income. You have to take into account how much it cost to run the business. Capital expenses are different from operating expenses because capital expenses are investments. So a capital expense represents something that is intended to generate revenue for a business in the long run. It may be a long term investment, so it still costs money, but you don't count it against income, So your income looks bigger if something is a capital expense rather than an operating expense, because you don't deduct the capital expense from the income. And capital expense again represents an investment that's at least ideally going to pay off sometime down the line. So essentially leaders at WorldCom were directing their accountants to classify operating expenses as capital expenses in an effort to make it look like the company was actually performing much much better than it really was, and they used the term prepaid capacity to mask it. And what they were hoping was that no one would bother to ask what exactly prepaid capacity was. They were relying on prepaid capacity to be vague enough and official sounding enough that people would just accept it and move on and not ask any questions. Like, you don't want to feel like you're the ignorant one by saying what does this actually mean? It's kind of like an emperor wears no clothes sort of thing. Right, You don't want to be the one to admit you can't see the meaning of something, because then it makes it seem like you're not as intelligent as everybody else, Right, Like, if you ask a question does this mean, well, that shows that you didn't know. And if you didn't know, then that's because you're not Smart's the that's the feeling. It's not true. By the way, not knowing things is not a bad trait. I don't know lots of stuff, but I ask questions so that I can learn. Learning and curiosity that's important. And you know, curiosity is all about trying to push back the barriers of our ignorance. So WorldCom leaders were thinking, prepaid capacity, that's going to be enough to keep people from asking too many questions. But they did not count on the tenacity and integrity of Cynthia Cooper. Cynthia Cooper headed up the internal audit department within WorldCom, and she looked into some irregularities in the book keeping, largely because of a previous scandal that another whistleblower had brought to company attention before then subsequently getting fired. So Cooper was thinking, I better look into what's going on here. So Cooper and her team gradually un covered fraud within WorldCom. She discovered that no one actually had a definition for prepaid capacity, like it was appearing on a lot of official records, but no one could tell her what prepaid capacity actually meant. As far as anyone could tell it didn't really mean anything, and yet here it was showing up in records again and again and representing billions of dollars in expenditures. Clearly, this was a huge, huge deal and she was getting the run around. Cooper and her team found enough evidence of wrongdoing that the SEC got involved and investigated world Com. Ultimately, the CEO of the company was held legally responsible for the fraud. He would end up receiving a twenty five year prison sentence. As part of that trial, he would eventually be released early due to declining health, and he would pass away not too long after that happened. As for WorldCom, it went into bankruptcy, it emerged under a new name, and ultimately Verizon acquired what had been WorldCom. But yeah, that's an example of a company pulling a scam on its own people as well as you know, shareholders in the SEC and relying on jargon to discourage anyone from asking tough questions. Cooper just wasn't putting up with any of that. So again, critical thinking absolutely something you should employ, just like Cooper did. You got to make sure that you're willing to ask the questions. Those questions. You know, maybe you're not asking a human being, maybe you're doing some research and just looking into things. Always take into account where your information is coming from. I recommend not using AI for that kind of stuff because you don't know where it's drawing its information, and may be drawing from a very biased source. It's very difficult to vet how reliable AI is on any given topic, and in fact, you may get very different answers if you ask the exact same question at different times or on different machines. So definitely take into account the quality of the source when you're asking your questions. But yeah, you know, use that curiosity, ask those questions. It may turn out that the thing you are skeptical of is one hundred percent legit and reliable, and that's great, Like, there's no reason to be upset about that. But it's always good to make sure before you start taking actions that could end up, you know, creating a bit of a loss for you, whether it's financial or otherwise. And the same goes true for like all aspects of life, as I said earlier, But really, when it comes to tech, I think critical thinking is in short supply. That's why we see things like misinformation campaigns go viral online. It's why we see people get super hyped about new technologies that have yet to actually prove their worth. I would argue that the generative AI craze kind of falls into that category that I think a lot of companies jumped way too far into generative AI, way too early before really getting an understanding of what it's capable of and what's limitations are and what applications are. This stuff happens over and over again. It becomes kind of frustrating because you think shouldn't we have learned these lessons already. I'm sure my peers over and stuff you missed in history class have a lot to say about that, because obviously they cover topics about history every single day, and I'm sure they lament the many times where someone has done something really stupid in the past, and we continue to do that stupid thing in the present, so and probably we'll continue into the future. But yeah, let's all remember critical thinking. It's a skill that you have to practice. You can forget to practice it. Certainly I have done that on several occasions. I have to remind myself to practice it. Well. I'm not some expert that just automatically applies critical thinking. So don't take this as me speaking from some high horse. My horse is low, maybe lower than your horses. Just me being concerned for my listeners and making sure that they take that lesson to heart. Critical thinking and compassion. The two will serve you well if you employ them. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. We'll be back with more new episodes for pretty much all of December and into the beginning of January, before we do the handoff with our new hosts, which I'll talk about them more as we get closer to the handoff. But I hope you're all doing well. I hope to be able to share with you lots of other cool and fun things. I've got some potential collaborations coming up with friends of the show, so hopefully we'll be able to get those scheduled and recorded in short order, because I look forward to going out with a maybe not a bang, but at least maybe a moderate sized boom. And until next time, I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? You know? Since we're wrapping up my run as host of tech Stuff, I thought it might be a good time to revisit one of the guiding principles of this show, that being critical thinking. I've always said Tech Stuff really has two guiding principles, critical thinking and compassion. That only with both of these can you, in my opinion, live an accountable and decent life. You need to have compassion so that you're not a total jerk, and you need to have critical thinking so you're not a total dip. And critical thinking is absolutely important in all aspects of life. I like to bring it up within the context of technology because tech is both incredibly complicated and it also touches our lives every single day in hundreds or thousands of ways. And if we don't think critically, we can make some pretty darn huge mistakes, either through incorrect assumptions or because someone has led us astray. Tech is one of those disciplines that is well suited for misunderstanding and for misdirection. Because of that complexity, there's stuff we can do in tech that seems almost magical, and the jargon around tech can be really difficult to parts like. That's not to say that all the jargon or the terminology is inherently bad. That's not really the case either. There are lots of terms that are very specific, and the reason why we use them is so that we communicate clearly what we mean and we avoid ambiguity. But then there's the flip side of it, where if you laiden something down with enough jargon, it becomes indecipherable. You can't even understand what's being said. I think the ultimate expression of how jargon can become gibberish is the humorous script for the fictional turbo incabulator. This was a gag. This was just a fake thing, a fake piece of technology, with a script that was intentionally made to be comedically dense with jargon meaningless jargon. So I did an episode about this ages ago. But let me do a quick excerpt from that script. So here's how it typically starts. And there are multiple versions of this online. By the way, if you search turbo incabulator on YouTube. You should come up with quite a few different versions of it, and they are all variations on this same theme. So here we go. For a number of years now, Yorick has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply in verse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grameters. Such an instrument is the turboincabulator. Now, basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive directants. The original machine had a base plate of prefamulated emultes surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two sperving bearings were in a direct line with a panametric fan. Now the piece goes on from there a little bit longer, and you get the point. Though. This is a send up of those technical manuals that would have so much jargon in them as to become almost meaningless that you can't really parse what is being said, and you feel like you have to look up every other word just to try and figure out what the meaning is, and you might ultimately come to the conclusion that even the person who wrote it doesn't really know what the meaning is. That's the joke, but it's based in reality. You know, there are those technical manuals out there that are so jargon heavy as to be almost a self parody, and this opens up opportunities for people who have underhanded motivations to try and mislead folks in an attempt to get something out of them, usually money. That's typically what it is, is that you have someone who is leaning on ignorance to pull one over on a victim. So I've really been thinking again about scam artists and investment schemes. Now that's something that spans well beyond the tech sector. It's not just tech that sees these sorts of things, but I think it's safe to say the tech world is particularly prone to such shenanigans, largely because a clever huckster can convince people that something that is implausible or perhaps even impossible, is actually achievable just through the wonders of technology. And again it's easy to understand how this could happen, how people could fall for these kinds of things, because consider the technology that you interact with on a daily basis. Our computers are phenomenally powerful these days. You can have a computer that has processors in it that allow it to do AI processing on your machine. That is something that was unthinkable only a few years ago. And most of us carry a small computer around in our pockets, and you can use that computer to do everything from make a phone call if you're an old fuddy duddy like me, or use it to look stuff up online. Or you can use it to take photos or video. You could even edit those images and those videos and then upload them to social platforms. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with that one device. Or you can jump in a car. Now, your typical modern car has remarkable technology in it, and depending on the car, it might even be able to drive itself under specific conditions. We've also got things like home automation, and then they're scary stuff like targeted advertising. We've got things that can be either cool or scary, depending upon how they are made and what they're supposed to do, like drones and all sorts of other things that you know. Back when I was a kid, I would have thought belong in science fiction, But today they're commonplace. So we've become used to technology being able to do incredible things. So it's understandable that if someone were to come to us with an extraordinary claim about tech, we might be tempted to believe in the dream right from the start. I mean, when I was a kid, I certainly didn't think I would see a day where I would be carrying a computer around with me everywhere I went. So why can't we have a device that's the size of a desktop printer that could run more than one hundred medical tests on the tiniest drop of blood. That, of course, was the point of Thernose, the biotech company that was purporting to create a desktop medical analysis machine, one that ultimately could end up being sold to consumers. Not just something that would be found in clinics or whatever, but you could own one of these things and you would take a very tiny pinprick of blood, and then you could run tests that not only would tell you if there was anything currently wrong with you, but also analyze your blood to look for potential things to look out for down the road, right conditions or diseases that you might be prone to developing in the future, so you could be on the lookout for that kind of stuff, like you could say, hey, you know, you could be pre diabetic or something along those lines. The problem was, of course, it just didn't work. It certainly didn't work the way it was being advertised. Even while it was under development, the company Theranose was found out to be using other companies technologies to analyze blood samples. They were taking larger samples of blood than what they were supposed to do, because again, it was supposed to be a microdrop of blood, but they couldn't get that to work. So they would take larger samples of blood or sometimes small samples, and then they would dilute it with water, hoping that that wouldn't mess things up too much spoiler alerted mess things up too much. Then they would run those samples through other companies analytic technology, not their own one. They would make it seem like it was in their own technology, but it really wasn't. They never really cracked the code on this, and in fact, there were plenty of people who were concerned that it was inherently impossible. That people thought, well, of course technology should be able to do this, without really taking the time to understand the limitations of the technology they were talking about. And there still stands a question to this day as to whether the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, whether she truly believed in the technology or if she was aware early on that she was running up against a brick wall, but of going because at that point she already had huge amounts of investment behind her. This was one of those examples of the fake it till you make it strategy, where you come up with an idea, you think the idea is really cool, you don't have the foggiest notion of how you're going to make that idea reality, but you go ahead and you create a business around it, and you get investment behind it, and then you figure somewhere along the way, we'll figure it out. We'll get the smartest people, We'll put them to work on this problem. They'll engineer a way out of it and will be good. In the case of THERAPNHOS, that just didn't happen. Instead, it was a business built around an ideal, but it was also built around lies and smoke and mirrors, and ultimately it all came crashing down. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. That's why I want to talk about critical thinking, because critical thinking would have saved a lot of people a lot of money if they had been willing to ask the right questions to the right people and to really heed those answers, could have, you know, saved themselves millions of dollars of losses. And I don't particularly feel the need to cry over rich people losing some percentage of their mass amount of wealth. It doesn't really bother me that much. But when it falls to people who can't afford to lose money, that's where I get really concerned. And I also just worry that the complacency, the tendency to accept things at a surface level, trickles down economics. I don't think trickle down properly, but ignorance certainly can. And that's where the opportunity comes in for scam artists, whether they are purposefully attempting to fool victims into handing over large amounts of cash, or they've actually deluded themselves into believing in an unproven technology. The tech world is complex and amazing enough to provide the perfect environment for a con. So in this episode, when we come back from this break, we're going to talk about a couple of notable examples of cons and scams that have happened in and around the tech industry and why critical thinking is so very important. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So a lot of scams, not just in the tech world but elsewhere, follow a pattern like the pyramid scheme, or more specifically, the Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is named after a guy who was named Charles Ponzi scheme. Oh no, I'm sorry, it's just Charles Ponzi. He was not the first to come up with this particular scheme. By the way, there was a woman who pulled essentially the exact same thing, but you know what, she had the gall to be a woman, So obviously we need to name the scheme after a dude who did it years later. That's just me being a little snarky, But anyway, the basic concept is you convinced people to invest in your business idea and then they're going to get some sort of insane return on their investment, typically on a very aggressive timeline. So Ponzi, for example, claimed that people who bought into his business proposition would start getting a fifty percent return on their investment within a month and a half, like forty five days. That's a crazy amount of return. And the way he would guarantee this, the way he would cover those returns because like his business wasn't a business, it was just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Essentially, he would use money from subsequent rounds of investors to show his earlier rounds of investors how well the plan was going. So let's break this down with a really simplified explanation of what was going on. So let's say that you are a low down, no good crook and you have convinced me to put one hundred of my American dollars in our business proposition. And in the meantime, after I have already put one hundred dollars in, you then turn to convince other people to give you money in a subsequent round of investments. And forty five days after you hooked me, you say, hey, good news, Johnny boy. Your investment has a fifty dollars return on it. Already do you want your payout. Do you want to get your fifty bucks and keep your one hundred dollars in as your initial investment. And what you're counting on is what a lot of people actually would do. I see an opportunity to get filthy rich, Right, I just got fifty dollars back on a one hundred dollars investment. That's still good. The investment is still in the business. The fifty dollars is like a dividend being paid out to me. So what I say is, oh, you know what, No, no, no, just hold on to that fifty dollars, reinvest it back into the business because I'm thinking, well, now I'm going to have one hundred and fifty dollars invested. I'm going to get even more money because the returns are going to keep coming in. Meanwhile, you're looking for your next round of investors to help cover the returns of not just me, but the people you fooled in investment round number two. And this goes on and on until it doesn't because these schemes ultimately reach a point where there's just no way to get enough people to join in order to cover everybody who is already bought into the scheme, and folks then might start to worry that something might be up and they might start to try to pull their money out of this business. And then you have to figure out, well do I pay out? And if I do pay out, how much do I pay out? Before I need to just pull up stakes, move out of town, change my name, and hide all my wealth away or you get nicked by the coppers, you know, and then you're put before a judge and then you're fine to timbuck to and back and then thrown in the whoscal for good measure. So in the tech space, these pyramid schemes happen fairly regularly, particularly in realms like cryptocurrency. You got blockchain and crypto evangelists out there who will try to convince greedy people to pour money into a system only to lock down that money and then run off with it. And that's just rampant. It's not I'm not making a wild accusation here. You can actually go to the website DFPI, dot CAA, dot gov and just look at their cryptoscam tracker, or you know, just search cryptoscam tracker. It'll pull it right up. That tracker lists dozens of cases in which victims have been parted from their hard earned assets. The stories are pretty similar. Usually it involves someone being convinced to put a significant amount of money into some sort of crypto scheme, only to have that account locked off. Like usually there are steps to it where first they're told, hey, in order to do anything with this money, you actually need to increase the investment by x amount, So like you might put five thousand dollars worth of assets into an account and it says, well, we need three thousand dollars more in order to really do anything with it. Then you might start getting notifications that hey, you're your account's doing really well, like its increased your wealth by x amount. But you find out when you try to withdraw that you're locked out. And then next thing you know, the website doesn't even exist anymore and someone has made off with your money. This happens a lot in the crypto world, and again it's understandable why con artists are drawn to crypto. You have bitcoin that's trading at near one hundred thousand dollars per coin these days. I think today it's down to ninety five thousand. It had been flirting with one hundred thousand last week. And it's absolutely true that if you had bought into bitcoin in the very early days and you were able to keep track of your digital wallet and stuff, then you would be wicked wealthy today. Let's say that you have bought like a dollar's worth of bitcoin back in twenty ten, Holy canoli. You know, bitcoin was a fraction of a dollar back in those days, so you would have a huge amount of wealth represented in bitcoin today. Now, set aside all the other stuff about bitcoin that I personally find very concerning, like the environmental impact and the prevalent use of bitcoin to do stuff like launder money and fund a legal activities and that kind of thing. The fact is bitcoin made a few people very, very wealthy, so it's understandable that people want to jump on some other perceived opportunity. And cryptocurrency is complicated enough that a con artist can count on a victim's ignorance to do a lot of the work for them. The average person doesn't really understand how cryptocurrency works, whether it's a proof of work or proof of stake system. The average person just sees number go up, you know, or sometimes number go down. But to the average person, cryptocurrency might as well just be a black box. You put money into it and then a whole lot more money comes out of it. That's an ideal situation to run a scam. People see this as an easy way to increase wealth. They understand that there's risk, but most people don't think that the bad stuff's going to happen to them. You know, most people don't live their lives that way, and a lot of people can't even imagine that a bad outcome will happen. They've seen the evidence of Hey, bitcoin made people into billionaires, why not me? NFTs fall into this category two. Now, that's not to say that NFTs have absolutely no legitimate use cases. I think that NFTs have potential use cases. The problem is the incredible saturation of the market back in like twenty twenty to twenty twenty two, combined with rampant speculation, created a ridiculous bubble that inflated so fast and bursts so spectacularly that to this day, NFTs are digging out of the hole that was left behind. You know, a ton of NFTs that at one point or another were being touted as the next big asset are now worthless, not virtually worthless. They're literally worthless. So let's just talk about NFTs for us a moment to refresh ourselves. So NFT stands for non fungible token. It is a digital token. It's built on top of the blockchain, and purchasing an NFT creates a digital record, and that record proves that you are the owner of this digital asset. But that asset is effectively a receipt like it's not a specific thing. Like if I bought an NFT that represents a digital photograph, the NFT isn't the photograph. The NFT is a token that represents the photograph. So you could think of it as I've got a certificate that proves on the owner. That's kind of what it is. However, an NFT doesn't mean that you actually control the asset itself, nor does it mean you can prevent someone else from making endless copies of that asset. So if I did buy an NFT that represents a digital photograph, and that photograph is up on the web somewhere, nothing stops people from making copies of that image. They can make them all day long. Plus I don't own the copyright to that image. Necessarily unless that was part of the NFT agreement. Otherwise, I just own a copy of this photo. I don't own the copyright to the photo itself. The original photographer or the company representing that photographer owns that. So let's say someone minted an NFT representing a digital copy of a novel. If I bought the NFT, would that mean I actually bought the novel itself? Would the novel belong to me? Would I have ownership of its IP? No, of course not. It would be similar to me going out to a bookstore and buying a hard print copy of the book. If I go out and buy the latest Stephen King novel at a bookstore, I don't suddenly own the intellectual property. I just own a copy of a book. That's it. Which is why I, like a lot of other people, got really confused when a crypto group called Spice dao. DAO actually is an initialism. It stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. That's something else we could talk about as far as the potential for scam dao. Not that all DAOs are scams, they're not, but that because they are a little tricky to understand, they are a good breeding ground for scams. There's the ignorance you can feed off of. Well. Spice DAO got famous because this group pulled together a couple of million dollars from its various members, and their purpose was to buy a copy of a book. It was a book that detailed the failed attempt of Alejandro Jodorowski's film adaptation of the science fiction novel Doune, and that production failed spectacularly, and this book detailed that failure and the vision of that original adaptation. Well, the DOAO intended to purchase this book and then sell NFTs representing parts of the book, essentially slicing the book up into digital segments and selling NFTs representing those segments, and then they were going to to actually burn the physical copy that they had purchased. So their thought was the digital NFTs would be the only remnant of this rare book. But here's the wild and wacky thing. They didn't realize that buying the book only meant that they were buying a physical copy of this book. They wouldn't have the right to do what they were planning to do. In fact, they expressly did not have the right to reproduce the book in such a way, because that violates copyright and they wouldn't own the copyright, So they ended up spending more than one hundred times the estimated value of the book in an effort to carry out the scheme that they ultimately couldn't follow through on. Also, to add insult to injury, you could actually already access the contents of that book online for free. So you know that was a huge missed swing right there. Now, that particular whoopsie was due to a misunderstanding of copyright law more than NFT technology. But the hoopla around NFTs fueled the frenzy that led to that goof in the first place. People were so excited about the potential for NFTs to get rich. Most people were just looking at as a way to get rich quick. They weren't asking questions, they weren't pausing to say, wait a minute, does this make sense? And if they had, they might have come to the conclusion of, oh, no, this doesn't. This would be an enormous waste of our money, and the auction house would be getting way more cash than they were expecting. Again, I don't necessarily feel hurt by rich people losing or gaining lots of money at the expense of each other. If the rich want to eat each other, that's fine by me. And by the way, this is why I cautioned people not to get swept up in hype for things that surround technology. Like it's good to be excited about stuff and to be passionate about stuff, but you have to also temper that with critical thinking. I'll talk about that more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, before the break, I was talking about how you know, passion is good, being excited for stuff is good. It can be a lot of fun, but that you should maintain critical thinking in order not to get carried away. I think that's really important to remember right now. I mean, it's it's probably not as prevalent as it was a couple of years ago. I think the NFT thing really took a lot of steam out from some other movements, but those movements are still happening. So if you encounter stuff like people talking about Web three point zero, I would be cautious. Now, that's not to say that some aspect of some version of Web three point zero won't eventually become a really big thing, maybe a crucially important thing, But I would be skeptical of any grandiose claims around Web three points oh or like something like the metaverse, which is often conflated or presented in conjunction with Web three point zero. I'd be careful about anything like that, especially people who are claiming that it's going to be the future of the Internet or maybe even the future of computing itself. Be careful around those types of claims. Maybe they're gonna turn out to be true. But I feel like a lot of people who really push the narrative on things like metaverse or Web three point zho are the same people who have already heavily bought into those ideas. They have sunk a great deal of their own personal wealth into these ideas, and their realization on their investment is entirely dependent upon other people also buying into it, so they have an incentive to get other folks excited about these things, whether or not the things are worthy of being excited about, Like there might not be enough there for it to really be, you know, a viable concept, but that's not really important if you're just trying to get people to buy in so you can make your money back. So to me, things like web three point zero and metaverse. They are vague, they are poorly defined because no one has really made these things yet. There's been a lot of talk around them, and some discussions of some points of common threads among the different variations that are presented to people, but there's no firm definition for either web three or metaverse, which means you have ambiguity. And when you have ambiguity, that's a recipe for confusion and potential deception. That's when you have to employ that critical thinking. You have to ask questions, and if you get non answers, like if it starts sounding like a political debate where a candidate has asked a question and then they just spend the next minute not answering that question and talking around it, I say it's best to just get the heck out of that conversation and keep your money safe. Maybe it means you'll miss out on an opportunity, that is a possibility, but I think more often than not, it means that the only opportunity you missed out on was saying goodbye to your money. So let's talk about some more investment scams that involved the world of tech, and one of these actually is not an investment scam. It was a bookkeeping scam. And it was interesting because it was a tech company, a telecommunications company, that was guilty of this. And in part this act was in an effort to not just fool external partners like stakeholders, shareholders that is, but also people within the company itself. I'm talking about WorldCom. This was a wild story from the early two thousands. I actually remember when this happened. It wasn't that long after Enron, which was another huge scandal when it came to finances. So, once upon a time, the telephone system had companies that were in charge of handling long distance phone calls. You remember when that was a thing. That's something that a lot of us haven't had to think about for a very long time these days. But in the early two thousands, world Com was the second largest long distance telephone company in the United States, and it became headline news due to a massive accounting scandal, and it was made to look like the company was doing really well, when in fact it was already starting to spiral out of control. But they didn't want the outside world to know that they were spiraling. They being certain leaders at world Com and so they came up with a plan to make it appear as though world Com was doing quite well when it wasn't, and even folks within the company had no clue about what was actually happening until an internal audit brought up some very sticky questions. And when I say that people didn't know what was going on, that included people who were engaged in the activities themselves of like covering stuff up because they were being told by their bosses to do specific things. They didn't understand why they were being told to do it, So it was one of those you know, I was only following orders kind of situations where you don't even really understand why you're doing what you're doing and you only find out later that it was part of a fraudulent scheme. So, leading up to the early two thousands, WorldCom was actually doing pretty darn well. It was leasing phone lines from AT and T for really, you know, cheap prices. Then it was turning around and taking these least phone lines and offering them to customers for really competitive rates. So you know, they're they're charging more than they're paying because otherwise you go out of business, right, But they're not charging a whole lot more, and so they're trying to scale up and get lots of customers, and it worked. They got a lot of cash, which they then started to use to acquire other companies at a pretty incredible pace. And when you buy up companies, you accrue a lot of debt in the process. You typically have to take out loans to do this, and WorldCom was buying lots of companies. Now, keep in mind, this is around the same time that we saw lots of inflation in the tech sphere because the dot com bubble was inflating. So WorldCom was spending a whole lot of money, and arguably it was spending more money than what the acquisitions were actually worth in some cases because of that inflation of the dot com bubble. Now, WorldCom's finances initially looked pretty darn good, but then you had the dot com bubble burst in two thousand and two thousand and one, and very quickly it was clear that WorldCom was over extended. And as a publicly traded company, that means it would be in danger of having a massive dip in its stock price, and that would be bad. Stakeholders expect a stable and growing company, well on paper. That was what seemed to be happening. WorldCom seemed to be doing pretty darn well. But it turned out that paper stuff was just paper. It was just creative accounting, which is another way of saying lying. It was outright falsehoods. So essentially, a group of leaders within WorldCom directed that operating expenses be listed as something else on the books. One term that kept popping up in the books was a term called prepaid capacity. And you might say, what was prepaid capacity? What did that mean? Well, it turns out it didn't mean anything. It was essentially code for hide to operating expenses here so that they look like capital expenses. Okay, but what's the difference there. What's the difference between operating expenses and capital expenses? This is something that I think a lot of people just don't know, including me, Like I have to look it up every now and then because I'm not a business guy. But it's actually pretty straightforward. So operating expenses are recurring, short term costs. These are the costs of doing business. So that can include stuff like paying rent for office space, paying your utility bills, paying out salaries, that kind of thing. So you deduct operating expenses from income whenever you're doing taxes, so that you can say, like, all right, well we made this much money, but it cost this much to do business, so we have to look at the difference there. You can't just tax me on the income. You have to take into account how much it cost to run the business. Capital expenses are different from operating expenses because capital expenses are investments. So a capital expense represents something that is intended to generate revenue for a business in the long run. It may be a long term investment, so it still costs money, but you don't count it against income, So your income looks bigger if something is a capital expense rather than an operating expense, because you don't deduct the capital expense from the income. And capital expense again represents an investment that's at least ideally going to pay off sometime down the line. So essentially leaders at WorldCom were directing their accountants to classify operating expenses as capital expenses in an effort to make it look like the company was actually performing much much better than it really was, and they used the term prepaid capacity to mask it. And what they were hoping was that no one would bother to ask what exactly prepaid capacity was. They were relying on prepaid capacity to be vague enough and official sounding enough that people would just accept it and move on and not ask any questions. Like, you don't want to feel like you're the ignorant one by saying what does this actually mean? It's kind of like an emperor wears no clothes sort of thing. Right, You don't want to be the one to admit you can't see the meaning of something, because then it makes it seem like you're not as intelligent as everybody else, Right, Like, if you ask a question does this mean, well, that shows that you didn't know. And if you didn't know, then that's because you're not Smart's the that's the feeling. It's not true. By the way, not knowing things is not a bad trait. I don't know lots of stuff, but I ask questions so that I can learn. Learning and curiosity that's important. And you know, curiosity is all about trying to push back the barriers of our ignorance. So WorldCom leaders were thinking, prepaid capacity, that's going to be enough to keep people from asking too many questions. But they did not count on the tenacity and integrity of Cynthia Cooper. Cynthia Cooper headed up the internal audit department within WorldCom, and she looked into some irregularities in the book keeping, largely because of a previous scandal that another whistleblower had brought to company attention before then subsequently getting fired. So Cooper was thinking, I better look into what's going on here. So Cooper and her team gradually un covered fraud within WorldCom. She discovered that no one actually had a definition for prepaid capacity, like it was appearing on a lot of official records, but no one could tell her what prepaid capacity actually meant. As far as anyone could tell it didn't really mean anything, and yet here it was showing up in records again and again and representing billions of dollars in expenditures. Clearly, this was a huge, huge deal and she was getting the run around. Cooper and her team found enough evidence of wrongdoing that the SEC got involved and investigated world Com. Ultimately, the CEO of the company was held legally responsible for the fraud. He would end up receiving a twenty five year prison sentence. As part of that trial, he would eventually be released early due to declining health, and he would pass away not too long after that happened. As for WorldCom, it went into bankruptcy, it emerged under a new name, and ultimately Verizon acquired what had been WorldCom. But yeah, that's an example of a company pulling a scam on its own people as well as you know, shareholders in the SEC and relying on jargon to discourage anyone from asking tough questions. Cooper just wasn't putting up with any of that. So again, critical thinking absolutely something you should employ, just like Cooper did. You got to make sure that you're willing to ask the questions. Those questions. You know, maybe you're not asking a human being, maybe you're doing some research and just looking into things. Always take into account where your information is coming from. I recommend not using AI for that kind of stuff because you don't know where it's drawing its information, and may be drawing from a very biased source. It's very difficult to vet how reliable AI is on any given topic, and in fact, you may get very different answers if you ask the exact same question at different times or on different machines. So definitely take into account the quality of the source when you're asking your questions. But yeah, you know, use that curiosity, ask those questions. It may turn out that the thing you are skeptical of is one hundred percent legit and reliable, and that's great, Like, there's no reason to be upset about that. But it's always good to make sure before you start taking actions that could end up, you know, creating a bit of a loss for you, whether it's financial or otherwise. And the same goes true for like all aspects of life, as I said earlier, But really, when it comes to tech, I think critical thinking is in short supply. That's why we see things like misinformation campaigns go viral online. It's why we see people get super hyped about new technologies that have yet to actually prove their worth. I would argue that the generative AI craze kind of falls into that category that I think a lot of companies jumped way too far into generative AI, way too early before really getting an understanding of what it's capable of and what's limitations are and what applications are. This stuff happens over and over again. It becomes kind of frustrating because you think shouldn't we have learned these lessons already. I'm sure my peers over and stuff you missed in history class have a lot to say about that, because obviously they cover topics about history every single day, and I'm sure they lament the many times where someone has done something really stupid in the past, and we continue to do that stupid thing in the present, so and probably we'll continue into the future. But yeah, let's all remember critical thinking. It's a skill that you have to practice. You can forget to practice it. Certainly I have done that on several occasions. I have to remind myself to practice it. Well. I'm not some expert that just automatically applies critical thinking. So don't take this as me speaking from some high horse. My horse is low, maybe lower than your horses. Just me being concerned for my listeners and making sure that they take that lesson to heart. Critical thinking and compassion. The two will serve you well if you employ them. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. We'll be back with more new episodes for pretty much all of December and into the beginning of January, before we do the handoff with our new hosts, which I'll talk about them more as we get closer to the handoff. But I hope you're all doing well. I hope to be able to share with you lots of other cool and fun things. I've got some potential collaborations coming up with friends of the show, so hopefully we'll be able to get those scheduled and recorded in short order, because I look forward to going out with a maybe not a bang, but at least maybe a moderate sized boom. And until next time, I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.