January 25, 2019 • 19 mins
And the votes failed to re-open the government. The Senate voted on two proposals, one backed by Republicans and one backed by Democrats, but neither gained enough support. There are hopes however that now that we know what won’t pass, the two sides can come to a consensus on what will pass. Shannon Vavra, reporter for Axios, joins us for another failed bid to stop the longest government shutdown in history.
Next, as we continue to wallow in endless robocalls and spam calls, the nation’s four major wireless companies are trying to give you a heads up when a bad call is coming through. For T-Mobile users, suspicious calls now show up on your caller ID labeled as “Scam Likely.” Dalvin Brown, consumer tech reporter for USA Today, joins us for the continued fight to save you from robocalls.
Finally, a pair of documentaries about the failed Fyre Festival have been released on Hulu and Netflix. It was billed as a luxury music experience on Pablo Escobar’s former island complete with beautiful Instagram models, but it was all a fraud. Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes, joins us for what the Fyre Festival documentaries reveal about Millennials and social media influencers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday janu I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the Daily Dive. The votes failed to reopen
the government. The Senate voted on two proposals, one backed
by Republicans and one backed by Democrats, but neither gained
enough support. There are hopes, however, that now that we
(00:21):
know what won't pass to reopen the government, the two
sides can come to a consensus on what will pass.
Shannon Varvara, reporter for Axios, joins US for another failed
bid to stop the longest government shut down in history. Next,
as we continue to wallow an endless robo calls and
spam calls, the nation's four major wireless companies are trying
(00:42):
to give you a heads up when a bad call
is coming through. For T Mobile users, suspicious calls now
show up on your caller I d labeled as scam likely.
Dalvin Brown, consumer tech reporter for USA Today, joins US
for the continued fight to save you from robo calls. Finally,
a pair of document ring is about the failed Fire
festival have been released on Hulu and Netflix. It was
(01:04):
billed as a luxury music experience on Pablo Escobar's former island,
complete with beautiful Instagram models. But it was all a fraud.
Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes, joins us for what the
Fire Festival documentaries reveal about millennials and social media influencers.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in. One of
(01:25):
the ideas suggested as they open it, they pay a
sort of a pro rated down payment. I'll tell you
who wants us to happen. The military wants us to
happen because this is a virtual invasion of our country
of drugs, of human traffickers. It's an invasion of our country.
Joining us now is Shannon Vavra, reporter for Axios. The
(01:46):
government shutdown continues. It's in its thirty fifth day now.
One quick thing that happened was the issue of the
State of the Union address. The President and Nancy Pelosi.
We're going back and forth fighting about postponing at Nancy
Pelosi sent Trump a letter saying we've got to postpone
this thing because the shutdown. There was back and forth.
The President finally conceded and said, all right, I'll wait
(02:07):
until the government reopens for us to do this in
the right place. What's interesting about that is, we're starting
to see Trump's wall that he's put up here and
his insistence on the border, while we're starting to see
corumble a little bit. Just in that one moment with
it was him saying, oh, yes, Nancy pelosie does have
that prerogative. And they're really seeing how far Pelosi is
getting into his head to write. He's tweeting. Pisays Nancy Pelosi.
(02:28):
I call her Nancy, which isn't even a nickname, right,
And so yeah, I thought the exact same thing when
that happened. It's just comical to laugh at. But you're
right though. It shows how much power Nancy Pelosi has
in this fight, how much power the Democrats in the
House have now that they've taken control there. And the
President is realizing as this the shutdown continues to go on,
that there are consequences and that he does need to
(02:50):
make a deal. So he did concede. They're talking about
the state of the Union or whether President Trump will
be able to deliver it in the House Chamber and
who's going to introduce that resolution to authorize right, it's
all posturing. It's it's the same reason why we know
it is actually was reported Miss McConnell and President Trump.
We're talking about that negotiated deal that they presented on
the Senate for today for votes. We know that they
(03:11):
were hoping to do that to sweeten the deal for
Democrats and to try and make it look like in
future election years Republicans would be able to say, well,
the Democrats actually voted against expending DOCTA protections, they voted
against renewing the Violence Against Women Act, and so it's
all this posturing around this one idea of a five
point seven billion border wall. Let's talk about the two
bills that the Senate voted on to try to reopen
(03:33):
the government. One was sponsored by Democrats, one was sponsored
by Republicans. On the Republican side, it had the funding
for the border wall. That one didn't pass. The Democrats
side had a clean funding bill, wasn't going to give
money for the wall, but did expand some other border
security protections that also didn't pass. Right, And what we're
seeing from the specific vote counc there is actually really
(03:53):
interesting to pull apart. So the Democratic plan had actually
more yeas and yes votes than the Trump and ch
McConnell plans, and then all of them had more GOP defections,
so it's overall had more support, and that's an indication
that president term of the White House, they're likely looking
at now moving forward in terms of what kinds of
proposals they can put forward if negotiations are seriously back
(04:13):
on the table. And then on the flip side that
we also see that was the six Republicans, we had Gardner, Makowsky, Collins, Ronney,
Alexander and Isaacson all broke party line to vote for
the Democrats, and we interestingly have Joe Manchin, who's the
Democrat vote for the Trump's proposal. It's interesting how this
is all playing out so publicly. Everybody's reporting on it
(04:34):
furiously because just how long the shutdown has extended because
of all of this. But a lot of people are
very hopeful that even though the bills did not pass,
at least everybody's on record now they've all voted, so
they know where everybody stands, and it could be the
beginning of concessions from both sides on working on how
to figure it out where we can meet in the middle. Right,
But that's exactly the thing is both Nancy Pelosi had
(04:56):
a press conference and after the votes took place, and
she seems firm as ever. And then President Trump also
spoke with reporters after the votes took place, and he's
saying things like, oh, there are other alternatives we can
turn to. We know he's talking now about accepting a
continuing revolution if it has some sort of a down
payments on the wall, which would indicate that there would
be future down payment trade. And the question is, if
(05:17):
there is a continuing resolution to reopen the government, what
happens then after that temporary opening, do we have another
shutdown if there's no border wall funding. And there's just
so many questions about whether President Trump will maintain his
stance here that it's it's I'm almost anybody's best guess
what happens in the next twenty four hours. Going back
to the politics of it, you know, the President made
this such a central part of his campaign. We're going
(05:38):
to build a wall in Mexico is going to pay
for it, And he's kind of pinned himself against the
wall with this. Ironically, right, it's obvious that Mexico is
not going to pay for this. I know they say
that's going to happen in some form with the new
trade agreement that we have going, but that's not really
born out just yet. So he needs to get this done.
He needs to have this go through for him to
have any prospects of appeasing his base. In terms of
(06:00):
whether his base actually supports this, we know that his
approval rating is starting to take a little bit more
than usual, in particular because Republicans aren't necessarily backing him
in his fight for the water anymore. They used to
be impenetrable and their support for President Trump. This is
one of the things that's actually started appealing some of
the support away from him, So he's probably gonna start
feeling the burn of that, in addition to the harms
(06:22):
that federal workers are experiencing right now as a result
of not having liquidity. Not to mention the fact that
we've had Kevin Hassett from the White House concede that
if the shutdown continues through quarter one, there will be
zero growth, and we know that President Trump likes to
count economic set so that's something that President has is
likely thinking about as well. Shannon Varvara, reporter for Axios.
(06:42):
Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you the
amount of time between you dialing a phone number and
the time it takes for someone to pick up or
before someone those starts ringing. Those are the fraction of
a second is the amount of time that the phone
company have to determine whether that call is at or
(07:06):
whether it is a person that you would actually like
to talk to. Joining us now is Dalvin Brown, consumer
tech reporter for USA. Today We're gonna be talking about
one of the worst things ever, and that is robo
calls and spam calls. It's just been so horrible to
deal with these things. I get calls all the time.
I just got one right before we did this interview.
There's a call blocking service called you mail that reported
(07:29):
that four point seven billion robo calls called our phones
in December of this past year alone. It's an average
of fourteen point three unsolicited calls for each person. It's
so crazy the numbers behind robo calls and these spam calls.
But there's a lot of things that wireless carriers are
doing to help with that. One that's gaining a lot
of traction is sometimes you'll get you know, the call
(07:51):
will come and it will actually say scam, likely giving
you the heads up, So be wary if you want
to answer this or not. So what are these phone
companies doing to help out with this problem. The most
important thing for people to know is that although you
yourself may not be able to prevent these robo calls,
the chances are your mobile provider is doing something to
prevent them. So I am a T Mobile customer, and
(08:13):
I would see the scam likely notifications whenever there is
a scammy mobo call trying to reach me, I just
don't pick up because I've learned from personal experience. If
it says scam likely, it's probably a scam. So that's
really helpful with T Mobile, and then other major service
providers are offering perhaps not it's built in. So T
(08:35):
Mobile has it built in. You don't have to download anything.
As long as you're a T Mobile customer, you'll get
the alert. But some of the other companies, like a
T and T require you that it's actually download an
app to block some of these robo calls. There is
a free service, and then there's also an advanced service
called a T and T Call Protect Plus that really
(08:56):
enables you to do a little bit more to prevent
these calls from reaching you. Same thing with T Mobile,
they require that you also download an app called Premium
Caller ID. That one was it's not free. But the
good thing about T Mobile of book T Mobile and
a T and T, they're both working on implementing blockers
(09:17):
on the back end so that in the future perhaps
you won't have to download an app to prevent robo
calls from reaching you. And then lastly, Verizon Vridon has
a really interesting system. So they have a call filter
app that grades the level of protection if you will.
If if you download the app, do get a graph
(09:38):
will pop up on your screen when you're receiving a call,
and so if it's a potential fraud then the graph
might lean in one direction. If it's one okay and
they think that it's not a fraud call, it will
lean in the other direction. That's very interesting because it's
kind of giving you it's still helping you play the odds. Basically,
it's like, well, this looks like it, so the graph
(09:59):
is going to lead more this way. While some of
these apps that you do have to buy a month
or something like that, it does give you a little
more peace of mind to know that they're trying to
help out and that you have that option to not
really answer that stuff. And some of these programs have
been really successful, the ones for a Team Mobile. They
say that they flagged over of scam calls from this
(10:20):
past November, equating to over one billion unwanted calls. I
mean the numbers really stick out to me as how
astronomically high the number of unwanted calls all these things
go through. You guys were talking to somebody from a
T and T. They sent you as a statement saying,
it's a whole toolbox that it takes to fight all
this stuff. Because you have blocked the numbers, label the numbers,
educate the customers on this. The industry has to get
(10:40):
involved enforcement. The whole color I D authentication stuff goes
into it. So it's a big doing just to help
block these calls. I guess what's really interesting too, is
that while they're blocking millions of calls, we all still
continue to receive dozens of them. It seems likely, right
like you said, it's because it's a really complicated issue
to solve. If you think about how quickly the amount
(11:01):
of time between you dialing a phone number and the
time it takes for someone to pick up or before
someone bone starts ringing. Those are the fractions of a
second is the amount of time that the phone companies
have to determine whether that call is ay fake or
whether it is a person that you would actually like
to talk to. And so during that time, there's so
many different things. You know, the numbers run it's run
(11:23):
up against a registry of blocked calls. The location and
time of the call also is taken into consideration to
determine whether it's a call that you may want to
receive or whether it's a likely scance. And so all
these things that are happening on the back end do
allow some they called to come through, which are the
ones that you would have gotten right before this interview
(11:45):
or the ones that I've gotten over the past t weeks.
But again, the good thing is they are working. You know,
this is relatively new technology, and as the technology continues
to advance, and hopefully we'll see fewer and fewer robo
calls and reaching. You know, it's funny is that I
didn't think we would be able to squeeze the government
shut down into this interview, but somehow it did creep
(12:06):
into it. Because part of the efforts to avoid these
calls is that do not call registry that the FTC,
the Federal Trade Commission runs, and since the government is
shut down right now, you can't report these numbers to
them right now during this time, the websites are completely
shut down if you try to go to the government
site to report a number, and then that sort of
compounds the problem, right because Okay, I got this call
(12:29):
that I don't want. There's normally a registry where I
can go tomit this too, and hopefully the government will
do something about it. But right now that's not really
the case. No luck. All right, Well, thank you very much.
Dalvin Brown, consumer tech reporter for USA Today. Thank you.
I appreciate it. Stially understood what millennials as a generation want.
(12:56):
What Fire Festival did is a power of influence. Threal.
These guys figured out a way to optimize social media,
almost weaponize it, and that's really when it turned to
something that became like a significant financial crime. Joining us
now is Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes. This is my
favorite story of the week, so thank you for being here.
It is that of the Fire Festival and the two
(13:17):
documentaries that came out, one on Hulu and one on Netflix.
I really think they're kind of companion pieces. They overlap
on a lot of similar themes, but you really get
a complete picture of how much a disaster this thing was.
It's all about the founder of Fire, Billy McFarland, his partner,
rapper jaw Rule, and this big luxury music experience they
(13:38):
were trying to create on Pablo Escobar subformer island in
the Bahamas. From the get go, it's like, we're gonna
do this in six months and established concerts like Coachella
things like that. I mean, they're working on these things
year round, and they wanted to create this from nothing,
and we all know what happened. We saw it play
out in the media of the disaster. So let's start
(13:58):
with their first impressions of the two documentaries. Anything that
stands out to you the same impression, just the amount
of craziness that I went into either executing it or
lack of execution, And then what happened when the actual
concert goers were there, and how much mayhem was happening
the Lord of the Flies, especially on the Netflix documentary,
when they were just grabbing mattresses and there was all
(14:18):
for themselves and some jerks were just peeing on the
mattresses themselves, so that I don't know what that accomplishes
right there at all. One of the things that struck
me was just how complicit a lot of the people
that were helping organize this thing. They saw it crashing
from the beginning, and they paint the picture in both
documentaries that they were putting out little fires as they'd go,
(14:39):
and you know, solving one problem and moving on to
the next, and everybody kind of just said, you know,
Billy had this confidence that things would get done, and
everybody just kind of kept going with it until it
was the last possible second and then they realized, oh crap,
we're screwed on this whole thing totally. And I think
it just goes to the fact of how confident and
how much that people really engage with Eli and kept
(15:00):
going with him. And even after he got arrested all
this stuff went on, he's still got people to work
with him on that v I P ticketing thing. So
he must have some kind of charm that people just
listen to him, want to work with him and invest
in him. So that's what happened, and it's kind of
a crazy story that keeps on going. There was a
lot of schaden freud that played out because people were
watching this here in the States and realizing, oh man,
(15:22):
all these rich millennials pouring so much money, ha ha ha,
they're going through hell over there. But one of the
things that really gets lost in there, and to Netflix's credit,
they made it an a central part of it, was
a lot of those workers there in the Bahamas never
got paid. A lot of those vendors got stiff, and
the poor woman mary Anne Roll, who was the owner
of one of the food places out there, she had
(15:43):
to end up paying over fifty thou dollars of her
own savings to the workers that were working with her
that never got paid. Now, they made a go fund me.
I think there's a hundred eighty five thousand dollars in
there that's going to go towards her, which is great,
but at the time, I mean, they put her out
really badly and through all that that was of the
silver lining of these documentaries is that we as viewers
(16:03):
got to see a lot more storytelling from all different angles,
not just what we saw on Twitter during that weekend,
and it was really like the one uplifting stories that
so many people did contribute to the go fund me,
and when you go on the go fund me, you
know there's people sending five dollars, ten dollars, not really
anything that they can, just because they put so much
hard and soul all those workers in the Bahamas and
(16:23):
they got totally screwed. And I think that at least
now we as viewers and can help out and do that.
And it's great to see that she, you know, has
her savings back. But again, if it weren't for these documentaries,
we wouldn't even have known about them. For wire fraud,
mail fraud, also fied investment documents and all that stuff.
Billy McFarland ended up getting six years in federal prison.
He's currently serving now. The article you wrote for Forbes
(16:46):
took a broader picture about what these documentaries really reveal
about millennials, and I thought it was a great take
on their starting off with the Instagram influencer campaign, which
was really central to this. There was four d in
demand influences who put stuff up on their Instagrams and
that's all it took to create the entire buzz for
everybody to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to want
(17:08):
to be here. It's incredible and I think it really
speaks to how we are as a society right now,
you know, everybody just scrolling through their Instagram and the
way that they did it too, is that they have
these orange tiles and all these Instagram influencers, you know,
with millions of followers, just have this tile. So here
we are, just wherever we are in America, just seeing
a tile and wanting to be part of this video.
And they created this whole campaign off of an illusion
(17:32):
from you know, a ten minute video of influencers running
on the beach. There's pigs, there's all this stuff that's happening,
and everybody wants to be part of it. And I
thought that was so central to who we are, and
especially millennial generation of just really consuming this Instagram content
and wanting to be part of that concert going experience. Yeah,
these influencer campaigns are so important. There's not a major
(17:52):
media company now that doesn't have some type of influencer campaign.
It just shows how important that is. The Other thing
that they that they did was, you know, these emphasis
on exclusive experiences, really playing up that fomo, the fear
of missing out, like you need to be here so
you can have the best Instagram pictures that your friends
are never gonna have. This Instagram culture has really created
(18:13):
this experiences that have to be exclusive, that you have
to go to to get that perfect shot. I think,
you know, when everybody goes to Cachella, everybody goes in
front of that big ferris wheel, and that's the shot
that people get. And on that point to the content,
the capturing of video, constant content. This is like part
of the downfall of Billy McFarland and the Fire Festival
(18:33):
because they documented everything from the beginning all the way
to the end and after even his next fraudulent scheme
that he started doing was caught on video. But that's
how we got to see what happened there. You know,
content from people that were there, the content that he
was recording himself, and I mean it's just shows that
everybody's doing this. This is what the next level of
(18:54):
media is is the constant plugged in. You could remember
that weekend of Fire Festival on Twitter. It was fending
all the time. You know. The cheese sandwich I think
is essential for sure. I think it was in the
Netflix version where they said you had all these influencers
with millions and millions of followers and it generated this buzz.
But in the end, it just took this one kid
with a few thousand, I don't know how many followers
(19:16):
he had to bring the whole thing down, and it
was at cheese sand which was the picture that did it.
Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thank you so much for having me on.
That's it for this week. Join us on social media
at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast
(19:37):
on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you get
your podcast. The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Moreno
and engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this
was her Daily Dive
It's Friday janu I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the Daily Dive. The votes failed to reopen
the government. The Senate voted on two proposals, one backed
by Republicans and one backed by Democrats, but neither gained
enough support. There are hopes, however, that now that we
(00:21):
know what won't pass to reopen the government, the two
sides can come to a consensus on what will pass.
Shannon Varvara, reporter for Axios, joins US for another failed
bid to stop the longest government shut down in history. Next,
as we continue to wallow an endless robo calls and
spam calls, the nation's four major wireless companies are trying
(00:42):
to give you a heads up when a bad call
is coming through. For T Mobile users, suspicious calls now
show up on your caller I d labeled as scam likely.
Dalvin Brown, consumer tech reporter for USA Today, joins US
for the continued fight to save you from robo calls. Finally,
a pair of document ring is about the failed Fire
festival have been released on Hulu and Netflix. It was
(01:04):
billed as a luxury music experience on Pablo Escobar's former island,
complete with beautiful Instagram models. But it was all a fraud.
Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes, joins us for what the
Fire Festival documentaries reveal about millennials and social media influencers.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in. One of
(01:25):
the ideas suggested as they open it, they pay a
sort of a pro rated down payment. I'll tell you
who wants us to happen. The military wants us to
happen because this is a virtual invasion of our country
of drugs, of human traffickers. It's an invasion of our country.
Joining us now is Shannon Vavra, reporter for Axios. The
(01:46):
government shutdown continues. It's in its thirty fifth day now.
One quick thing that happened was the issue of the
State of the Union address. The President and Nancy Pelosi.
We're going back and forth fighting about postponing at Nancy
Pelosi sent Trump a letter saying we've got to postpone
this thing because the shutdown. There was back and forth.
The President finally conceded and said, all right, I'll wait
(02:07):
until the government reopens for us to do this in
the right place. What's interesting about that is, we're starting
to see Trump's wall that he's put up here and
his insistence on the border, while we're starting to see
corumble a little bit. Just in that one moment with
it was him saying, oh, yes, Nancy pelosie does have
that prerogative. And they're really seeing how far Pelosi is
getting into his head to write. He's tweeting. Pisays Nancy Pelosi.
(02:28):
I call her Nancy, which isn't even a nickname, right,
And so yeah, I thought the exact same thing when
that happened. It's just comical to laugh at. But you're
right though. It shows how much power Nancy Pelosi has
in this fight, how much power the Democrats in the
House have now that they've taken control there. And the
President is realizing as this the shutdown continues to go on,
that there are consequences and that he does need to
(02:50):
make a deal. So he did concede. They're talking about
the state of the Union or whether President Trump will
be able to deliver it in the House Chamber and
who's going to introduce that resolution to authorize right, it's
all posturing. It's it's the same reason why we know
it is actually was reported Miss McConnell and President Trump.
We're talking about that negotiated deal that they presented on
the Senate for today for votes. We know that they
(03:11):
were hoping to do that to sweeten the deal for
Democrats and to try and make it look like in
future election years Republicans would be able to say, well,
the Democrats actually voted against expending DOCTA protections, they voted
against renewing the Violence Against Women Act, and so it's
all this posturing around this one idea of a five
point seven billion border wall. Let's talk about the two
bills that the Senate voted on to try to reopen
(03:33):
the government. One was sponsored by Democrats, one was sponsored
by Republicans. On the Republican side, it had the funding
for the border wall. That one didn't pass. The Democrats
side had a clean funding bill, wasn't going to give
money for the wall, but did expand some other border
security protections that also didn't pass. Right, And what we're
seeing from the specific vote counc there is actually really
(03:53):
interesting to pull apart. So the Democratic plan had actually
more yeas and yes votes than the Trump and ch
McConnell plans, and then all of them had more GOP defections,
so it's overall had more support, and that's an indication
that president term of the White House, they're likely looking
at now moving forward in terms of what kinds of
proposals they can put forward if negotiations are seriously back
(04:13):
on the table. And then on the flip side that
we also see that was the six Republicans, we had Gardner, Makowsky, Collins, Ronney,
Alexander and Isaacson all broke party line to vote for
the Democrats, and we interestingly have Joe Manchin, who's the
Democrat vote for the Trump's proposal. It's interesting how this
is all playing out so publicly. Everybody's reporting on it
(04:34):
furiously because just how long the shutdown has extended because
of all of this. But a lot of people are
very hopeful that even though the bills did not pass,
at least everybody's on record now they've all voted, so
they know where everybody stands, and it could be the
beginning of concessions from both sides on working on how
to figure it out where we can meet in the middle. Right,
But that's exactly the thing is both Nancy Pelosi had
(04:56):
a press conference and after the votes took place, and
she seems firm as ever. And then President Trump also
spoke with reporters after the votes took place, and he's
saying things like, oh, there are other alternatives we can
turn to. We know he's talking now about accepting a
continuing revolution if it has some sort of a down
payments on the wall, which would indicate that there would
be future down payment trade. And the question is, if
(05:17):
there is a continuing resolution to reopen the government, what
happens then after that temporary opening, do we have another
shutdown if there's no border wall funding. And there's just
so many questions about whether President Trump will maintain his
stance here that it's it's I'm almost anybody's best guess
what happens in the next twenty four hours. Going back
to the politics of it, you know, the President made
this such a central part of his campaign. We're going
(05:38):
to build a wall in Mexico is going to pay
for it, And he's kind of pinned himself against the
wall with this. Ironically, right, it's obvious that Mexico is
not going to pay for this. I know they say
that's going to happen in some form with the new
trade agreement that we have going, but that's not really
born out just yet. So he needs to get this done.
He needs to have this go through for him to
have any prospects of appeasing his base. In terms of
(06:00):
whether his base actually supports this, we know that his
approval rating is starting to take a little bit more
than usual, in particular because Republicans aren't necessarily backing him
in his fight for the water anymore. They used to
be impenetrable and their support for President Trump. This is
one of the things that's actually started appealing some of
the support away from him, So he's probably gonna start
feeling the burn of that, in addition to the harms
(06:22):
that federal workers are experiencing right now as a result
of not having liquidity. Not to mention the fact that
we've had Kevin Hassett from the White House concede that
if the shutdown continues through quarter one, there will be
zero growth, and we know that President Trump likes to
count economic set so that's something that President has is
likely thinking about as well. Shannon Varvara, reporter for Axios.
(06:42):
Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you the
amount of time between you dialing a phone number and
the time it takes for someone to pick up or
before someone those starts ringing. Those are the fraction of
a second is the amount of time that the phone
company have to determine whether that call is at or
(07:06):
whether it is a person that you would actually like
to talk to. Joining us now is Dalvin Brown, consumer
tech reporter for USA. Today We're gonna be talking about
one of the worst things ever, and that is robo
calls and spam calls. It's just been so horrible to
deal with these things. I get calls all the time.
I just got one right before we did this interview.
There's a call blocking service called you mail that reported
(07:29):
that four point seven billion robo calls called our phones
in December of this past year alone. It's an average
of fourteen point three unsolicited calls for each person. It's
so crazy the numbers behind robo calls and these spam calls.
But there's a lot of things that wireless carriers are
doing to help with that. One that's gaining a lot
of traction is sometimes you'll get you know, the call
(07:51):
will come and it will actually say scam, likely giving
you the heads up, So be wary if you want
to answer this or not. So what are these phone
companies doing to help out with this problem. The most
important thing for people to know is that although you
yourself may not be able to prevent these robo calls,
the chances are your mobile provider is doing something to
prevent them. So I am a T Mobile customer, and
(08:13):
I would see the scam likely notifications whenever there is
a scammy mobo call trying to reach me, I just
don't pick up because I've learned from personal experience. If
it says scam likely, it's probably a scam. So that's
really helpful with T Mobile, and then other major service
providers are offering perhaps not it's built in. So T
(08:35):
Mobile has it built in. You don't have to download anything.
As long as you're a T Mobile customer, you'll get
the alert. But some of the other companies, like a
T and T require you that it's actually download an
app to block some of these robo calls. There is
a free service, and then there's also an advanced service
called a T and T Call Protect Plus that really
(08:56):
enables you to do a little bit more to prevent
these calls from reaching you. Same thing with T Mobile,
they require that you also download an app called Premium
Caller ID. That one was it's not free. But the
good thing about T Mobile of book T Mobile and
a T and T, they're both working on implementing blockers
(09:17):
on the back end so that in the future perhaps
you won't have to download an app to prevent robo
calls from reaching you. And then lastly, Verizon Vridon has
a really interesting system. So they have a call filter
app that grades the level of protection if you will.
If if you download the app, do get a graph
(09:38):
will pop up on your screen when you're receiving a call,
and so if it's a potential fraud then the graph
might lean in one direction. If it's one okay and
they think that it's not a fraud call, it will
lean in the other direction. That's very interesting because it's
kind of giving you it's still helping you play the odds. Basically,
it's like, well, this looks like it, so the graph
(09:59):
is going to lead more this way. While some of
these apps that you do have to buy a month
or something like that, it does give you a little
more peace of mind to know that they're trying to
help out and that you have that option to not
really answer that stuff. And some of these programs have
been really successful, the ones for a Team Mobile. They
say that they flagged over of scam calls from this
(10:20):
past November, equating to over one billion unwanted calls. I
mean the numbers really stick out to me as how
astronomically high the number of unwanted calls all these things
go through. You guys were talking to somebody from a
T and T. They sent you as a statement saying,
it's a whole toolbox that it takes to fight all
this stuff. Because you have blocked the numbers, label the numbers,
educate the customers on this. The industry has to get
(10:40):
involved enforcement. The whole color I D authentication stuff goes
into it. So it's a big doing just to help
block these calls. I guess what's really interesting too, is
that while they're blocking millions of calls, we all still
continue to receive dozens of them. It seems likely, right
like you said, it's because it's a really complicated issue
to solve. If you think about how quickly the amount
(11:01):
of time between you dialing a phone number and the
time it takes for someone to pick up or before
someone bone starts ringing. Those are the fractions of a
second is the amount of time that the phone companies
have to determine whether that call is ay fake or
whether it is a person that you would actually like
to talk to. And so during that time, there's so
many different things. You know, the numbers run it's run
(11:23):
up against a registry of blocked calls. The location and
time of the call also is taken into consideration to
determine whether it's a call that you may want to
receive or whether it's a likely scance. And so all
these things that are happening on the back end do
allow some they called to come through, which are the
ones that you would have gotten right before this interview
(11:45):
or the ones that I've gotten over the past t weeks.
But again, the good thing is they are working. You know,
this is relatively new technology, and as the technology continues
to advance, and hopefully we'll see fewer and fewer robo
calls and reaching. You know, it's funny is that I
didn't think we would be able to squeeze the government
shut down into this interview, but somehow it did creep
(12:06):
into it. Because part of the efforts to avoid these
calls is that do not call registry that the FTC,
the Federal Trade Commission runs, and since the government is
shut down right now, you can't report these numbers to
them right now during this time, the websites are completely
shut down if you try to go to the government
site to report a number, and then that sort of
compounds the problem, right because Okay, I got this call
(12:29):
that I don't want. There's normally a registry where I
can go tomit this too, and hopefully the government will
do something about it. But right now that's not really
the case. No luck. All right, Well, thank you very much.
Dalvin Brown, consumer tech reporter for USA Today. Thank you.
I appreciate it. Stially understood what millennials as a generation want.
(12:56):
What Fire Festival did is a power of influence. Threal.
These guys figured out a way to optimize social media,
almost weaponize it, and that's really when it turned to
something that became like a significant financial crime. Joining us
now is Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes. This is my
favorite story of the week, so thank you for being here.
It is that of the Fire Festival and the two
(13:17):
documentaries that came out, one on Hulu and one on Netflix.
I really think they're kind of companion pieces. They overlap
on a lot of similar themes, but you really get
a complete picture of how much a disaster this thing was.
It's all about the founder of Fire, Billy McFarland, his partner,
rapper jaw Rule, and this big luxury music experience they
(13:38):
were trying to create on Pablo Escobar subformer island in
the Bahamas. From the get go, it's like, we're gonna
do this in six months and established concerts like Coachella
things like that. I mean, they're working on these things
year round, and they wanted to create this from nothing,
and we all know what happened. We saw it play
out in the media of the disaster. So let's start
(13:58):
with their first impressions of the two documentaries. Anything that
stands out to you the same impression, just the amount
of craziness that I went into either executing it or
lack of execution, And then what happened when the actual
concert goers were there, and how much mayhem was happening
the Lord of the Flies, especially on the Netflix documentary,
when they were just grabbing mattresses and there was all
(14:18):
for themselves and some jerks were just peeing on the
mattresses themselves, so that I don't know what that accomplishes
right there at all. One of the things that struck
me was just how complicit a lot of the people
that were helping organize this thing. They saw it crashing
from the beginning, and they paint the picture in both
documentaries that they were putting out little fires as they'd go,
(14:39):
and you know, solving one problem and moving on to
the next, and everybody kind of just said, you know,
Billy had this confidence that things would get done, and
everybody just kind of kept going with it until it
was the last possible second and then they realized, oh crap,
we're screwed on this whole thing totally. And I think
it just goes to the fact of how confident and
how much that people really engage with Eli and kept
(15:00):
going with him. And even after he got arrested all
this stuff went on, he's still got people to work
with him on that v I P ticketing thing. So
he must have some kind of charm that people just
listen to him, want to work with him and invest
in him. So that's what happened, and it's kind of
a crazy story that keeps on going. There was a
lot of schaden freud that played out because people were
watching this here in the States and realizing, oh man,
(15:22):
all these rich millennials pouring so much money, ha ha ha,
they're going through hell over there. But one of the
things that really gets lost in there, and to Netflix's credit,
they made it an a central part of it, was
a lot of those workers there in the Bahamas never
got paid. A lot of those vendors got stiff, and
the poor woman mary Anne Roll, who was the owner
of one of the food places out there, she had
(15:43):
to end up paying over fifty thou dollars of her
own savings to the workers that were working with her
that never got paid. Now, they made a go fund me.
I think there's a hundred eighty five thousand dollars in
there that's going to go towards her, which is great,
but at the time, I mean, they put her out
really badly and through all that that was of the
silver lining of these documentaries is that we as viewers
(16:03):
got to see a lot more storytelling from all different angles,
not just what we saw on Twitter during that weekend,
and it was really like the one uplifting stories that
so many people did contribute to the go fund me,
and when you go on the go fund me, you
know there's people sending five dollars, ten dollars, not really
anything that they can, just because they put so much
hard and soul all those workers in the Bahamas and
(16:23):
they got totally screwed. And I think that at least
now we as viewers and can help out and do that.
And it's great to see that she, you know, has
her savings back. But again, if it weren't for these documentaries,
we wouldn't even have known about them. For wire fraud,
mail fraud, also fied investment documents and all that stuff.
Billy McFarland ended up getting six years in federal prison.
He's currently serving now. The article you wrote for Forbes
(16:46):
took a broader picture about what these documentaries really reveal
about millennials, and I thought it was a great take
on their starting off with the Instagram influencer campaign, which
was really central to this. There was four d in
demand influences who put stuff up on their Instagrams and
that's all it took to create the entire buzz for
everybody to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to want
(17:08):
to be here. It's incredible and I think it really
speaks to how we are as a society right now,
you know, everybody just scrolling through their Instagram and the
way that they did it too, is that they have
these orange tiles and all these Instagram influencers, you know,
with millions of followers, just have this tile. So here
we are, just wherever we are in America, just seeing
a tile and wanting to be part of this video.
And they created this whole campaign off of an illusion
(17:32):
from you know, a ten minute video of influencers running
on the beach. There's pigs, there's all this stuff that's happening,
and everybody wants to be part of it. And I
thought that was so central to who we are, and
especially millennial generation of just really consuming this Instagram content
and wanting to be part of that concert going experience. Yeah,
these influencer campaigns are so important. There's not a major
(17:52):
media company now that doesn't have some type of influencer campaign.
It just shows how important that is. The Other thing
that they that they did was, you know, these emphasis
on exclusive experiences, really playing up that fomo, the fear
of missing out, like you need to be here so
you can have the best Instagram pictures that your friends
are never gonna have. This Instagram culture has really created
(18:13):
this experiences that have to be exclusive, that you have
to go to to get that perfect shot. I think,
you know, when everybody goes to Cachella, everybody goes in
front of that big ferris wheel, and that's the shot
that people get. And on that point to the content,
the capturing of video, constant content. This is like part
of the downfall of Billy McFarland and the Fire Festival
(18:33):
because they documented everything from the beginning all the way
to the end and after even his next fraudulent scheme
that he started doing was caught on video. But that's
how we got to see what happened there. You know,
content from people that were there, the content that he
was recording himself, and I mean it's just shows that
everybody's doing this. This is what the next level of
(18:54):
media is is the constant plugged in. You could remember
that weekend of Fire Festival on Twitter. It was fending
all the time. You know. The cheese sandwich I think
is essential for sure. I think it was in the
Netflix version where they said you had all these influencers
with millions and millions of followers and it generated this buzz.
But in the end, it just took this one kid
with a few thousand, I don't know how many followers
(19:16):
he had to bring the whole thing down, and it
was at cheese sand which was the picture that did it.
Kate Talbot, contributor to Forbes, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thank you so much for having me on.
That's it for this week. Join us on social media
at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast
(19:37):
on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you get
your podcast. The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Moreno
and engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this
was her Daily Dive
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