Wannabes

Wannabes | Tell Me Something I Don't Know

"There was this one time Steven when I was in Atlanta I visited a very famous dry through known as The Varsity and the lady serving me nudged her co worker and said: what language is she speaking and then somebody at the back of the kitchen went: woah, it's a black Mary Poppins...

Bots are - these are accounts that are posted by computer programs. They tweet, they follow each other, they look pretty normal but they're not people and they look like any other twitter account. But there's one simple observation you can make that will unmask them'...

'Is it something to do with the timing of their responses?'

'That's a good possibility. I actually looked into that and it seems fairly randomized so it looks kinda like any other person'...

'If you look at your friends on Facebook or Twitter and how many friends they have, about thirty percent of them will have friend counts that start with a one and only about five percent of them will have friend counts that start with a nine. This is a thing called Benford's law and it says that ones are way more common as the first digit in natural systems and it goes down for each digit from there'...

If they want you to be a spy I know how to get yourself fired because my wife managed to do this. So she speaks Chinese and Japanese and she studied at a University. When she graduated she got this mysterious letter and writing her to come along. And it seemed to be from the Secret Service. She didn't read to the end of the letter which said do not discuss the contents of this letter with anybody. So anyway she just, she calls her mom and she's telling her friends and mysteriously the job offer was withdrawn very very quickly...

Juan Garcia... was a Spaniard and he hated the fascist because he had spent a lot of time in Spain during the Spanish civil war. He wanted do everything he could to mess with the Nazis... So he reached out to the British, they rejected him. He reached out again, they rejected him a third time. They said no. He wasn't going to give up.

He really wanted to spy for the British. So now he reached out to the Germans - not to provide them with any information but essentially he faked that he was a spy inside Britain. Never went to Britain but using travel guides and train schedules in journals and things he pulled out from the library on Britain, he was able to give fake reports to the Germans about what was happening inside Britain. He created twenty five fake assets on the ground - spies that he was running. Created fake identities, actually wrote in different handwriting, the reports for each of these identities. To the point where the Germans brought him on as one of their top spies.

Then he went back to the British and said now you want me right? Because I've got the Germans eating out of my hands and the British finally realized this was somebody they wanted to work with. So the Germans were kind of fed disinformation for the rest of the war because they thought Juan Pujol Garcia was their spy. To the point that he was such a good actor that the British codenamed him agent Garbo. Because Greta Garbo at the time was the greatest actress in the world. Now here's the kicker. He was so good at his job that he spread disinformation about the D Day landings in Normandy. And he said to the Germans the D Day invasion wasn't going to take place at Normandy. It's going to take place at a place called Pas de Calais. Which is actually the shortest distance across the English channel...

The Germans never knew he was a double agent. So he's the only person in history to receive the top award for spying for the Germans and the British too...

When people think about going to do activities alone, really what they're thinking about is that other people are going to look at them and judge them for not having friends. It's as though that's the one thing that other people will be thinking about us if they see us.

And yet what we find is that what observers do is they create these stories like this person is working on a Ph.D. or you know they have this sort of rich inner life. because when you see them there alone you know they must be interested in the exhibit, whereas if you see the person there with a friend at the museum maybe the person is there just to socialize with a friend.

People do think that a person who goes alone has fewer friends but, but people also view that solo person as more interested in the world and more curious and so overall there are these really positive evaluations of someone who does things alone. We find also that people are more interested in initiating conversation with someone who is solo than with a friend."


One reason to note have a wingman.