Episode 47: Transcript

Helping our kids and parents know when to stand up for themselves.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: So how about that Threads question about does anybody like the banter at the beginning of podcasts?

Doug French: I was going to bring that up.

Magda: You were like, “Oh, well, we just banter because Magda moved across the country.” But the whole time, let it be known, I'm only doing this banter because you said we should do banter at the beginning. I hate the banter. Somebody on that Threads post said it's the podcast equivalent of telling this story about your vacation in Venice before you give the recipe for brownies. And I completely agree.

Doug: No, I get it. But I like banter. I know you do. I'm a bantering person. But I recognize that some banter is too much banter. Like Marc Maron's banter. Twenty minutes of banter with himself. I can't stand it. I fast forward through that all the time. I'm there for the guest.

Magda: Okay, but I just don't see why people care about what you and I have to say to each other that isn't on topic. You know? 

Doug: Well, because I have enough hubris to think, oh, sure, they don't like their banter. But our banter...is better banter.

Magda: …is not even funny. Our banter is just like us upset about the FAFSA.

Doug: It's us recognizing that we've known each other for 28 years and we've been through a bit together and know each other well. 

Magda: I know, but–

Doug: Not every pair of podcast hosts has that and we should take advantage of that.

Magda: Ok, so you think that a long history with someone means that your conversations with them are interesting? Because I would say it's probably the opposite.

Doug: If we were still married, they'd be boring as hell. But we're not married anymore. We've been through the weeds, man.

Magda: It doesn't make any sense to me. It makes zero sense to me. It's the same as when people are like, oh, well, I can't give up on this friendship, relationship, job, whatever, because I have so much invested in it, so much time already. Like, if it's not interesting to you in the present, like, you don't need to participate in it anymore.

Doug: I mean, I understand that. And I will go where the people lead us. I mean, I was going to say, we should talk to our people. And say, what do you think of our banter?

Magda: Do you want the same amount of banter? Because we've been having like a good solid five to six minutes of banter at the beginning of every episode. And I feel like we could cut the banter down to like, “hey, how many pies did you make last week?” “Great.” “How many times did you go out bike riding?” “Great.” Done. Into the topic.

Doug: See, I think five minutes is a good amount.

Magda: I can't imagine listening to anybody else talk about their lives for five minutes.

Doug: That's why God invented the fast forward button.

Magda: People are already listening to us at 3x.

Doug: Shouldn't it rather be there so you can listen if you want and if you don't, you can skip it?

Magda: Okay.

Doug: I mean, I get it. I will conform to the public's need not to listen to people technically enjoy each other's company. But I got to say.

Magda: “Technically” we enjoy each other's company.

Doug: That fuels me. I like listening to people talking. I am so freaked out by the fact that no one talks anymore.

Magda: I read an article. Also, you're going to have to cut this out because it's boring. I read an article somebody wrote for, I don't know, HuffPost or something, like–apparently HuffPost is still around–about how she went on this boating, canoeing outing, journey for three weeks. And they each got assigned a guide in a boat. And she's a big introvert. And she got assigned to be in a boat with a guy who never said anything. And she was too introverted to try to instigate conversation with him. And so she felt so sort of uncomfortable with it for like the first week. And by the end of the trip, they had fallen in love with each other by not saying anything to each other.

Doug: How is this boring? This is very exciting.

Magda: I think it's absolutely preposterous because Mike and I talk all the time about the reason we fell in love so hard and thoroughly and completely and rapidly as we did with each other is that we were talking to each other all the time. And if we had been in the same part of the country and had just been going on dates, you know, like spend two hours with somebody once or twice a week, we would not have gotten to know each other as well. It would have been years before we got to those weird conversations on the edges of things. You know, like when you've been talking to somebody for two hours that day already, random weird shit comes up. And of course, that first year we were dating, we were talking to each other. We would talk every morning and we would talk every night and sometimes we would talk in between. So we were talking to each other for between two and six hours a day.

Doug: Right, and thank you for proving my point. Banter works.

Theme music fades in, plays, and fades out.

Magda: Yes, but you know what? Nobody else would have tuned into it because boy, we have had some intensely boring conversations.

Doug: Wait, define intensely boring.

Magda: Intensely boring. Oh my God. Well, okay. So, you know, there's a length of time you're supposed to wear shoes for, right? Like athletic shoes. I feel that you're supposed to switch out your shoes every 300 miles because that's like the length of time that a pair of running shoes is good for. Mike is an avid walker, but he was complaining that his walking shoes were not working out for him. They just felt weird and they weren't giving him as much support. And so then I asked him how long he had been walking in them for. And it turned out that he had about 2000 miles on this pair of shoes. And so this turned into 20 minutes every day for like eight or nine weeks, just about the walking shoes.

Doug: It develops intimacy in people. And if people will see us chat, they'll develop an intimacy with us.

Magda: But they don't get to talk back. That's the thing. I mean, also... 

Doug: Well, they can. In fact, if you respond to us in our Facebook group saying, enough with the banter, I will de-banter us.

Magda: Okay. All right.

Doug: I'm fine going with what the people want. But now that I don't see you very often anymore, it's actually genuinely good to see you. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: And catch up with what you're doing. I like it. Even when you're talking about shoes, for hell's sake.

Magda: Oh, my God.

Doug: But men hang on to things longer than women do. It's true. We know this. I will hang on to things as long as they're functional, then I'll use them. But yeah, running shoes.

Magda: Sometimes you need a second opinion on “functional.”

Doug: Well, yeah. I'll buy that. I need a second opinion on most things. In fact, that's actually why I wanted to talk to you about that thing I mentioned, today's topic.

Magda: Okay, that thing.

Doug: Because, yeah, the thing about how society works and did we prepare our kids well enough to defend themselves?

Magda: You make it sound like the world is just a bunch of angry lions waiting to chew up the kids.

Doug: Well, I mean, there are a few angry lions out there. Mostly it's just a bunch of penguins. Because I was reading about just how shameless capitalism has become.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: We were talking about Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. And we were talking about this fake investment group that tried to scam Riley Keough out of Graceland. You know, our kids are adults now. Have we prepared them to kind of call out bullshit when they see it. Since then, I've added a layer to this because we're the sandwiched parenting generation. Our kids are young adults and all four of the grandparents are alive, but there's just as much issue with people preying on elderly people as well. 

Magda: Right. 

Doug: So I feel like I have a lot of people to protect, least of all myself, when it comes to the potential for kids to get scammed out of stuff.

Magda: Well, okay. I think that what we're talking about here is boundaries. So much of this is about boundaries. And you're saying, have we taught our kids to stand up and protect themselves? But I think that that's only part of it, right? I think the whole view is: Have we taught our kids to establish and maintain their own boundaries, such that when somebody tries to breach their boundaries, they can respond appropriately instead of just reacting? Whether that means fighting back, holding a boundary, just letting something go because it's not worth it to them. I saw something online the other day that was like, “I'm going to teach my kids to punch anybody who punches them” or something like that. And I was like, you know, remember when our older one was in third grade and there were physical fights with the boys in his class? All the time. Every day.

Doug: All the time.

Magda: And we got called into the principal's office where the principal said to us, “Your kid drew blood on another kid. And I am supposed to expel your child for this. But I know that this is just this really negative cycle that these boys in the class have gotten into where they are all fighting with each other, and the teachers aren't fast enough on the playground to physically separate them from this. It’s a bad cycle, right?”

Doug: Well, fast is doing a lot of work there. Interested is another possibility.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Some of those playground monitors were pretty lackadaisical.

Magda: Well, yeah. But I see walking away as just as legitimate a response to having your boundaries breached as fighting back. And I think the question is, did we teach our kids to understand their own boundaries, their own power relative to the situation, the context of the situation? Like if those kids had just been at the playground and not at school and punching each other and our kid drew blood on one kid one day–because it wasn't the only time that that had happened. Other kids had drawn blood on other kids. In this whole cycle, if it had just happened on the playground, nobody would have cared. It was just because it happened at school that there was a big repercussion, and we were lucky that that principal didn't actually eject our kid from schooling.

Doug: Well, that was our saving grace because it was a TAG program, number one. But number two, he was a star.

Magda: Yeah, he was. He was the best principal I've ever encountered.

Doug: Almost as much of a star as our pediatrician was. You think about how lucky we were.

Magda: I know. But I think it's really about teaching kids to understand context and appropriateness. Who's your audience? Do you need to push back hard on people? Because sometimes you do. Sometimes that's all people understand. Is this actually an attack or did somebody just accidentally jostle you?

Doug: Well, it's a big understanding of no one to hold them and no one to fold them when you consider this is what could happen if I do this, and this is what will probably happen if I do that. Well, as is customary, you've boiled this down to a behavioral issue, which I think is important, just the idea of boundaries and trusting your instincts. 

Magda: Right. 

Doug: And that lends itself to a level of savvy. Because I'm thinking more in terms of a specific issue, not so much like... walking away from a fight on the playground, but recognizing when someone's coming after you, you can sniff out crap when it's coming, you know, to have some level of smarts that recognizes shit when you see it, but not so much that it totally undermines your sense of trust in humanity.

Magda: Right, basically having stopped the kids from being you.

Doug: Well, if my example helps my parents and my children become better people... And by the way, I'm not sure when this podcast became a Beat Up on Doug podcast, but all right.

Magda: When you started to realize that you were experiencing the world as a hostile place, like a year after the rest of us did.

Doug: Yeah. I'm behind the curve on this. I get it. 

Magda: Yeah, you are. I think, if anything, the banter, going back to the banter, has exposed... I didn't realize how deeply you experienced things as potentially hostile. Because that's absolutely not how I experience things.

Doug: See, isn't that another case for the usefulness of banter? And we're sitting here talking to each other. We're not messaging. You can see body language, intonation, context. That's what human communication was built on, not LOL, semicolon crap.

Magda: I think I see almost every interaction as a chance for a negotiation. And I see negotiations as chances for value to be created by both people getting something that they want without the other person having to give something up. I kind of see everything as one of those buy nothing groups or like a don't buy anything group. If I have something that is of value to someone else that is not of value to me at all that I can easily do or give them, it is fantastic for the universe as a whole if I can give that to that person. And the same if they have something that is of value to me that they can do or give me that isn't costing them anything to do or give to me, I would love to create that value. I have tried to help the kids see that that's a thing that can be done. And I've tried to model it with them when they want something and I want something. It's like, “How can we work this out?” You know, when I lived in Mexico, that was the phrase like when you needed to give somebody a bribe, you would say, how can we work this out? And that never bothered me.

Doug: No, I get it. I mean, haggling is an art. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. And there's just that fundamental fear that you walked away having paid too much. It's like when you do a freelance job, you pitch a job and they say, “Sure!” And you're like, damn it.

Magda: Yeah. But deadweight loss exists along every curve. And so are you going to get upset about it? Is it a really large amount that you underbid? Or is it an amount that makes up for not having to have extended negotiations, for them being willing to pay you in cash, for all this kind of stuff?

Doug: A desire to haggle or a comfort with haggling comes from, again, a good sense of self. That you know what you're talking about.

Magda: I don't see this as haggling. Because to me, haggling is trying to get the price down. And this is more of like, What will you accept? What would make you feel good? Can we come to something that makes you feel good and me feel good?

Doug: How is haggling different from negotiation?

Magda: Haggling is trying to get the person to give it to you for the lowest amount. Well, I see haggling is kind of disrespectful. I hate when people try to haggle with me. To me, it's like the opposite of a negotiation that's looking for value. It's looking to destroy value.

Doug: So you think negotiation’s in good faith and haggling is just for the sake of chipping down the price.

Magda: Yeah, exactly.

Doug: And that's less respectful. 

Magda: Exactly. 

Doug: Well, if you're self-assured in your ability to negotiate, that's a great skill to have. That is an underserved skill to have. Just like there's this great book called Poker is Life. Just in terms of how to bluff people, how to read people. It's an interesting skill to have. It's an important skill to have. I did some research for this discussion. I want to just lay out a couple of stories and a couple of facts for you. I was looking at the FBI website. 

Magda: Oh, okay. So we're talking about defending yourself and you started by looking at the FBI website. All right. 

Doug: In terms of data, in terms of how much were people scammed out of in 2023. And it's over $10 billion, which is up 30% from the year before. It was an alarming spike, people were noting. And it seems also, by the way, that the age ranges in which that $10 billion is spread out is kind of uniform. I mean, the older people do tend to fall for it more, but they also tend to be more victims because they have more money.

Magda: Right.

Doug: But the other story I saw, which I thought was fascinating, and again, this is an outlier, but it was a story about a woman who writes a financial advice column for New York Magazine, and she was scammed out of $50,000 cash. She put $50,000 in a shoebox and brought it out to a car parked in front of her house in New York City, and then broke down the tactics that they used, because they came into her with a bunch of information that, That she didn't think they would know. They knew her full social security number.

Magda: Oh, they blackmailed her.

Doug: No, no, no. I mean, many of these scams are based on you owe money or you're in trouble and this is how you pay it off. This is how you get out of it.

Magda: Okay.

Doug: And these scammers said “you have been identity thieved. And this person is now doing all kinds of crap in your name and you're going to get in trouble for it. There's drugs, there's kidnapping, there's fraud, and everyone's assets are going to get seized unless you do X, Y, and Z.”

Magda: And she didn't go to law enforcement or somebody who could see what... 

Doug: No. 

Magda: She didn't even log into Experian and see if there were miscellaneous frauds on her credit report? Like, I don't... 

Doug: Well, that's the thing. She logged into all that stuff and found nothing wrong. But you still listen because one of the tactics is you keep at this, you wear people down, you bring other people in. Like the first scammer pretended to be from Amazon. And then “I need to send you now to my colleague at the FBI.” And a second person came on. And now I have to direct you to my colleague at the CIA and put a third person on. And each of them said, whatever you do, wait a minute.

Magda: And they didn’t give them a number to call them back so you could call back? And they'd be like, “hello, CIA.” You'd be like, what? 

Doug: But this is what we're talking about. Because she talks about all this now. I mean, it's so brave of her to come across. Because they also talk about the trauma, what it's like to have been through this and been scammed. And how depressed you get, and how you withdraw from society and how scared you are of everything. She said, ultimately, they knew just enough about her. And of course, used that to get more information out of her. But they said, whatever you do, don't tell anybody about this because we're protecting them. Once you tell them this is going on, they're implicated. So don't tell your husband. 

Magda laughs. 

Doug: We can all laugh about this, but it's something that succeeded.

Magda: I'm laughing at it because to me it just seems so textbook and you would think that somebody who was financially savvy would be like, “oh, come on.” Do you remember, it was the neighbor, the girlfriend of that guy who was living in the apartment next to the apartment in New York who had been robbed in the subway at the ATM at the subway? You know, there was that ATM down in the subway station at Union Square. She gave him all of this money that she had taken out of her account. And she told me the story, and I said, why didn't you just start screaming? And she said, “I just didn't even think of it.” She said, “I was so surprised and so scared.”

Doug: You can't judge people in those situations. It's like watching Jeopardy. You're like, how did you not know that?

Magda: Well, that has stuck with me for a long time, that I guess that element of surprise really is it. And I think if you were going to go after somebody with a scam like this, it really would almost be a point of pride to be able to get somebody who was financially savvy like this advice columnist.

Doug: I feel like I'm picking at a scab here because most of us go through our lives every day and would prefer not to think about how much people are getting scammed out of money. I guess the median value is like, I don't know, $1,000, $800, $900, something like that. But it adds up because the stories get that much more plausible, especially as technology makes them that much more defensible. 

Magda: Right.

Doug: I'm looking to crowdsource this. As much as people even... let themselves think about something like this, given the day-to-day stresses that we're all living under. But if you've dealt with your parents, and I talk to my parents all the time, they get strange phone calls. They're very concerned about being phished. They get strange emails. They get called all the time by election officials. “Your vote doesn't count.” They are being told all sorts of things. And, you know, I used to make fun of my dad because he told me 15 years ago, I will never pay for a thing online with a credit card, The End. And he still hasn't. Right. And I kept saying to him, Dad, it's safe. You can do this. And now I'm thinking, you know what? You're right.

Magda: Okay. They still say that there's more fraud from physical receipts than from online transactions.

Doug: And I think there's a myth there as well. Like people are scared of air travel, even though it's like 20 times safer than car travel. Maybe a little less so currently, but statistically overall, it's much safer.

Magda: Exactly.

Doug: This is something that we don't think about. We don't have the bandwidth to conjure that as a possibility in our minds. And we think about how our parents are living, how our children are living, how we're living. It's not all lions, but there are lions out there. So I think in both cases, we're both trying to keep our parents and our children safe at the same time using different methods.

Magda: My parents had a problem probably 10 years ago. You know, like my dad would get a call from somebody that was like, “there's a problem with the password on your computer” and stuff like that. Now, they didn't know that my dad had been an IT guy, a systems architect, for years. And my dad also knew that this was a fake story. So my dad did not fall for it, but the calls became, I don't want to say like frequent, right. But they just started to be more varied as the scammers would change their story and stuff like that. So at a certain point they did some things to kind of lock down their finances so that it was harder. Like they weren't operating with multiple debit cards. They put locks on their credit, that kind of stuff, just so that structurally they were protected and they didn't have to rely on their own perceptions of the validity of these fraudulent situations. They were leaning on processes that they were able to set up. It would be impossible for someone to take all of their money because their money is in one account and it just tips out to the money that they spend in a smaller account. Does that make sense? They just put these protections in place. And when Uncle Tim died, we discovered that his financial life was set up the same way too. It would have been impossible for somebody, a small-time scammer, to scam him out of all of his money. Like they could have gotten a certain amount that was sort of his walking-around money, but he built structures to protect himself. And I think that that's one way to look at this. Like, even if it's just a decision tree. Like my decision tree is, I am never ever ever ever going to give money to anyone who calls me on the phone and asks me for it. Give me the information. Can you email me the information? Is there a URL I can go to? Give me the phone number to call back and I will call you back. All that is is a mechanism I've pre-decided. And there are plenty of times people call me and ask me for money that are totally fine, right? Like my college alumni association. And I think I'm trying to teach the kids to think in terms of like, you can just sort of pre-make these decisions. They're your policies of what kind of stuff you'll go along with and what kind of stuff you won't go along with personally, not even just financially to protect yourself. But, you know, make a decision.

Doug: It just made me think if this woman... didn't have the wherewithal to protect yourself against putting 50 grand in a shoebox. The guy asked, how much money do you have? 

Magda: Oh, no!

Doug: And she responded. It was the money she had saved to pay her taxes because she's a freelance writer. And so even people who purport to be on guard for such things can still fall for it. There's the four reasons why you should shut off immediately, right? Because usually someone who does this will either say you're in trouble or there's a prize. That's red flag number one, right? Flag number two is they're going to pretend that they're from a place you know of. Because they put that together based upon looking for data online. They know what organizations you're part of and they can fake that pretty quick. And then once it comes time for them to want payment, they're going to pressure you. 

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: They're going to say, don't hang up. Don't talk to anybody else about this and start acting in a way that doesn't make sense. Because law enforcement will never ask for money.

Magda: No.

Doug: But by the way, do you know that you can write off a theft once you've proved it?

Magda: No, I did not know that.

Doug: She called her accountant and the accountant said, once you file a police report, even though nothing will come of it, you'll have the police report and put that in your tax return. You can write that off.

Magda: That's a relief.

Doug: I know one of the other things they mentioned is now that software has gotten sophisticated enough where they can replicate someone's voice. So an elderly couple gets a call from a grandchild and says, I'm in trouble. I'm in a Thai prison.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And if you get this call, the strategy is to ask them a question that only they would know the answer to. Right. I'm curious about our listeners and the experience they had. If they're aware of all this, if they keep that as a point of conversation with their parents, with their kids, again, we're building a Fiftypedia here. We're building a library of information people can use to make their later lives better. And I think this is a big part of that.

Magda: I think if we're talking about our parents or the older generation, another area that we have to think about in terms of being taken advantage of is not just the I think they have so many more interactions with the health care system and have interactions with healthcare providers and sort of auxiliary providers and systems that are not necessarily trying to act in their best interest and don't really understand how to treat them kindly and to help them make their own decisions with things. You know, I think they get brushed off, in a lot of cases. Like, “You’re 80, why do you even care if this functions correctly?”

Doug: Yeah. 

Magda: And just not taken as seriously. I mean, my grandmother lived to the age of 101. And when she was like 90, 91, some doctor decided that she seemed weak or I don't even know what it was. But this doctor convinced her that she wanted to go into hospice. And I remember my mom being there, my mom being like, “what, you want to go into hospice?” And my grandma was adamant that they had said to her, you know, hospice is going to be the best solution for you. Now, for people who don't know what hospice is, hospice is probably the only functioning part of the U.S. healthcare system. It is a system that helps you die.

Doug: Yeah, in as most comfort as possible.

Magda: Yeah, in a good way. They just give you comfort care measure, they give you pain relievers, they send a nurse out to check on you every three or four days to make sure that you’re going ok. It’s really wonderful for people who are actively dying who don’t want to be in a hospital, who want to be treated kindly, who want to have end-of-life quality. But my grandmother was not actively dying. I don't understand what this was about. And so the hospice agency sent a nurse out to talk to my grandmother and my mother about hospice and how long my grandmother probably had left and all this kind of stuff. And a hospice nurse gave the talk about what to expect. And my grandmother was like, “What are you talking about? I'm not dying.” And realized that there had been this huge misunderstanding and her doctor just basically didn't want to deal with her anymore and wanted her to be in hospice to just sort of roll off his books. And so my grandmother checked herself out of hospice, and switched doctors to somebody that was actually happy to talk to her and happy to have her as a patient, and lived for another nine or 10 years after that. But I think that's not uncommon for old people to just be brushed off. And when I say old people, I kind of mean anybody over the age of 40, because I know a lot of us get brushed off by our providers, too.

Doug: I read the other day, Jimmy Carter has been in hospice for 16 months.

Magda: Six months now or how long? 

Doug: 16 months. 

Magda: 16 months. Wow.

Doug: He went into hospice in February of 2023. 

Magda: 16 months is a long time.

Doug: It's amazing. It's amazing. 

Magda: And it’s not hospice’s fault that he's not going on their timetable. But, you know, I think like the hospice people probably have more of an idea than anyone else of how long it will take an individual person to pass just because they've seen it so often. But I also think they understand that there is no one standard way that it happens. 

Doug: Right. I think, yeah, if he makes it to October, he'll make it to 100 years old. 

Magda: Wow. I don't... I mean, everybody's like, wow, you want to make it to 100. And when Bob Barker died, everyone was like, oh, he was only 99. He didn't make it to 100.

Doug: Yeah, Betty White didn't make it to 100 either. And it's like, you know what?

Magda: Does that matter? Like, do you get like fastpass to heaven when you get that third digit?

Doug: Remember Willard Scott?

Magda: Mmm hmm.

Doug: Yeah, he'd go and celebrate people's 100th birthdays and they all looked like they just wanted to be strangled immediately.

Magda: Yeah, I mean, my grandmother, like the last three years were not good for my grandmother. She really, really, really missed my grandfather who had been gone for, I don't know, like 30 years at that point. She didn't feel good physically. She was very limited in the things that she could do. For her, work was primary. She was always trying to do something that was work and that was useful. And she was unable to do anything that was useful, she thought. She just was done.

Doug: Well, we've steered clear of the discussion we started with, but It's kind of tangentially, technically related, I guess.

Magda: Yeah, but I mean, a lot of it is just like not allowing people to have agency on their own terms, and they're not knowing sort of what desires they're allowed to express. And our kids need to know what desires they're allowed to express also. So are our parents. And I think it's interesting to watch the different generations, you know, because our parents are Silent Generation and Boomers. Our kids are firmly Gen Z and the ideas they have about what they're allowed to ask for. And some of that is decades of being told what they're allowed to ask for. And some of it is just trying to figure out what is even available if they ask for it.

Doug: I think what I'm going to do for this episode, because this episode began as... I mean, I felt like I was just turning over welcome mats and looking at all the bugs, you know, and recognizing that even though we don't come in contact with this level of activity every day, it happens every day and people lose a lot of money. And it speaks to a greater issue, though, about when you launch your children into the world, how prepared are they? I mean, that's a greater issue now, considering how much of a slowdown in development COVID gave us and how much more depressed kids are and how much more just unaware of their surroundings, the way they need to function as adults.

Magda: A lot of things that shaped my thinking, especially about negotiations as being a way to create value and that sort of everything's a negotiation is the book, Getting to Yes, which is the classic of negotiation. Also the book, The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. And that one was one that a lot of us read when kids were little and we were worried about protecting them from sexual predators. But it's not just about protecting kids from physical violence. It's about protecting kids and yourself and just sort of trusting yourself when you think something sounds too good to be true or it sounds dangerous, it probably is. And it's about how to sort of give yourself a reality check. Most people tell themselves they're making too much out of something instead of telling themselves like you should be more careful. And so it was about how to basically avoid gaslighting yourself into accepting things that you shouldn't accept.

Doug: Which each of us does in some point or another every day. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Like what's the line? “We tell ourselves stories to survive,” you know, in terms of who we are and what we're doing and how it makes sense and how it's worthwhile and all that kind of stuff. Another book that I got a lot out of, did you ever read Angela Duckworth's book, Grit?

Magda: No, I've not read it.

Doug: In terms of trusting your knowledge, I mean, that's another issue too, because AI is teaching us not to trust what we're reading and trust what we're watching and trust what we're seeing. And you got to teach your kids and your parents where they can still stand. 

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And just so you know, we had our 200th anniversary, the bicentennial of Ann Arbor over the weekend. 

Magda: Okay. 

Doug: And part of the bicentennial was a Bikapalooza. There was a bike-a-palooza in the big parking lot, and I spent two hours talking to people about, isn't it great to have a bike? And don't get run over by a car. And bike people are good people. If you want to reaffirm your faith in humanity, go talk to bike people. So as far as my own personal journey, it's serving a very healing purpose.

Magda: Good.

Doug: But I think in general, it still put me in the mind of when our older kid bought his truck, he negotiated in good faith. He figured it out. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Anyway, so what we'd like to do is I'd like to crowdsource this. We're going to put a lot of this onto the Facebook page as well. If you have any experience with being scammed or saving yourself from a scam or a friend of a friend of a friend, I mean, this is a lot more pervasive than I think people think. Hundreds of thousands of people fall prey to this every year in some form or another. And there's a shame spiral involved in that. Not everyone talks about it. They want it to go away. They want to forget it happened, even though it has a lasting impact because you feel stupid. And that's a uniform emotion that we can all relate to. So we encourage you, if you would, go over to our Facebook group. We're going to post that question in there and let's have a conversation about what we're thinking about and how we're going to fix this going forward as the nature of truth erodes into complete vapor.

Magda: Again, the nature of truth isn't going anywhere. Like AI is obscuring things, but truth is still truth.

Doug: Have you seen what Google is doing now with your actual searches?

Magda: Oh yeah, I hate it. So have you started using udm14.com?

Doug: I want to hear all about this.

Magda: All right. So UDM14.com is kind of like a mirror search engine of Google, but without the AI. So you just search and it comes back the way Google used to, but without this stupid AI conglomeration thing at the top that is utterly ridiculous.

Doug: So who runs that search?

Magda: I don't know.

Doug: Oh, okay. Well, that's encouraging.

Magda: I don’t care. It's not Elon Musk.

Doug: They're not harvesting our data?

Magda: And it's not AI. So I don't care. 

Doug: Well, the real story now is Google is now basically what they want to do is they don't even want you to click on the sites from which they get the information. 

Magda: No, not at all. They put the AI thing at the top of the page. And so I assiduously scroll past the AI.

Doug: Because many of those are hilariously wrong.

Magda: Oh, yeah. Like there was one that said you're supposed to glue the cheese on the pizza. No, thank you.

Doug: And John F. Kennedy is still alive.

Magda: Right. 

Doug: And it's perfectly fine to stare into the sun. There's a whole Twitter feed that I was looking at. And again, who knows if that's real. Because one of the things our older kid taught me how to do, you can go into the settings of Google and just go into the code and change the text on any website ever and then take a screenshot of it. This is a whole other discussion, but what Google is essentially doing is cannibalizing the web because the websites they rely on for their information rely on the traffic that Google sends them.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And the consensus opinion is that this new AI at the top of the page, however good it is, and it sucks, it's going to take as much as 40% of all web traffic. And I guess the optimists are saying this is going to shake out all the charlatans and all the dreck that's out there that's AI generated and otherwise. 

Magda: Mm-hmm. 

Doug: But it's kind of interesting when you think of an AI generator using AI generated text. It's a copy of a copy of a copy. Basically, the only information you can rely on is going to be behind a paywall, which brings around other issues about access to information and how the web is no longer open. Well, on that note.

Magda: I mean, let's end. Let's just ask people. Go in the group. Tell us, A, do you want us to have less banter? B, do you know anyone who's been scammed? Have you been scammed? C, do you feel like you taught any kids in your life how to understand context around when they were being harmed and how to respond to that? And D, are you worried about your parents either being scammed financially, not being treated right by the healthcare system, any of that kind of stuff?

Doug: If you have single parents, they might be getting scammed romantically.

Magda: Yes.

Doug: They might be getting catfished. Yeah. Yeah. But other than that, everything's fine. And our banter is the perfect amount and everything's just groovy. Go about your business. Thank you for tolerating episode 47 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French, bantering away to a quantity as yet to be determined.

Our guest has been the pervasive nature of scamming and how prevalent it is and how we protect ourselves against it. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter every Friday. If you're on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review there. That really helps. See you next week for episode 48. Until then, have a great week and hang on to your wallets. Bye-bye.