The 404 Media Podcast - How Influencers Fake Being Rich

0:01The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday.

0:30wherever you get your podcasts. We're here in the private jet. We're on our way to Ibiza, got the passport, got the Prosecco. You want to be rich like us? You learn how to do journalism. You take our online course, publish articles, you get subscribers. It's that easy. Follow us, figure out how to learn more, can be rich like us. Take our online course, check out the dashboards. I'll show you. You want proof? I'll show you. Hello, and welcome to the 4 for Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL.

1:034 for Media is a journals-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4formedia.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 4formedia.co. I'm your host, Sam, today. Joseph is out this week. And with me are 4 for Media co-founders, Emmanuel Myberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hey, what's up? And we have two...

1:33Crazy wacky cool stories both from Jason today Jason is paying pennants for being out the last couple weeks so I'm gonna Grill Jason about this story, which is a fan favorite and I'm a fan The headline for it is how I bought a private jet by selling $10 subscriptions to 4 for media first of all congrats Jason on your private jet. I can't wait to fly it to various festivals and conferences like Davos and such. I mean, let's just stay at the top. Jason does not have a private jet. Unfortunately, he was doing something called Lark Influencing, which I believe you learned about via social media. Can you tell me where you first ran into this? Yeah. So I guess I've been

2:30thinking for quite some time that a lot of the hustle bros, which I guess I'll define as people who are like, I make a lot of money on the internet by doing something, whether that be making an AI influencer, whether that be like day trading, whether that be doing like Airbnb hustling, whether that be crypto stuff. Like I've had the sneaking suspicion that a lot of them are lying.

2:59and that they are not wildly wealthy. But I think that if you are one of these people, very often you post videos of yourself driving luxury vehicles, being in a private jet, being in like really exotic locations, like, you know, being in Bali, things like that. And the story goes that, you know, they got all this money to buy the Lambo, to buy the private jet by doing some sort of online hustle.

3:28and they can teach you to do that online hustle. If only you'll buy their course and their course usually costs like $30 a month or $100 a year or more than that. And I suspected for quite some time that this was fake or that a lot of these were fake that these people don't actually have private jets. They don't actually have Lamborghinis. And I knew that you could rent a Lamborghini for a day that you could like.

3:56ride on a yacht and take pictures of yacht. But on my TikTok feed one day, I was basically served a piece of software that allowed you to like fake a dashboard for Shopify, for only fans, for Stripe, which are these, you know, different online payment processors and platforms where you can sell subscriptions. And basically, They allowed you to pick the dashboard, which is like the page that shows you the analytics of how much money that you're making. And I clicked into this account, and the entire account was about LARPing, which we can define in a second, but it's basically like pretending to be rich when you're not rich. And so it had all these tips for how to pretend to be rich when you are not rich. It reminds me of... I also ran across this on social media, but they're this company. I forget the name of it.

4:56But all they do is sell fake cash and various cases to display your stacks of bills. And it's like, it's their entire business. It's like a pretty high-end service. And as you can imagine, it's like if you're shooting a video and you want to hold half a million dollars and pretend that you have that in cash, you could just go to them and get that. This has been a thing forever.

5:25And music and flexing on social media and so on and I think everyone understands like a suitcase full of cash You've called This in the piece the new economy and I think a sign of that is it's not just a Lambo It's not just the private jet which we can get into it's not just cash It's these dashboards and like that says a lot about the state The economy I suppose what what what what are some of the dashboards that you can fake? How do you fake them? And I guess like What more philosophically what do you think it means that like showing the back end of an only fans or a? What's another popular one, but what would be a strike strike strike? Yeah, like what do you think that that says about the current state of things?

6:25Well, I think that this has, so basically like for a while people who were larping, let's also just say larping stands for live action role play like historically and is part of like gaming culture and is like appropriate from gamers very broadly speaking and then also appropriate from like people who like reenact.

6:53Like sword fights in parks and things like this like what do you guys what do you guys know? LARPing to be because that the use of it as like LARPing as a rich person is new and that is like gone viral in the last only few months I think but like it now seems to be kind of the dominant way that term is used at least on like to talk in Instagram I mean I think of like battlefield reenactors right or like sword and sorcery fantasy like those are the two LARP Worlds that I think of Civil War reenactment I would say is like the OG LARPing but the term itself is popularized by literally taking the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and Bringing it to like the physical realm Yeah, and yeah the park when you go to the park and you see people beating each other with foam swords and saying like fire fire spell fire spell That's that that's that's LARPing

7:53Yeah famously in the movie role models is like where I learned about it. But yeah, there's also like a good documentary I think where where I really like caught on in popular culture, but I think it just I mean to your question about like why it became Such a popular term to describe other things is that it's like it's a very powerful Metaphor, you know what I mean for someone pretending to be something that they clearly are not in like a No offense. I'm into it. I don't personally do it, but like nothing but respect to my my various wizards out there But it's just like to an outsider. It seems pretty pathetic to be like I am a I am a knight, but You're just a guy in a in a It doesn't have a good reputation for sure. It's not like seeing it's not looked upon as a cool thing to do Definitely, but like people get really into it and I think it is super interesting that like

8:50the there's this emergent like modern day larping as Like as an aspirational thing. It's like the new like wizard is This dude with a broccoli haircut who's got a really fat stripe account. That's so Strange to me, but I guess it makes sense Because that is like the status that marker that we have now I'm going to answer your question about the dashboards and manual, but I think first like I asked that because Now you can like LARP as anything like you can LARP. It's like you take on the role of an only fans model of like a music producer as like an actor as an influencer as a celebrity. It's like this idea of fake it till you make it. And the idea of like pretending to be someone that you're not online goes back forever to like time immemorial.

9:50And for a while, like when people were larping as rich people, like when they were being like, hey, I got rich doing this stuff on the internet. What they were doing was they were downloading these clip packs. And so what that means is they were basically just buying stock footage of fancy places. And then they were like editing TikToks and Instagrams using this footage that either they stole from somewhere else or they bought from someone.

10:19or that they got from Pinterest. And what happened was people started being like, you bought that, like you're larping. This is fake. Like where's the proof? Where's the proof? And so what has become the proof has been like, I will show you a screenshot of my account and my account will say that I have tens of thousands of subscribers. It will show that I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It will show that I'm making that I made a million dollars last year on OnlyFans or whatever. And like honestly, when I was writing about AI slop and people making a lot of money on Facebook and that sort of thing, a lot of the times people would be like, I made $20,000 by having this image on Facebook go viral. And then all the comments would be show dash, show dashboard, show dashboard. Like where's the dashboard? Like where's the proof?

11:19And so the rise of this dashboard faking has been in response to that, where basically what the software is, is it is a modifiable back end that looks like Stripe, that looks like Shopify, that looks like OnlyFans, and you can type anything you want into it. You can type that you sold the $3 billion worth of whatever product.

11:46Yesterday if you want to you just it's literally just typing stuff in there's graphs and you can like click and drag them to show whatever so if someone was like sees a footage of you on your Yacht and they say like where's the proof you can show them this and Not only can you show them a screenshot? But you can show them a video of your laptop because it's literally software that is emulating and mocking the actual back end and so I mean I think One, it's like a culture where people think that it's cool to be on a yacht, but they also think it's cool to just show screenshots of their bank accounts or in this case, their Stripe accounts or whatever. But also, the LARPing has gone so far, the faking has gone so far that people are creating fake software to fake this so that people can

12:41fake their their lifestyle so that they can sell a fake course and presumably try to make some real amount of money by Doing a pyramid scheme where it's like look you wanted to get rich just emulate me buy my course and then like of course their courses bullshit like almost always Yeah, I think before we move on to some of the more old-fashioned physical larping you did just like linger on the on these fake dashboards for a minute i think it's interesting that people are not. Saying oh like let me get a fake capital one dashboard to show you my bank account it's about. These platforms everybody is aware.

13:34Of the rich people or the people who are getting rich on these platforms like whatever star on only fans or whatever star on twitch or people on stripe or patreon or. You know even something like ghost that we use everybody wants to get rich that way and that is the fantasy that is being sold to you but it is if you if you spend like just like two minutes thinking about it you can.

14:03come to the conclusion that it's a scam because the numbers of how many people get that wealthy from these platforms is kind of out there. And they're all extremely lopsided in the sense that there's like 1% or half a percent of people who make a lot of money and then the rest of them make no money, right? It's like, this is what you see.

14:32Only fans stars say in their bio that they're like top 1% on only fans or You know everybody talks about how much most twitch streamers have Like under five or no viewers watching them. That's like the vast majority of people On the platform and I'm guessing it just like is this what you're referring to by the new economy it's like this idea that people are not getting rich by Getting a great job or even owning a great business. It's just like I am the winner in this dog pile on only fans Which I mean if you get rich Great, most likely you will not but I feel like the the effect of like these fake dashboards is like net positive for all the platforms, right like

15:31Well, it's become a flex to show this and I think it's become more of a flex to show your only fans back end than it is to show your Chase account back end or whatever because I think it is because there is like some sort of cache that comes with like, I am a self-made person who like made this money because I'm popular on the internet.

15:55Versus like I don't know a chase account like maybe you inherited that money maybe it came from working a cringe w2 job like a nine to five or something and here it's like I created something out of nothing like on the creator economy like on YouTube I became a big youtuber I made like all this money like here's why you should trust me versus like If I was just showing you, hey, I have a lot of money. It's like well, maybe it's your dad's money Maybe it's like maybe someone died and you inherited it like whatever And here it's like well, I'm like a self-made person who like figured out the secret to the internet like I figured out how to game the algorithm or like if you're making it in AI only fans model or actually they sell fan view dashboards as well, which is like what

16:46AI models are using because only fans doesn't allow AI models at least last I checked Sam today. Hello now. I mean you have to you have to have like a real idea attached to your account no matter what Yeah, it has to match the content that you're making so Yeah, so basically it's like it's like I made I made an AI girl who's like so hot that like all these people wanted to subscribe and like here you should you should listen to me and that I think that's kind of like why this has so much cachet behind it I'll also say that like after I published this story about These fake dashboards and things like that. I didn't write about this Because I just got the tip and I think it's maybe too small to do but like

17:40One of our readers like figured out that you can just like break into these dashboards and not pay for them because they're vibe coded and they're just like really shitty, but like they are being put together to like fill some sort of like hole in the market. And so it's like not clear how many people are doing this, but they're quite expensive. It's like the Shopify fake dashboard is $149 a month and it's like You got to sell a lot of so much. It's so much. It's crazy And it's just like it's unclear like how many people are doing this and it's funny because on the website itself They're like we're almost sold out of these dashboards because we're keeping them really You know like exclusive only and only a few people are allowed to buy it because we want to keep this secret And so like there's an air of exclusivity to all of that as well. It's it's very silly

18:35And then I want to talk about one other piece of software before we talk about like what I did in real life, but there's another one called fake notifications and I bought this one on telegram and This one was a bargain. This was I think a hundred dollars, but it's a lifetime use so I don't have to I didn't have to cancel the subscription But basically it's a web app that You install on your phone. So it's a mobile website, but then you install it as a bookmark So it looks like an app on your phone and you give it notification the ability to send your phone notifications and it's spoof notifications from Shopify or from Stripe and you can make that notification say anything and you basically like go into your Into this little app you type what you wanted to say

19:30And then you type how many notifications you want it to send your phone. And then you can also have it generate random email addresses, presumably using AI, like fake email addresses. And so I can like click a button on my phone and I can just send myself tons of notifications that make it look like people are like buying my product. And so this also allows you to be like, I am making so much money that I am like getting notifications as we speak. And I'm pulling it up on my phone right now. I can send myself like hundreds of notifications. Like I'm going to send myself 300 notifications right now. And it's just like, this is the back end. You can maybe see a little bit of it, but it's like- You're blowing up right now. I'm blowing up. It's just like new subscriber, new subscriber, new subscriber.

20:26It's that it's like even that can be faked, you know I would like fix my social media addiction. I think my little pacifier of dopamine Honestly, I felt something when I was using this. Yeah. Oh my god. Like yeah, here we go like making a lot of money Because I as as we'll talk about it's like I turned this into a fake 404 media subscribers and then I clicked a button and I was like, wow, new subscriber, new subscriber, new subscriber. And to be clear, like we use Stripe as our backend and this is the notification looks the exact same as the real one is fully, fully spoofed. I was going to say, should we take a break there to talk about the physical arping? Yeah, let's take a break. We have at this point written an embarrassing number of stories about data brokers.

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28:02Yeah, so I learned that these fake softwares existed and this like notification app existed and all this and I started sending myself notifications making myself feel like I was making lots of money and I was changing the dashboard to like look like I had a lot of subscribers and I you know tied 404 media in but I was just like sitting In my bedroom while I did this and it didn't feel very luxurious. It didn't feel as though I were rich and I had seen enough of these tiktok accounts where I was kind of like You know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna go try to get some content I'm gonna go try to film some content show people that I actually am rich that and just basically copy what these guys are doing to see like how difficult it is and

28:56because I live in LA and so much of the economy of LA is influencer focused and also Hollywood focused. There's a lot of photo studios. And so I googled private jet photo studio and there was one and it's never, it's almost never booked out. It was $60 for an hour. And I was just like, I'm going to book, I'm going to book this photo studio. I'm going to go take pictures in a private jet.

29:26And so to be clear, it's not actually a private jet. It is like a warehouse in a like relatively poor part of LA that you are basically like you book it, you're sent a code to enter. The code didn't work like it was a nightmare getting in and out of this place. And you like open this creaky old door and then there is like the...

29:56Interior of a private jet and lights there and you can just like take photos and they're pretending like you're rich What do you mean by the interior of a private jet like what what is it actually? That's a very leading question it is it is just like a room with some shitty pleather couches in it And like some circle like some air airplane window Like cutouts, but they're just they're not actually windows. They're made to look like windows, but they're just LED lights that are in a circle form, right? I'm just saying like there's actually There are real either for movies or for whatever there's like decommission jets that people use for this purpose I was a PA once in a production where we had to wire a decommission jet to look like a functioning airplane for a movie and

30:53We did it on an actual decommissioned airplane. This is not that it's like there's no part of an actual it's like just a piece of plywood You're in it. You're you're in an unair conditioned room In a warehouse that has been built like with two by fours and like styrofoam and It's funny because a few weeks ago my brother was visiting and I went I went on a studio tour like that's another popular thing to do in LA is like you go to the Paramount studio you go to the Sony studio. So we went to the Sony studio and like. They let you see some of the sets that they build for like Hollywood movies and the entire time like. The tour guide is like yeah it's all made of styrofoam it's and you can just like you see this like load bearing wall.

31:43like and he just like shoves it over it's like weighs nothing and it like basically it was that and i mean i think that's one of another reason why like la has so many of these is that it has tons of people who work in film who make different sets for movies and tv shows and so presumably that skill transfers out to like building a fake private jet interior and yeah you like walk in and and it's like concrete floors and one side is like a dressing room where you can like get ready to go in your private jet and then the other is just like an open like there's a partition and it's open and it's just another room and it has like a little bit of a lower ceiling and it has like airplane signs in it where it's like don't bother the pilot like it says on the wall and things like that.

32:36But yeah to be clear like you can go to the Santa Monica Airport for example where there's there were there's real private jets and you can like Take photos there if you pay someone who has a private jet Which is something that that's like other advice given in the LARPing community is that like you can pay actual like significantly more than $60 to do this I found one that does photo shoots in real private jets for influencers and for like engagement photos, things like that. That was like a few hundred dollars. I could have easily done that, but I was just like, I'm gonna do this as shitty and as quickly as possible and see what it looks like. Yeah, it's like basically like, they felt like Amtrak tables, like the cafe car of an Amtrak and then like these white like cracking pleather, like Ottomans basically.

33:36To be fair as bad as that looks and my favorite part is that it's just like Yeah, it's like somebody bought some love scene on Wayfair and put it in the room and that's like the the airplane seat but When when you the final product like the thing that you use these photos for these photos and videos It doesn't I mean I don't think you need a private jet like it works. You know what I mean like on camera It looks like a private jet. It looks like you're you're living you're living the dream. I think it turned out pretty good. Honestly, like if you put a really shallow depth of field, like the background is blurred and it's like I put on a suit top. I put on the suit top that I wore to Sam's wedding and I brought a bottle of Prosecco that I had in my house that was like leftover from a party.

34:32And I was like, I don't know. I feel like I'm on a private jet. It's like 8,000 degrees in here. And I had to keep stopping filming because I could hear a power saw going because they were building another set next door. And these things are not soundproof whatsoever. And so I was like, not so luxurious. I also was fully by myself, which I think made it a lot funnier because these exist so that...

35:01You can show how much fun you're having with your friends. I was like by myself with a tripod, like using the self timer on my camera. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the reason it works is that you sold it and that you looked really happy. I was like, damn Jason is really, he's really feeling it. He's living the life.

35:20I was really happy because sometimes I start working on a story and I'm like, this is so ridiculous. It's like so stupid. And I was like, I'm having a good time legitimately. So let's play a clip of it before we move on. Let's play a clip so people can hear the joy in Jason's voice and see the jet that we're talking about. We're here in the private jet. We're on our way to Ibiza, got the passport, got the prosecco. You want to be rich like us? Learn how to do journalism.

35:49So there's no point in you shooting in this fake studio if you didn't post it somewhere. So tell me how you actually produced this like sizzle reel of your rich lifestyle and your pitch to do journalism and get rich.

36:14Let me tell you the other two things that I did because they they were good too. I'll be quick I went to the jewelry district in LA which is like uncut gems vibes like there's just kiosks and like tons of gold there and stuff and I had bought some jewelry there like five years ago and When I talked to the guy he was like you ever need anything like Come back here, and I told him I was a journalist and showed him my instagram Like I don't know that that's just like he was like oh cool like you want to do a photo shoot sometime come back And I was like maybe he'll let me hold a bunch of gold But he wasn't there so I was leaving kind of like dejected and right next to the jewelry district there is a Jewelry box wholesaler that just sells jewelry boxes and jewelry bags and so I bought

37:03Empty box empty jewelry boxes and empty like fancy bags to put the jewelry in for like eight dollars and I put I just like carried them around and film myself as though had just like bought bought a bunch of jewels and then I went to a Marina that's kind of near my house where rich people have yachts and I just like stood outside of it filming myself I do this all in one day. I was just bopping around But I say that because I basically like filmed a bunch of videos of myself and then I just dumped them on a person that I found on Fiverr who does this for a living. As in like Fiverr, which is the gig work platform, has an entire category of people who just make like hype videos on Instagram and

37:57Is that the category? Is that what we're talking about? Is that what you made? Yeah, it was like vertical video advertisement category editing. But like hype video is the genre. It's like it's the thing. I'm calling it hype video, but like basically everyone on Fiverr, like you kind of like click through different profiles and people show examples of the type of video that they make. And some of them make like straightforward advertising for malls or like I will do like I will cut down a clip of your city council meeting for the public access channel or something and that those are like boring ones which are very thankless and that sort of thing but then there's some that are like action like they advertise in their fiber profile that they do like high energy Instagram videos editing basically.

38:57The person, what's their name? Let's give credit. EJAS. So EJAS clearly understood the assignment. It did not feel like the first time that he made a video like this. Like, I've definitely seen this type of video on Instagram. It seems like he has made something like this before. Did you give a special instruction or you would like make me one of those? So...

39:22I made a Google Drive of footage. I dumped it in there. And honestly, it was late at night, and I was like, I don't really know what to say. So here's what I wrote. I said, hi, here's a lot of footage. Basically, I want a few videos that highlight the private jet, the jewelry, and becoming rich. It is very important that the notifications and Striped dashboard are shown. The videos should also feature quick scrolls of 404media.co, our website, and a lot of transitions. And that's all I said. And he turned around three incredible videos based on like, they were like, they were great. They were really great. And they're all like 16 seconds long. And they are full of like cuts and sound effects and things like that. And they are basically exactly the type of video that.

40:20I've seen all of these larpers and hustle bro influencers make so Yeah, he understood the assignment there was I had no edits for him like it was truly one of those things no notes vibes I think I think I paid $60 for three videos I Got the sense that he did this in his sleep because like he sent me one and he was like is this good And I said yes, and he said okay, I'll do the other two and then like 20 minutes later he sent me the other two so I mean hopefully it was something where he just gets a lot of work from from doing this this sort of thing but that the reason that I did fiverr and not like edited myself or had Evie on our team edited it is because I wanted to be true to form because

41:15that's what a lot of these people do is they go on fiber and they find people to edit their footage for them and make them look rich, basically. All this reminds me of, do you remember like two or three years ago, I think it was like 2024, you wrote about the fake live stream viewers and how you could like create like a fake stream where it's just like you're getting so many views all the time.

41:42That is so true. I do remember that I should have mentioned that in the article But yeah, basically there was like this fake app where you could it looked like you're on a live stream and it had AI generated comments and AI generated like usernames and things in that and I mean that was really Gross for a million reasons, but it was specifically gross because it was like made by a pickup artist vibes and the whole point of the app was for you to like show people at bars that you were Popular like a lot of a lot of streamers watching you and things like that. Yeah, totally works. That's yeah chicks love that shit When you and you're like look how many viewers I have and now I'm streaming you through my Meta glasses. That's something that we can do now Yeah, I don't know that just came to mind. It's like this whole culture of like the new markers of success our social media success and

42:37Really all they're doing I mean I like the point of all of this which I guess we haven't like explicitly said yet is to buy your course like that's the whole idea is like this multi-level marketing idea of like By my course by my course and be successful like me which is another thing and you guys mentioned this earlier But it's another thing that if you take two seconds to think about Doesn't make sense because the idea of it is to be the standout in a very crowded field So why would you want more people to know how to do this?

43:06But the point of all of this is to buy my course not to fake being rich but to actually like the idea is to tell you how to get rich Which they're not so they can't tell you how to be But also yeah, I mean do you want to just talk about just like the end goal of all of this? I guess is to to sell more grip Yeah, I mean it's like it's pure it's a pyramid scheme on top of a pyramid scheme like actually so where it's like nominally there is the like i am going to teach you how to make an ai influencer by my course like that is a type of person on instagram now there's like a lot of them and all of them have these like 30 per month course you get like a pdf that shows you which software to use

44:02It usually includes like prompts and things like this like we've done articles about these before and they usually like come with access to some sort of discord or something like that and There are that that's one of those examples where like the person making that is not getting rich with the AI girl the Person making that is getting rich selling the course for how to make the AI girl and it's not clear whether they're getting rich or not But it's like that is their business model. Their business model isn't like I'm good at making the AI girl. It's like I'm good at making marketing for my course. And often the course is like shitty and AI generated everything like the PDF is AI generated. I bought like 10 of these by the way like over the course of 404 media just while like reporting on these things. And they're always terrible. So there's like that that is a pyramid scheme. And now there's a pyramid scheme beneath that where

45:02They are people are selling the dashboards and software and like the larping toolkits and all of this for that guy So that guy can make up your mid-scheme and a course and all that and so I mean it does Earlier a man. You said I call it like the new economy. I think I actually called it or I think it's like part of the depravity Economy is is what I was calling it where it's just like really depraved. It's like scam on scam on scam and it's Every like inch of the market that is like underserved Something will arise to like fill it. I think and so like that's kind of I think what is happening here where it's like I'm gonna go go make this like whatever I'm gonna make these tools for these for you to make your tools for this to make another tools and it's like it's just all like so fucked up honestly I feel like

45:55Eons ago when there were ads for like shady here's how to make money schemes on TV it was like I don't know go to trucking school go to video game development college and it's like They're kind of fake right? It's like your chances of becoming a very successful video game developer especially now are not really good, but at least the The dream being sold is like hey you get a job and you learn a skill And that's how you make money and now it's like i'm thinking about uh one person you wrote about a couple times i think is his name is musa right like he he does like uh Short form video and like a whole part of his pitch Is like he describes his day and it's like i woke up i posted a video it took me five minutes and then i went back to bed and i made $15,000 that day it's like the idea is you don't work right it's like and i think that is part of the

46:51The the fantasy being sold like showing your bank account showing like your capital one bank account that Suggest you got a job. Maybe you went to school Maybe you build business relationships and now you work really hard and you make money. That's like who cares about that It's like that's that's not real. I just want to like, you know post images or videos to social media and get rich That way and I think that is really indicative of like obviously this is not this is not real But like the economy or at least what people want to do is kind of pointing in that way because nobody has faith in the idea that you can like get a job and build wealth and yada yada yada. The story is always like it's so easy if i'll show you how and you can do it from your phone and it's like once it's like a set it and forget it like automated recurring revenue like all of this sort of thing.

47:44Yeah passive income and I guess the thing we didn't even really mention is that like in all my videos it was like I'll teach you to get rich by being a journalist and blogging and all of that which is really That was part of the joke because it's famously very difficult to get make a sustainable Journalism business let alone like get rich doing it like selling blogs on the internet and I was like take my journalism course. I didn't make a journalism course. There was no course But maybe we should do that that could be fun. What's our three-step journalism course? What are the three steps to becoming a successful journalist? Dude, I don't know write down facts. It's not blogging. I think it's like pick the worst profession in the worst time Quadruple down on your bad decision Yeah, you're going to massive student loan debt

48:38Yeah, have no other scales Burn the boats and get extremely lucky. Those are more than three steps. Yeah, exactly. Yeah The last thing I'll mention is that like when I was doing this the the story ends on a very wholesome note I feel which is like when I was looking for footage to send to eJazz to make it look like I was rich and stuff. I was like, oh I like my life. I've had a nice time like there's a look like I've taken some nice vacations in my time like I've hung out with friends I have been on boats before like you know boat rides not I don't have inflatable raft and the canal is not the same thing I had a nice time. I had a nice time on it. What can I say? I know it made me feel like oh I have like tricked myself into feeling happy

49:34By doing this done So I don't know the wealth is what you built along the way. It's very true The more the wealth your friends. Yeah, that's right Okay, should we take a break there and then do another story? Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll go back for the subscribers supporters section where we're gonna talk about actual wealth unfortunately As a reminder, 4 for Media is journalists founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 4 for Media and directly support our work, go to 4formedia.co. You'll get limited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about our story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for this podcast.

50:28That helps us a lot. This has been All For Media. We'll see you again next week.