Megan Garber on the New Era of Scamming

TOPICS DISCUSSED

• The New Era of Scamming with Megan Garber 

• Outside of Politics: Reality Television

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EPISODE RESOURCES

• Sarah and Beth will be visiting Edgehill UMC on September 8th 

• Megan Garber, The Atlantic

• On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics a book by Megan Garber

• Introducing: How to Know What's Real - The Atlantic  

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

[00:00:30] Thank you so much for joining us today. I don't know about you, but it feels like most of this year I've had so many conversations about scams showing up in our email, text messages, phone calls. Scammers are getting more sophisticated and they are setting us up in all kinds of ways, where sometimes you feel like I am walking down this path and thank goodness someone stopped me and said, you're being fooled along this path. So we're in a new era of scamming, and we wanted to have someone help us think about that. We are delighted to welcome Megan Garber back to the show. Megan is a staff writer at The Atlantic and has a new show called How to Know What's Real, which seems relevant. The perfect person to talk to us about the proliferation of scams. And Megan stuck around with us for Outside of Politics to discuss Survivor and reality shows and whether they're entering a new era as well.  

Sarah [00:01:19] Before we share that conversation, we wanted to remind you that we will be at Edgehill United Methodist Church in Nashville on Sunday, September 8th. Y'all, we're actually giving the sermon. I'm a little excited about that. And then we're staying afterwards for a book conversation about our first book. So if you are in that area and would like to join us, there is more information in the show notes. And we are also looking forward to the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, whether the mics will be muted or not, who knows? But it's next week, and if you want to be a part of the community conversation in real time during the debate, you can join us. Beth will be on Patreon chat and I will be in the Substack chat. Both of these chats are available to paid subscribers on those specific platforms, so join us there.  

Beth [00:02:00] Next up, we're going to talk with Megan Garber about scams.  

[00:02:03] Music Interlude.  

[00:02:11] We are so thrilled to welcome Meghan Garber back to Pantsuit Politics. Meghan is one of those writers who I am constantly refreshing to see if you have a new piece up. And you have started a podcast called How to Know What's Real. And so Meghan, first of all, welcome. And second of all, I need some help from you.  

Megan Garber [00:02:30] Thank you, and I would love to.  

Beth [00:02:33] So I was at the beach on spring break, and I had an experience that I imagine a lot of people listening have had. I get a text message from a number I don't recognize saying, "Are you here yet?" And I said, "I think this is a wrong number, sorry." And the person comes back and says, "It's Lindsey, you're supposed to meet me here to go to the event."  

Megan Garber [00:02:56] The event.  

Beth [00:02:59] I said, "Hi, Lindsey. Still a wrong number."  

Megan Garber [00:03:01] That's good.  

Beth [00:03:02] And she sends me a picture in a beautiful dress saying, "Are you not coming with me?"  

Sarah [00:03:08] To the event.  

Megan Garber [00:03:09] To the event, right.  

Beth [00:03:10] I said, "You look beautiful, Lindsey, but this is still a wrong number." And so I'm with my friends at the beach, and I'm telling my friend Brian about this. And he was like, "Beth, this is a scam, and you're doing exactly what they want you to do. They just want to keep you talking and you're doing it." And I was like, oh, man, I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person and being polite is super important to me. And it didn't even occur to me that this was something other than a wrong number. And I would just love to chat about in the umbrella of how to know what's real, how do we stay real ourselves and have this personality that we care about and deal with this kind of incoming?  

Megan Garber [00:03:53] I love that question. First of all, I think you actually handled it great just in the sense of you were polite and yet you weren't giving that person/bot/AI, whatever it might have been, anything to use. 

Sarah [00:04:07] And some people have developed this new hobby where they keep the scammers on the line. I have a friend who does this on Facebook and take screenshots and just keeps them at it for days and days.  

Megan Garber [00:04:18] That's amazing. It's like the new literature, just the bot conversations. Oh my goodness. But to the question of what's real, I think what's so hard about these scams, which let's assume that you were being scammed or someone was trying to scam you, they're so good at sort of weaponizing our own humanity against us, right? Because they take for granted that the person on the other end of the message doesn't want to be rude, wants to give the benefit of the doubt, thinks maybe I do have a friend I'm supposed to meet, and I just forgot. A) our plans and (b) what they look like. And I think just the fact of the maybe is what makes it so hard because maybe can just go on forever. And we want to be polite, we want to be human and humane and there it goes.  

Sarah [00:05:11] That is the perfect observation to me because it does feel like it's shifted. It went I feel like for years that the only thing that could be weaponized against you was sort of-- this is going to sound uglier than I mean it, but incompetence. Or maybe not incompetence, but a lack of digital literacy. Let's call it the Nigerian prince era, okay? And so it felt like that was it. And we all mostly knew how to navigate that, except for people maybe who had not ever been digital natives in their whole entire adult lives, that kind of thing. But then it seems like to me that we have left the Nigerian prince era, and we have entered where they're not just weaponizing a lack of digital skills, but they're exactly what you described. They're weaponizing your own humanity like that viral piece that went around about the woman who gave the shoe box of money. And all that stuff where you're like, whoa, this is somebody who grew up with the internet. This is somebody who would not fall for a Nigerian prince. Or I think about all the time the way they use people's voices. I mean, I have a lot of my voice on the internet, so my kids and I have a safe word. If somebody gets on the phone with you and it sounds like me, you better know what to ask them to say because it might not be me. It just feels like this whole other era.  

Megan Garber [00:06:30] I think it totally is. And it's so hard because, yeah, there's no amount of literacy that would help, right? It's just the scams are getting better; the AI is getting more sophisticated. It's so hard to keep up and to sort of keep up in a way that we would be able to distinguish even between, just like we were talking about, the real and the fake and all of that. The lines are so fluid right now.  

Sarah [00:06:57] Yes.  

Beth [00:06:58] I came into this conversation thinking about how my framework on scams, kind of like you were saying, Sarah, not just the incompetence but also loneliness. That scams are predatory for people who are really lonely. And I think that's true, but it seems like simultaneously our relationships are now making us vulnerable because it is that idea of I've used someone's voice, I've told you that your nephew is in trouble and needs this money or whatever. So we're just all out here for the taking.  

Megan Garber [00:07:29] Yeah, I think that's so true. And it makes me worried that we are going to either correct or maybe overcorrect.  

Sarah [00:07:37] We love to overcorrect in America.  

Megan Garber [00:07:39] We really do. We really do and we are great at it, too.  

Sarah [00:07:41] We love it. It's our best favorite hobby.  

Megan Garber [00:07:44] But if we do overcorrect and come to doubt everything, like just assume if it's someone who is not a safe contact in my phone, I should probably just implicitly doubt them. Or if I have even just a hint of doubt about the veracity of this exchange, I should actually, for my own protection and really for the protection of other people around me, because these are all such networked phenomena, I should doubt, I should question. And from there, it's a really short step to I should be cynical. I should just sort of doubt everything by default, which is the protective move and the correct move in so many ways. But then it also, I think, distances us from the people that we would want to be interacting with and having relationships with.  

Sarah [00:08:35] Well, and it can be physically dangerous. Like that poor Uber driver who got shot and killed by that man because she was just delivering something that was a part of a scam but he thought she was in on it. It was so wretched and terrible that entire story. I thought, oh my God, we have crossed the Rubicon now, where that sense of threat, especially tied up with our gun culture, that sense of everyone's a threat, everyone's trying to get one over on you. It's like some people I think for a lot of reasons and complicated personality, life experiences live in that space anyway. And so I just think like this new sense that there is this whole space-- I kind of liked how your podcast is formulated. It's something I articulated several years ago. And the way I think about it is there's another me out there. There's another me online. How do I think about that? How do I want to live in that space? Because we all are kind of living in that space. And these scams, it's like it feels like a sci-fi movie and the stretchy place between both worlds. You know what I mean? Like where the online and the real and it's like we're stuck in some in-between.  

Megan Garber [00:09:46] Yeah, I love that. Or almost like a funhouse mirror kind of thing where some of the images are pretty accurate and then others are completely stretched or completely narrow. And you don't know what you look like actually in that scenario.  

Sarah [00:10:00] Absolutely. So how do you think about that? How do you think about being in these two spaces and where the scams exploit that crossover, that in between?  

Megan Garber [00:10:13] It's I think in some ways the question, so I love that you brought it up. It's so hard. I think what it comes down to, for me, at least at this moment, and it's always evolving because the tech is always evolving and the scams are always evolving and all of that. But for right now, I try to think a lot about the sort of should elements, the what do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of me do I want to be? And sort of lead with that. So do I want to be someone who is doubting everything? Do I want to be someone who is fooled? Do I want to be someone who can be taken advantage of? And I try to start often from that perspective of in the ideal scenario, what would I be? And then as much as I can sort of build off of that and orient myself in the moment around that. Because I think otherwise it's so easy to sort of lose control of yourself and then of everything else, too.  

Beth [00:11:09] As you're talking to a number of different people on your show about maintaining a sense of groundedness in this digital era, what is something that you've heard that you thought, oh, that is going to change my behavior, or that's going to reorient my thinking?  

Megan Garber [00:11:25] One of them that comes to mind is we interviewed Doctor Lisa Fazio who is an expert on neuroscience and psychology, but focuses a lot on the way neuropsychology interacts with politics and the way we sort of process information. And one of the things she said was anything that gives you an extra sort of emotional charge that you come across-- and we were talking about it in the context of news information, but I think it could also apply to scams and to any types of messaging. If it gives you a very strong emotional reaction, it's good to question it. It's good to think what am I responding to exactly here? And it could be that you get a strong reaction deservedly. You come across a piece of news that is shocking, that is horrifying, that is really funny or enlightening, whatever it might be, and that's the strength of the reaction. And that's fine, but often that's not the case.  

[00:12:27] And often whether it's scams, whether it's forms of propaganda, whether it's bad messaging in general, if there is a strong reaction, it's because it is designed to create that in you. And then you can sort of stop and say, wait a second, do I want to believe this? And certainly do I want to share it with other people? That was another thing she talked about. Was just sort of if you have this impulse to share, oh my gosh, I have to tell someone because this is such a big thing and it's making me so angry. Whatever it might be, also check that impulse, she says, and just think, okay, do I want to be contributing to this? So in some ways that's such an obvious thing, but I think it's such an important thing to remember as we live our lives in this informational environment because so much of the information out there is designed to make us feel in really big ways.  

Sarah [00:13:21] You know what it reminds me of when you said, do I want to be a person that's fooled or taken advantage of? When you said that, it reminded me of when my now 15 year old was a new baby. It was right around the time where there were a lot of stories around people leaving their children in their cars because we turned the car seats around. We'd had all these like different sort of things happen in the car that were sort of risk factors, and everybody's initial reaction was that'll never happen to me. I would never forget my child. Never. What kind of person does that? And then it really slowly shifted to this sense of like-- because I remember thinking immediately, no, I don't need to think I'll never do this. I need to think I could and how to prevent it. And I wonder if that's what we're going through with scams right now.  

[00:14:11] Right now do we need to think about, no, I could. Don't tell yourself you'll never fall for this. Don't tell yourself you'll never encounter misinformation. Don't tell yourself that you always understand what's real and what's fake. Think I could fall for it and so how do I think about myself as a person who could be fooled and who could be taken advantage of? Well, my question is two parts. One, I wonder, as you did this podcast and you think about this, is there a couple things you could identify as the backwards car seat, that you could point to and go, oh, that's where we entered this new era. That's the thing that sort of shifted the scam, shifted the misinformation, made it so this was such a fertile ground for us to fall for. And then two, how do you think about, okay, I could fall for it. We all could fall for it. Now, how does that need to change our thinking about this?  

Megan Garber [00:15:01] Yeah, I love that. I guess I'll start with the second. I mean, I think so much of how to know what's real comes down to exactly what you said, which is humility. We're great at overcorrecting. We're not often great at accepting our own limitations and appreciating how other people's flaws are also quite often our own flaws. So I think just that basic recognition that this really could happen to me, I am no better than anyone else, I think that's really crucial. And it can be really hard for us to do just culturally and otherwise. And it is sort of chastening to realize, like, I could be the person who leaves my kid in the car. I could be the person who does XYZ.  

Sarah [00:15:46] Hands over a shoe box full of money..  

Megan Garber [00:15:47] Exactly. And especially as the scams get more advanced, it will extra be true that it could be any of us. And it really is just kind of a matter of luck. So there's very much, I think, there but for the grace go I element of all of this. And it's interesting, in terms of pivot moments, one thing that occurred to me-- and this is not recent, but I do think it's relevant--is I grew up in the era of stranger danger. Where there were so many stories just like you were talking about with the car seat idea and the stuck in the car idea and all of that, I grew up in the age of you could be kidnaped at any moment.  

Sarah [00:16:27] Poor Adam. think about Adam all the time.  

Megan Garber [00:16:30] Yes. And I worry actually a little bit. And it's hard to know in retrospect, but I do worry that growing up in that context made me a little bit more suspicious of people than I should have been. I was just told from a very young age to keep yourself safe. On some level, you doubt everyone. You assume the worst until proven otherwise rather than the other way around. And I actually do think that even though that was ages ago, that kind of set the standard in many ways for the era we're in now, where the default ever more so is mistrust and is assuming the worst of people until proven otherwise. And I worry a lot about that because obviously for just cultural and political and civic reasons, that is no way to run a society, but here we are.  

Sarah [00:17:22] Well, and paradoxically, it is also how you get scammed because you won't ask anyone. You won't talk to anyone. You know what I mean? If you feel like I can't trust this person, but I can also not really trust anybody, you can't compartmentalize that. Your brain doesn't work like that. If you say I can't trust anybody, you mean I can't trust anybody? It's like with the poor shoe box money lady. I was like, just tell someone quick. Just call literally anyone, anyone in your phonebook. Because it's that sense of checking in with each other that helps build in that sense of safety and checks and balances and all those things. But if you are living in a place of distrust, you don't trust the checks and balances either.  

Megan Garber [00:18:05] That's such a good point. And it also feels like it's related to the humility idea, just in the sense of we associate pride with I would never fall for a scam. So if you suspect you might be falling for a scam, you don't want to admit it because that's a knock on your own abilities, allegedly. But, of course, it's not. It can happen to anyone.  

Sarah [00:18:22] This is a very philosophical conversation we're having.  

Megan Garber [00:18:24] It really is.  

[00:18:25] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:18:35] The question that comes to mind for me is what is trust in this new era? I had this conversation with Cathy Boockvar, who was the secretary of state in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, and now she works in election security. And she said that what they are most concerned about for this cycle is people getting text messages saying there's been a fire at your polling place. The vote is moved to tomorrow. And just different efforts like that to disenfranchise people through something that sounds plausible and normal and isn't really preying on anyone's emotion, it just sounds logistical. And the answer to that is to make sure that you're always checking with a trusted source, that if that didn't come from the secretary of state or the county election official, then it's probably fraudulent. But we have just lived through 10 years of you can't trust institutions, our institutions are crumbling, we don't have any trust anymore in government. And so that's a problem over here that I don't know how to control for. And on the other side, to the stranger danger point, I understand how we came out of stranger danger, because you do start to have life experiences and you realize most people are nice or neutral.  

Sarah [00:19:54] Neutral, yes. So true.  

Beth [00:19:56] And most people are not scary. The volume of the digital scam, it can still be true that most people are nice and neutral, but one person can wreak endless havoc. And so I just wonder, how do we start to control for this when one person can wreak endless havoc?  

Megan Garber [00:20:18] It's such a good question. Yeah, I think so much of it is really about empowering people actually to feel like they have some semblance of control. Media literacy is one example for me that if people can just have a sense of, okay, I know what a scam looks like, generally speaking. I know that if I get a text message about the fire at my polling place, I should check the source. And not only that, but here are the ways I can know that a source is reputable. And if people come at things in a very basic way with those tools to at least feel like they have a semblance of control over their own beliefs, over their own mechanisms of trust, I actually do think that that's a big part, and it's so hard to do. I don't want to pretend that that's an easy thing at all, even though it also sounds basic. We're always racing the scams and that's part of the problem. It's just this moving train and we're trying to hop on and hop off and it's very hard. But I do think that so much right now we're down to hopelessness among people where we don't trust the institutions, but we also don't know who else to trust. And that's part of the problem. And I think if we can at least have a little bit of feeling of, okay, I do have something solid I can rely, on that can be a very good basis for everything else.  

Sarah [00:21:46] Well, and it's going to have to be the institutions. I don't mean to be the bearer of bad new, everybody, but what else is the other alternative that we have here besides a free press and a representative government in a democracy? I don't think there's any other better ideas. And it's almost like we need to flip the script and say, when you distrust everyone you make yourself vulnerable. When you put yourself in a place that you are cynical and distrustful of everything and every institution, that is actually a weakness. That's a vulnerability that you put yourself in a position to be easy prey. Because I think people feel like they're strengthening themselves, that they're the ones who've got it figured out and they can see things clearly. And you kind of want to be like, no, no, no, you got it backwards. You have put yourself in a place where you are vulnerable to attack. Let's use some language that really gets people's attention because I don't know what else to do. I just feel like this sense of like every man's an island, I don't know if y'all know the quote, but that ain't it. No man is an island. That's the problem. It feels like everybody thinks they can build their own fortress and be out there on their own, and it just doesn't work.  

Megan Garber [00:22:54] No, exactly. I think sometimes about-- this might seem a strange example, but I do think it relates-- Wikipedia, which in theory should be subject to a lot of the things we're talking about. It should be so easily scammed, so easily manipulated, so easily used for misinformation. And sure, sometimes it is. Sure, that can happen. But by and large-- and again, you want to check from Wikipedia and you don't want to take everything it says at face value. It's always good to check the sources and all of that. But by and large, that is a pretty impressive feat of collective information gathering and dissemination. And part of that, part of the reason it works is that it really thinks about it as an organization. Wikipedia, the group, thinks about group dynamics, thinks about mechanisms of trust, thinks about things like sourcing. Like, here is how you prove that something is backed up, that it is not just an assertion but a fact. And the fact that it can do that in so many small ways every day, every second and it's always evolving but for the most part in ways that create reliable information, I think that's pretty remarkable. And something in that I think could be a bit of a lesson for us.  

Beth [00:24:14] It's almost like we need a roundtable with Wikipedia and Disney and the Microsoft security team, like all the people with the resources to think about how we drive human behavior in big, messy situations.  

Megan Garber [00:24:30] I love that. I'm imagining like Clippy there, like, "Hello, I see you're trying to preserve American democracy. How can I help?"  

Beth [00:24:40] Well, and this scam situation makes me anxious about the new Clippy because this copilot idea sounds so useful to me. It sounds so useful to say I'm going to have an AI assistant who's not combing the depths of the internet, but who is really learning me. That sounds great. It also makes me feel like an absolute sitting duck, and I don't know what to do about that or who to listen to on that. I tune in to Hard Fork to get those thoughts, but beyond those guys, I don't know who can tell me go forth and be efficient or pump the brakes here. And I feel like that's happening more and more as I engage with technology that can make life a lot easier, but also makes me feel super vulnerable.  

Sarah [00:25:29] Yeah, and I have a good example of this. I got scammed by ChatGPT the other day and then talked about it, and went back and was like, oh my God, it told me the wrong information. I was trying to figure out which author told Reese Witherspoon, no, because that is hard information. Reese Witherspoon's team is very good. And so I was like [inaudible] and ChatGPT said Ann Patchett. And I was like, that sounds right. No, it wasn't right at all. Because I asked it again and gave me another answer a week later. And I had talked about it at an event. I'm like, oh my God, I cannot depend on this thing at all.  

Megan Garber [00:25:56] It is amazing that the terminology for the misinformed AI is hallucination. That's very telling. And speaking of moments of paradigm shift, I do think that we're in this moment with AI where the older paradigm was very much not just in the function of the technology, but also in the branding of it. And the marketing of it was very much about digital assistant. The dynamics were very clear where these technologies are here to help you. They will summon our collective resources to help you solve a particular problem. And now I think we're moving into the age of the companionate AI, where those lines are getting blurred. Yes, they're still here to help you, allegedly, but they're also here to know you, to know everything about you, to be some kind of companion to you. And I think when those two paradigms blend, as I think we're seeing right now, that's when we get extra vulnerable. And, yes, we can also be helped. We can be assured that things are going to be better and that we can be known and all of that, but we are very vulnerable then to the technology.  

Sarah [00:27:10] I think the issue with AI too is they said even it's just being run by Google. And I think our old experiences with chat bots is the framework is they answer your questions. And they don't. They do not answer your questions. And it's like I feel myself bummed. I just want it to be like Google, but correct. I want it to answer my questions and that is not what it does. And I'm not sure everybody's on the same page about that.  

Megan Garber [00:27:41] No, exactly. And for good reason, which is the marketing has been very fuzzy.  

Sarah [00:27:47] They don't know how to explain it to people because they don't know. 

Megan Garber [00:27:50] They don't know, exactly. That's the thing. It's interesting. The latest ChatGPT, I was looking back to a lot of the blog post from OpenAI, and it was remarkable how transparent they were about we don't actually know what this thing is that we've created. Again and again, on the record and off, people who work for the company were just sort of saying, wow, the AI ended up doing this thing that I never expected, that I never thought I was programing; isn't that amazing? And you could detect this tone of sort of all but also fear, which is not necessarily a combination you want in the people who are building these technologies.  

Sarah [00:28:28] I know. And what does it say that we started this conversation about scams and this is where we've ended up?  

Megan Garber [00:28:32] That's a great point.  

Beth [00:28:34] Well, it's part and parcel, right? It's all the same thing. I know you're going to continue to explore these topics. So thank you for the podcast and for being here. I would love for us to transition if we could, to the original reality distortion field of Survivor and other reality shows.  

Megan Garber [00:28:51] Yes, no man is an island in that show.  

Sarah [00:28:56] See.  

[00:28:57] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:29:06] So I love competition reality shows, and I have noticed over the last few seasons of some of my favorites, a big shift. And that shift is that I don't care who wins at all anymore. In fact, I have very little interest in even seeing the finale episodes. I still really enjoy the season of Top Chef of Survivor, but by the time we get to the end, my feeling is always like, they all seem great. It's fine. Whoever wins is fine.  

Megan Garber [00:29:41] They worked hard. They deserve it.  

Beth [00:29:43] Well, yeah. I think I have been conditioned too as sort of a fan to know that people are getting edited in different ways, and so whoever wins deserves to win and I just have to trust the process and it's fine.  

Sarah [00:29:55] What season are you on?  

Beth [00:29:56] I don't know, 42 or something.  

Sarah [00:29:57] Well, that's the thing too. Isn't there an aspect of, like, this is how I feel about the show? If I start to spin up about it, then I'm like, well [inaudible] make another one in days. There's going to be another survivor. So how invested can you get in that? You couldn't even list the winners if you wanted to. How big of a deal is it?  

Beth [00:30:11] I could maybe list the winners. I actually don't think it's that, because I do feel very hooked into the seasons. I do get invested in the players, but I don't care who wins anymore. This is my theory that I want to get your opinion on. I think this could be related to sort of the Schitt's Creek-Ted Lasso effect, because I think our casting now in reality world, especially in these competition shows, has become a lot more about getting a really nice group of people together, most of whom have my life has been hard stories, or at least have a version of my life has been hard story to tell as they're all gathered together. And it seems like the push from production is more and more towards we want you all to be a big family. We want you being supportive of each other. We don't want villains in this season. And I feel like a lot of the dramatic tension, personality wise, has dropped out of these shows. And I think that's why I don't care who wins anymore. 

Sarah [00:31:20] Everyone's there to make friends.  

Beth [00:31:22] Everyone is there to make friends. And then afterwards, on social media, they're sharing like I just watched two of my favorite survivor players go to the Eras tour together in Europe. It has a totally different vibe. And I just submit that to you for consideration because it's really changed my experience of watching these shows.  

Megan Garber [00:31:42] I love that. You mentioned Top Chef, even though I definitely do want to talk about Survivor, because that is just the ultimate. But I actually did a story about Top Chef and I talked to their judges, among them Tom Colicchio, and asked him actually about that idea. Just in the sense of I too had noticed that especially compared to the very earliest seasons where there were obvious villains and it was so cutthroat, and it's certainly not like that anymore. Exactly like you said.  

Beth [00:32:11] They share ingredients now. Somebody is like, “I didn't get salt.” They're like, “I've got salt.” You're like, “What are you doing?”  

Megan Garber [00:32:16] And if they don't give the salt, then you know that they're probably kind of doomed.  

Beth [00:32:21] Yes. That's the loser at it if you're not getting the salt.  

Megan Garber [00:32:24] Exactly. And I do think part of it-- and I don't want to exactly quote Tom Colicchio, so I'll just put it in my words. But the idea I think in part of Top Chef especially, but I think also to an extent Survivor and Project Runway and shows like that, there's so much about celebrating craft. They're not just as cut throat. I think back to the first episodes of survivor where was it one challenge like literally who can stand on a post the longest? And that's great, but there's not a lot of art to that really. And these shows are about art. These shows are about craft. And the competition doesn't always serve that. So I do think that that's one part. But then I also wonder if I could add one more theory to yours, which is in general, audiences are so sick of competition. In life too, not just in these shows. But we have such a kind of winner take all culture right now where everything is so competitive and everything is turned into a competition.  

Sarah [00:33:32] And gamification.  

Megan Garber [00:33:33] Yeah, gamification. And it's interesting you mentioned that. I was thinking back to one of our episodes was actually about games and we talked with [inaudible] who is a professor of video games, basically, at the University of Utah and thinks remarkably deeply about the role of games in society. And his point was that games can bring us together in ways that are so profound and can encourage collaboration and teamwork. And the competition very quickly becomes incidental to the more collective, humane elements of the game. And I do think that's exactly what you're describing with these shows, where the shows have sort of tapped into that idea that we want more than competition, we want more than one random winner at the end. We want to see people collaborate.  

Sarah [00:34:25] Well, there's still a big universe of reality television that has villains. Real Housewives comes to mind. So I think it's interesting to see where that structure, and it seems like the dating shows still have a lot of that-- or if there's even dating shows left. I feel like they're dying out. In some ways I want to be really optimistic and say, I am so glad that we all saw clearly and decided that these shows were ruining people's lives, sometimes literally. And so that we've kind of come into a place where we don't want to see that. We all know that these are real people, and there are real costs to these shows in their lives long after the cameras stop rolling. I mean, how long have we been at this? Since the one of the real world premiere in the '90s. I really hope that we figure that out.  

[00:35:13] And I do think to a certain extent, the reason I don't watch reality television anymore, I think streaming really took a hit to the habits and the process and ritual of watching reality television show. But is that I didn't want to do that anymore. Especially Real Housewives, when that one woman's husband killed himself, I was like, I'm never watching the show again. These are real people. And just because they're rich doesn't mean they don't suffer. I'm an Enneagram one, so I lean hard into this sort of black and white moral universe. But it does feel like I hope that that some of that is just everybody going like, hey, we all have to be in our bodies whether we're a producer manipulating the villain or the villain themselves or whatever. We have to be humans after this show is over, and so let's think about that. I also wonder how much of it is the sense that so many people go on these shows just to become influencers.  

Megan Garber [00:36:08] You become one just by being on the show on those.  

Sarah [00:36:10] So they've won just by being on the show. They also don't want to get in this place where you lose 100,000 followers because people are mad at something that you've done on the show. That has happened, I think, a couple times on the dating shows. I think that happened on like Love Island. I don't know all the shows. But I wonder how much of that is at play inside their own minds, is not only do you have to be a human, but maybe I want to be an influencer and sponsors have to like me and like all that aspect. That's my more cynical take. I'll give you my optimistic take and my cynical take.  

Beth [00:36:38] I think the real person side of that, though, of somebody who doesn't want to be an influencer, they do still become an influencer. They do you still have lots of people following and talking about them online. And I have kind of wondered if some of this sort of flattening out of the casting is to say to people protect your peace online after this. This most recent season of Survivor, a woman voted in a way that no one expected and took it hard online. Now, I strongly disagreed with her vote. I was shocked too and not pleased about it, but I never would have even sent a tweet about that. But clearly that digital person out there is being protected by the person in the game, and then maybe by the third character that's created of them when they're on the show just by virtue of being observed all the time anyway.  

Sarah [00:37:30] Yeah, they're a product for sure.  

Megan Garber [00:37:32] Yeah, there are a product. And they're also just celebrities in a very basic way, in a very kind of ancient way. And celebrities traditionally have sort of-- as a sort of cultural products and cultural icons, I think there's been this sort of transaction where in exchange for fame, which often means also in exchange for money and for renown and all these good things or allegedly good things, you have to put yourself forward to be picked apart by the masses and you sacrifice yourself. There's the me of the person and then the me of the celebrity. And I think what we're seeing with reality TV now is those things too, kind of blurring. And I don't think we figured out as a culture what the dynamics should be there and how those people deserve to be treated. I'm thinking too, there's a movement now to unionize.  

Sarah [00:38:27] I'm so fascinated by that.  

Megan Garber [00:38:28] Yeah, exactly. And that's so revealing. I feel like we're just in this moment of just such flux and chaos and we're not sure even how these people should be treated, let alone whether we will then follow through with that should.  

Sarah [00:38:45] Well, it's so exploitative and nobody wants to hear this about The Real Housewives. I get it, but it is. You would be shocked; I think, people would be appalled if you knew especially in the early days of reality television, how many people were not getting paid at all. No money. To put their faces out there, to sacrifice their privacy, it's a devil's bargain, man. It is a devil's bargain. This exchange of the loss of your privacy and the right people feel to pick you apart. I recently, probably ill-advised, got on the phone with a troll. I thought, well, let's just talk in our voice. Let's talk in our voices. And this person kept going, “You have a political podcast you get paid to do." That was the emphasis. You get paid to do it. And you could just hear that transactional nature of you get some money. And I think people felt that when they weren't getting money. You're on TV, that means you owe me. You owe me an explanation. You owe me an apology. Whatever it is that I think you owe me, that is a real debt. You better be ready to spill the blood and pay, man. Since we're into these ancient metaphors, which I think are appropriate.  

Megan Garber [00:39:55] And that you owe me element could be anything. It's very much in the eye of the beholder. If I observe you, therefore you owe me something is the logic often. And I I'll fill in the blank of what the thing is and why you owe me, but I will come with that assumption, often people think. Yeah.  

Beth [00:40:17] Have either of you ever watched Tabatha's Salon Take Over?  

Sarah [00:40:21] No.  

Beth [00:40:21] Okay, this is quite a few years old. It's probably 10 years old now. I will look it up. This is a show about a woman who has phenomenally successful hair salon, and she decides to go out into the world to salons that are struggling. And she comes in and she has kind of a formula. First she puts hidden cameras in and she watches what's going on in the salon.  

Sarah [00:40:45] Like Gordon Ramsay for hair.  

Beth [00:40:46] Gordon Ramsay for hair. Exactly. And she is like Gordon Ramsay for hair. She's cruel for a couple of days. She is very, very hard on everybody. I sat down to watch this the other day (they're on Peacock or something) with my 13 year old daughter. And it was a really fun show to watch together because she really teaches the basics of customer service and business ownership and how to be a good employee who doesn't just say, like, I don't clean my station, that's somebody else's job, you know what I mean? I thought this is a great show for her to watch, minus some of the language. But also, you see in that show adults being pretty real. I don't know how much production was involved, but people get their feelings hurt over ridiculous things. But it feels like that probably did hurt her feelings.  

[00:41:37] And people have absolute toddler meltdowns, but then they kind of come back around because they've been desperate for the leadership that she provides, and she does. She comes in and brings a really steady hand for people who have not done that. And it's kind of heartwarming at the end, after she has been really tough on everybody because they see this is better. We like this better. Anyway, I bring it up because when I was watching it with my daughter who loved it, wants to watch all of them, I thought, I don't know if this gets made now because she comes in so hard.  

Sarah [00:42:11] Yeah, I want to know where Tabatha is now.  

Beth [00:42:13] I do too. She comes in really hard. I can't imagine what the social media conversation about this show would look like. I think it would be tough for a salon to take the risk of going this public now. It just feels like we're in a redefinition of reality TV in so many ways.  

Megan Garber [00:42:34] I love that. You're making me think to one of my favorite reality shows right now is Below Deck.  

Sarah [00:42:41] People love Below Deck. My friend Leslie lives for Below Deck.  

Megan Garber [00:42:46] I got to say it's great for what it is, which is trashy reality TV. It is great, but I think what makes it great is not-- so it's essentially.  

Sarah [00:42:57] It's upstairs, downstairs on a yacht.  

Megan Garber [00:42:58] Thank you. That's the perfect way to do it. Exactly. But what makes it interesting is that we focus on the downstairs. So you focus on the crew, the people who come and who are chartering these mega yachts for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're sort of incidental to the story, and it's all about the crew. But what I find really fascinating is that it is actually I think a show, to your point, about Tabitha. It is about workplace relationships, and it's about what makes a good worker and kind of stepping up but not overstepping. It's almost about emotional labor in a certain way and about just the kind of dynamics of a workplace that happens to be on a yacht with really hot people.  

Sarah [00:43:42] And they had a sexual assault controversy, right? They had somebody go into another crew members bedroom and they kicked his ass right off immediately.  

Megan Garber [00:43:50] They sure did. And also, you can see them always evolving because the show was already a hit before MeToo. And then you see like the MeToo ethics kind of slowly infiltrating or flowing, I guess, into the culture of these yachts where everyone is living in incredibly tight spaces and everything is just sort of amped up. But you do see the culture changing through the mechanism of these mega yachts. I would recommend this show. It's fascinating. But I think to me that's sort of where things are evolving is shows like that perhaps.  

Sarah [00:44:26] Yeah, which is so interesting since we're all working from home. Not everybody's working from home, but you know what I mean?  

Megan Garber [00:44:31] I'm on a mega yacht right now.  

Sarah [00:44:33] Isn't that interesting that we're all fascinated by workplace reality shows, at the same time we're having this conversation where everybody's like, I would really like to work from home and there's like all this conflict around that?  

Megan Garber [00:44:43] Yeah, but I also wonder if because of that, the work from home dynamic has created all of these new tensions and things that we're having to navigate together and like zoom etiquette and all these things; and so maybe the yacht is actually a nice way to sort of think through some of those ideas.  

Beth [00:45:01] It's just tough because as reality TV tries to be a little bit more aspirational in this way, something is kind of lost in it. Now, I'll take that. I don't want anybody harassed online or traumatized by their experience or exploited in the process. So it's a fine trade off. It just seems like an unsustainable one to me, too, in terms of like what is going to get our attention? I would love to watch a show that's really well done about people navigating zoom etiquette. But that seems really difficult to me to make. I don't know where we're going with any of this.  

Sarah [00:45:38] I just saw a reel where the CNN lady explained-- Jeffrey Toobin was sitting next to her and she explains why he had been fired while he was sitting there. And I was like, this is terrible. Who thought this was a good idea? It was painful to watch.  

Megan Garber [00:45:52] I'm getting hives right now just remembering that. Yeah.  

Sarah [00:45:57] And I'm not going to describe it to you. We'll put a link if you want to torture yourself.  

Beth [00:46:00] It is tough.  

Megan Garber [00:46:01] But I do think it gets to this question of definitions, right. Like what is reality TV actually? Is it pure entertainment? Is it documentary plus?  

Sarah [00:46:08] We've never known. We probably will never know. It's like about time we figure it out it'll change.  

Megan Garber [00:46:14] Yeah. That's right.  

Beth [00:46:16] And I think it's probably different for different shows. But so much fun to talk with you about this. Meghan, thank you so much for joining us.  

Megan Garber [00:46:22] Thank you. And thank you for mentioning Survivor. I'm so glad to talk about it always.  

Beth [00:46:30] Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to Meghan for sharing her time with us. We'll be back in your ears on Friday with a new episode. Until then, have the best week available to you.  

[00:46:37] Music interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.   Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.   Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.   Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.   Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Emily Helen Olson. Barry Kaufman. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. Jessica Whitehead. Samantha Chalmers. Crystal Kemp. Megan Hart. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. Genny Francis. Leighanna Pillgram-Larsen. The Munene Family. Ashley Rene. Michelle Palacios. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.