The Daily Show: Ears EditionGet out from behind the desk with some of the best of Desi in the field
Investigate the Yelp protection racket and the truth behind daylight saving time. Then take off for a potential mission to Mars scam, and make a hard swamp landing to uncover the origins of the infamous Florida Man.
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Yeah.
Yeah, the most popular crowdsource review form online and a vital resource when choosing which waxing place doesn't laugh so loudly? But can we trust everything we read on Yelp? One extremely Italian restaurant owner finds Yelp's business practices so devious he's protesting.
My name is a chef, David Cherlatini. I'm a chef owner a Botto bistro and I give fifty percent of a pizza if you give me a one star on Yelp?
Why would you want a one star review? Sorry? Let me ask you in what terms you can understand? What's the matter to you?
If you want to have a good rating on Yelp, you need to pay for advertise, and I decide to don't pay advertise. So what they do? They manipulate your raything in order for you to give up and pay for advertising.
According to Doggie Day, when he refused to pay Yelp to advertise, he noticed dozens of five star reviews disappearing from his Yelp page.
To me, that is a stortion. Yes, I'm Italian.
We invent a stortion.
Well yeah, I mean you're not just Italian, you're like cartoonishly Italian.
I agree with you.
How exactly did yelp try to extort you? Walk me through?
Yes, absolutely.
You open your business.
In a couple of weeks, you have your business place in their forum, you start to have good review, and then in three or four weeks you start to receive a phone calls. They call you every single day. They're pushy, they don't give up, they keep calling you. We were answering the phone, looking at the number, and we were just telling to go themselves. Immediately, after a couple of days, you start to see the results of your bad decision. So immediately your rating is changing somehow. This good review they're gone.
Claimed that yelp extorts businesses was a serious allegation, and he's not the only one with the Yelp grievance. In fact, yelp gets accused of extortion so much that they have an entire page on their website dedicated to explaining how they don't extort businesses.
So I went to.
Yelp's headquarters to meet with their spokesperson. But not just any spokesperson.
My name's Ben Flannik.
I am currently yelp san Francisco's community manager. And and I did some television a number of years ago, were on it was on The Bachelor, I was the Bachelor.
That's right.
Forget about yelp extorting people. I had to ask Season sixteen's Bachelor, what really went down on that horseback ride with Lindsay or the time he totally does I.
Would prefer that we probably keep this conversation about Yelp today, that's cool with you?
Yeah, no, yes, absolutely no.
I'm I am one hundred percent a professional, and I'm here to talk to you about Yelp.
I would never want to talk about it. Go go, go get out of here, go clean it up, clean these up. I didn't arrange that.
No, no, it's fine, it's fine.
Sorry, excuse me.
What would you say to someone who says that yelp extorts businesses?
I would say, that's simply not true.
Right.
I'm also not in sales.
I don't you know.
I run the community side of things here.
Yelp makes its money primarily through advertising. You don't have to advertise. Reviews are shown just the same, whether you're a paid advertiser.
Or not, so businesses can control the order in reviews that come up.
Description reviews are a bit different. We have this algorithm, it's called recommendation software, and unfortunately the business owners get frustrated with the algorithm. Alongside that you have sales reps that are calling them and they think that the two are correlated, but they're absolutely not.
We don't extort businesses.
Bullshoot you are going to work. You are going to be arrested from these people. It's blackmailing. Is rocket bring the money in to the family, and that's the help mafia.
Does it cause you pain being so Italian and seeing your noble tradition of mafia culture be portrayed by these Silicon Valley douchebags.
It is.
It's insulted. The Italian community got really mad. Not because the attention of distortion is the way that it's been done. That a little stupid guy called me from the Silicon Valley because his manipulated that's humilating for the Italian issue, not at least doing the rightway. Send couple of guys with a baseball bat, do it a classic a gig of the money. Nobody's saying anything.
But what if he was on the Bachelor.
Well you can gratulate to him. But also talent to go with himself. These people are protected by politics, law and lawyers, and we don't give a shit anymore. It might be legal, but it's not okay.
Choosing who to trust between these two guys was going to be tough. Business practices are totally legal, but David da had a point. Harassing businesses and adjusting reviews feels dishonest, almost as dishonest as calling this Italian style pizza. In the end, I had to listen to my heart.
It might be legal, but as an all kid, just.
Because it's legal doesn't make it right. I was going to have to let bend down easy.
Ben.
I spent a lot of time with Yelp today, and I think it's just that Yelp and businesses are somehow not trusting one another. It just feels like there are some things that Yelp is keeping from businesses. But I really hope that Yelp finds happiness. I'm sure one day they'll make a business very happy. Thanks time. It flies when you're having fun, but it also killed people every March in November, we try to control it.
Daylight Saving Time is about to begin.
Remember we fall back tomorrow.
Night set the clocks back bringing forward, and I hate it that what hour?
Why do we change our clocks? And does it do more harm than good? Well, as I found out, if you screw with time, who are you? It just might screw you back. Arizona it's one of America's top states alphabetically, but more importantly, their clocks play by their own rules.
Arizona does opted out of daylight saving time. They stick to standard time all year.
So I'm here in Cactus Country to find out how these time bandits can even function living outside of normal time. How has living without daylight saving time completely messed up your life?
I feel like everybody else is all messed up because I've never turned my clock back.
I never have to worry about it. I guess it's like the wild West.
Does that explain your I.
Don't know what explains this.
I love the fact that I don't have to worry about changing the clocks. Don't you feel like you're missing out being an hour behind the rest of the country.
No, that's all right, we'll catch up.
You won't catch up. You're always an hour behind.
Yeah. I don't see it as living in the past. I only see it as living in the present.
It's their future and not my past, because my past has then.
Their clocks.
I'm sorry what Arizonas seemed happy with their own time laws, not to mention their access to primo desert drugs. But if they were unaffected by not changing their clocks, why do the rest of us do it? I sat down with clock blocker Scott Yeates, who's on a mission to permanently stop clock changing.
I'm the leader of the lock the Clock movement, trying to stop people from having to change the clocks twice a year.
But isn't it a good thing to set the clocks forward an hour and gain that extra hour of sunlight.
People in general like that extra hour slay, But for some people it's really deadly. Traffic accidents go up, strokes, heart attacks, more people actually just die in the few days after the spring forward time change.
I guess for some people, time is up.
Solid jokes aside. If this is literally killing people, there has to be a good argument for it.
There really isn't any argument, and it changed the clock.
Twice a year.
Well, there is the farmers.
No, the whole story about the farmers. It's the biggest pr con job ever. The farmers have always been against changing the clocks for daylight saving time, and they've been like, hey, stop blaming us, we don't have anything to do with this.
You'll blame the farmer trope. No, honey, I did not have sex with my yoga instructor. It was a farmer.
Anyway, had sex with Why do we even have daylight savings time? Or is it Daylight's saving times?
Daylight save meaning times? No, s it's daylight saving.
Time, got it?
Daytime save light time?
Well, it was first proposed here in the United States by a retailer that found that if there's more sunlight, people would have more time to shop.
This all started from a retailer.
Well, he came up with the name daylight saving time, but it actually started during World War One. The Germans started doing it, and then the Brits and then the US fell ensued. After that it was called wartime.
Such a German thing to do to make people lose an hour.
After the war, we stopped doing it because everybody hated it. And then in the sixties, the golf industry became a really big industry. So golf lobbyists were able to convince politicians that we should have daylight saving time so that there's more time to play golf after work.
Wait, the golf lobby.
Yeah, that's right.
They make hundreds of millions of dollars for every extra month that the country is in daylight saving time. And then a candy lobbyists went to Congress and said we should have daylight saving Time extend into the first weekend of November and that way on Halloween.
Makes somemo camp.
All right, wartime golfers and now candy men are the reason behind DST.
Where does that leave us?
Now?
Things are actually really improving.
There's a bill that has both Republican and Democrat support to actually make the change to the law so that the states can go on permanent.
Daylight saving time.
So it's a bipartisan issue.
It's totally bipartisan.
Wow, I don't think I've ever heard that from anybody before.
Well, the basic idea of time is really just an agreement. We all have to come together to decide when ten am is and that agreement shouldn't kill people.
Time is an agreement. What even is time? When is time? Who is time? Why is time?
What can I go?
Now?
The deeper I traveled into daylight saving the deeper. I got lost in what time? Even was?
Time is a construct?
Time is, it's now, it's before, it's later, later.
I'm in their past, but it's my future in the future.
And if some states changed the clocks in Arizona doesn't could space and time invert on themselves?
Who are you? Better? Question is when am I.
Future me?
Yeah? I'm you during daytime?
Save lifetime. Hold on a second, this is me in an hour. Yeah, this whole changing the clocks thing is really fixed up. God damn it.
Who just locked the clocks? This whole thing would never happen.
Ah, Yes, the McFly paradox. I knew exactly what to ask me.
You know, when I was sixty nine.
Yeah, okay, either America needs to lock the clocks or I need to stop doing payodium work trips. Mars Humanity side piece. The worse our relationship gets with Earth, the more we lust after that cold, unattainable hunk just out of reach, which is why everyone went wild for Mars One, a private company who in twenty twelve offered four lucky Earthlings a one way ticket to Mars.
Mars one has selected its final hundred contenders to form a colony on the foreign planet.
That is actually happening in life.
People are being offered a one way ticket to Mars.
Yet thousands still signed up and paid application fees for a chance to go to Mars forever. Who would do that?
My name is Leila Zucker and I'm an emergency medicine physician.
What would make someone want to take a one way trip to Mars? Aside from just being a woman on this planet right now.
It's been almost fifty years since we went onto the moon.
It's time to go.
So you're telling me you would choose space over your husband.
I would.
My husband is okay with that, because if you love something, you have to let it go.
Are you sure you don't just need a little bit of space?
Like I tell my husband that I've got book club once a week.
There's no book club. I barely read.
It's not really about that we need to make humans a multiplanet species.
Unfortunately, for Leila and ninety nine other finalists, there's only one problem.
Mars one now filing for bankruptcy.
Was Mars one ever a real thing at all?
The more that I looked at it, I kind of felt like, this is like not a real thing.
At all.
They didn't have any kind of real money. They weren't working with SpaceX. Their idea was they make reality TV shows, But where do you get the money before that to pay for the scientists, the gear, everything else that goes into actually getting you there.
You know what they should have done. They should have done a pyramid scheme. I had a very successful pyramid scheme going in college. It was basically like herbal life, but with one hundred percent cocaine. I would sell it. Then I had other people selling it. I would take a cut of it. It's pretty great.
That sounds like you were just selling drugs.
What are you a cop?
Like?
I told those prosecutors, I'm going to need a second opinion, So I turned to real life astronaut Chris Hatfield.
Mars one had no spaceships. They gave everybody the impression that you could just go buy a spaceship that could take you to Mars, but those spaceships don't even exist. They still have to be invented. Mars one was a scam. They builked people out of a million dollars, and when they just went broke recently, they still owe somebody else another million euros.
You don't mean a scam. Scam.
You just mean they told the world that they had a thing, but they didn't actually have the thing, and they couldn't deliver on the thing.
That's what scams are.
What kind of magician can pull off an illusion this big? I had to find the man behind it all, Mars one CEO bos Landsdorp. I didn't want him to be suspicious, so I started off slow. Is Mars one a scam?
And Mars one is definitely not a scam? And I think that if you take a real good look at our website you cannot be convinced.
Otherwise, as everyone knows, the best way to check to see if something is a scam is to see if it has a website. And like any legitimate space venture, Mars one offers sweet merch and a chance to donate monthly.
Don't forget that in sixty one when Kennedy said We're going to the Moon before the end of the decade, they basically had nothing.
Okay, if President Kennedy and four hundred thousand people working for NASA could turn a dream into a moon landing, maybe bos and his team could get us to Mars.
How many people do you have on staff at your company.
There's ten people currently working on Mars one.
Ten people, yes, how many of the ten are scientists?
So the three engineers currently involved in Mars one and the others are more on the storytelling part of the company.
Of the ten are more involved in the storytelling process. Yes, So if I invest in Mars one, am I investing in a space program or a media story?
Investors are really investing in a media company that's selling the story.
So all this time Mars one was nothing more than a sales pitch sold to us as news. How could the entire world be fooled by this one Dutchman?
The media? Sure, the media, Yeah, m I t was putting out papers about how Maswan's plans were going to actually kill the people within sixty eight days of arriving because they would suffocate to death. But then you had a ton on the news. You would see these kind of like soft bowl coverage.
What items would be on your bucket list? What do you need to check off before you go to Mars? These people are really going everybody.
There are two things she will really miss about Earth, her husband of twenty two years and her favorite food, hamburgers.
The media perpetuated and magnified the lie.
Yeah, media is the worst.
The first step in becoming a truth telling journalist informing Leyla that she's been scammed.
That doesn't make it a scam.
In order to have a scam, you have to be fooling someone and you have to be stealing from them. And nobody has really paid anything other than the original application fee.
So if you're not stealing and you're just fooling somebody, it's innocent.
It's an innocent lie that makes life on earth more magical.
Like Santa Claus or a Sister Bunny.
Basically it or like when you tell your husband you only slept with his father once. You know, little lies that make people happier.
We say it's only going to take ten years, and it's only going to take six million dollars, and we know those aren't true. But in order to pursue these dreams, sometimes we take small liberties.
Everybody is allowed to dream, but the media's job is not to report dreams.
It is to report the facts exactly.
A journalist's job is to seek the truth and to stay sharp, and the best way to stay sharp is with urbicane. The only erbal supplement made of one hundred percent cocaine urbicane that feels good. Mars One had a story to sell, and like the customers my erbal supplement, most of the media bought it without examining the product.
That's how you end up in a world where Tharanose gets the coverage that it did. It's how by a festival happens, and there's really big consequences for things like that happening.
Maybe that explains Mars want. When you live on a planet where facts no longer matter and the media legitimizes something that was fundamentally empty from the beginning, it's no wonder people want to escape. But fighting for a world where truth counts is a mission I can believe in.
Just tell me when we get there.
Florida God's waiting room. It's home to theme parks, the Everglades, your peapot, and of course Florida.
Man committing a sexual act on a tree, yelling he was as.
Tried to start a fire with spaghetti saw.
It was karate kicking those birds.
We attack two people every week. There's a new headline out of Florida wild shocking, unnecessarily.
Sexual masturbating, at a bus stop, told police he was captain.
But have we ever stopped to ask the question, why something's happening to men in Florida? And it can't just be a coincidence. As a future Pulitzer winning journalist, it's my responsibility to uncover the truth, to reveal what lies beneath the swamp, to answer the question what makes a man Florida man? Florida man, Florida man, Florida man, Florida man. First thing I did was some heavy back channeling, mostly on Craigslist in Facebook. I needed to locate some of these real life Florida men. First up was Robbie. Last July, he ran into a liquor store with the live alligator. For some reason, Florida Man Robbie Stratton decided to bring an alligator.
With him while making a beer run.
Yeah, I definitely regret it.
It was stupid.
Talk to me about the night that you became Florida man.
I can't really tell you much about that night.
There's too much alcohol involved that night.
Not just alcohol, though there's probably a deep rooted conspiracy.
No, it was alcohol.
What was it about Florida that made you do what you did?
It was hot, it was humid.
The heat makes you do crazy things.
The heat makes you do crazy things. Alcohol makes you do crazy things.
Isn't there something that all Florida men share. There's something behind it mental health issues. No, that couldn't be it. And this wasn't the only man affected.
He's been hit with charges after pictures in this video showing him handling an alligator, which he posted.
We're seen by law enforcement.
Right, A real name, Jordan Bedford, but I go by the alligator.
Man, Kay, alligator man. What's the common factor among all Florida man?
We all different? Well, I'm I'm different from the rest because I do the wrong thing in the right way, if that makes sense. No, no, see you not from Florida, so you don't understand my language what I'm talking right now. But I do the I do the wild things. Anything you think of, I probably do it. Catch like I tay you anything, anything, I catch gators, anything, anything, well, not anything, oh but basically anything when it comes to the reptile animals, mainly the alligators. Though, way like hearing Florida you not allowed to catch an alligator. I mean I didn't know that before, but I know not I just had a little form, put 'em on the leash and dance with the last one. They seen.
What kind of dancing did you do with the alligator?
The alligator man dance, You gotta kick your feet, spell alligator in the sand, as you dancing, as you going around, you spell an alligator and you in it with the stump. The alligator man got a commercial.
Too, So you just have a commercial.
They got a commercial. You got a theme song. Everybody seem like na na, nah, naw, it's the alligator man.
That is the McDonald's jingle.
Well it's delligated man as all.
Now I see what you're saying about doing the wrong thing in the right way, and how it works.
It works.
Where do you find alligators in Florida?
If there's a lake, there's a gator. I promise you that's so. That's everywhere. There's gators everywhere.
Stuirs are very hard to get about.
It gone so.
Many Florida men, so many alligators. Surely there's a Florida man who's normal.
Oh, missy, I am Captain Silky's Silver Tips, and I hail out of the island called marathon done in the Florida Keys.
Cool and you're pirate.
Well, I'm a pirate most of the day. When I'm not, I'm a landscaper.
What could a landscaper pirate possibly have done?
A man dressed as a pirate is accused of shooting his gun.
On the Seven Mile Bridge in South Florida.
So I took out my flintlocks to shoot at the sun.
Now, mind you, there was no projector.
You know, simply gunpowder right away.
Why do you defend what you did?
Well, I defend my Second Amendment.
Right, your Second Amendment right to shoot a gun into the sun.
Yeah, why not?
How exactly did you become a Florida man?
To become a Florida man, you must first be a Florida boy and experience to life that it gives you as a boy, to hone your skills to be, in my case, a Florida pirateman.
Have you always been a Florida man?
Ah?
No.
Originally I hailed from Chicago, Oh your transplant, I was then, But since then I've lived my entire life here in the Keys.
What do you think is behind every Florida man?
Must be the water that we're drinking down here to drive us.
To what we do.
It's a water conspiracy and uh women.
Women, Yeah, they're the ones that drive you crazy.
And while I was running away from these unusual men, I was heading towards some new ideas. There had to be a common thread. What was I missing? There was something different about this state. So many Florida man's stories filling the news. Did Florida reporters know something I didn't? I went to an undisclosed Orange grove to meet a very casually dressed journalist to find out, what can you tell me about these Florida man stories? I mean, I had my own research, but sure you just give me yours just to compare notes.
Yeah, I mean they are true. People do weird things here in Florida, and it gets.
Into the news. The bushet.
Yeah, A major factor is that we went from being the least populated southern state in nineteen forty to now being the third most populous state in the country.
Sure, we got to this nerd.
Knew a lot about Florida. And while he mostly rambled and I was connecting the dots.
Built tons of homes everywhere where there used.
To be just wilderness, a lake des a gator.
You can get just about any kind of weapon, you want here. This is men forty ninth among the states and funding for mental health treatment mental health issues. Another big factor is Florida was the first state in the nation to pass this landmark law called the Sunshine Act that says that basically any government document is available for reports to go in and see. Police reports, for instance, are all open for inspection by reporters.
And that's when it hit me. The missing piece of the puzzle by a guy named Memory Richard Up, that's it.
What's it?
It's the Sunshine Act.
Yeah, it's not what causes Florida Man. It's why we hear about Florida Man.
Yeah, pretty much.
I just figured it out all by myself. I'm a genius.
Florida Man has been the butt of countless jokes. But maybe that's not fair. Well, this guy was pretty weird. The Sunshine Act makes it easier to discover Florida Man's stories. But I was just scratching the surface. We may not hear about them as much, but it turns out there are Florida Men in every state.
We're trying to shoot the dog shoots its owner. Maybe get the emoji.
And while Florida will always be America's Petrie Dish of batshit behavior. The truth is, there's a little Florida Man and all of us. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show wherever.
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