From Fraud and Bribery to Money Laundering and Insider Trading, Dr. Will Thomas studies white collar crime. We talk how white collar crimes are committed, why criminals get away and what happens to the nearly $800 billion lost every year to white collar crime. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Stores to Wander Around In
Dr. Will Thomas: 00:58
Pointless: 42:08
Top 5 Stores: 58:43
Interview with White Collar Crime Researcher Dr. Will Thomas
Nick VinZant 0:00
Nick, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant Coming up on this episode white collar crime and stores,
Dr. Will Thomas 0:21
it costs us around $800 billion in economic loss every year. And it just turns out, right? The entire business was a house of cards. Their machine didn't work. Students, as I say, you know why court crime is contagious. If you don't sort of try to root it out. It gets in the system, and once it gets an assistant, it's really hard to get rid
Nick VinZant 0:42
of. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it really helps us out. So I want to get right to our first guest. This is white collar crime researcher, Dr will Thomas, so what is white collar crime.
Dr. Will Thomas 1:00
White Collar tends to refer to crimes committed either through a business or in a business environment. So the classic white collar crime is fraud, whether it's bail fraud, it's tax evasion, securities fraud, stuff like that. And in general, what I would say is white collar enforcement is concerned with sort of what we think of as like financial crimes. So that's fraud, that's bribery, money laundering, insider trading, but it also covers environmental abuses, it covers antitrust and it covers crimes that involve highly regulated industries like food safety or pharmaceuticals. So rather than give you, like, a good definition of what it is, just say, like, that's usually where we spend our times. When we think about White Collar
Nick VinZant 1:47
is there kind of a dominant area of it? Like, usually when we talk about white collar crime, it's going to be this, this and this? Yeah, I would
Dr. Will Thomas 1:56
say, if you sort of looked at enforcement records, like, Where does the government spend most of the time fraud and any related financial crimes, like embezzlement, insider trading, that sort of stuff that is like the big focus right behind that is environmental crimes and something like antitrust, so market cartels and collusion.
Nick VinZant 2:19
When you look at things kind of I'm a numbers person, so on the scale of one to 1010, being the highest, one being the lowest, where would you put how seriously law enforcement takes this? Where would you put how seriously society takes this? On that list of one to 10,
Dr. Will Thomas 2:37
on a scale one to two, maybe what's helpful is to have like a background. Of how big a problem we think this is, and that's like the good way to judge how well we're responding to it. So it turns out white collar is a hugely expensive problem for society. So the FBI does estimates on this. The latest estimate that they put down is that white collar crime. You sort of take all the white collar crime conducted in the United States, it costs us around $800 billion in economic loss
Speaker 1 3:11
every year, $800 billion 800 billion and
Dr. Will Thomas 3:15
to put that in context, that is about 20 times the impact of, like, all other criminal activity combined. So from that perspective, you might say, like, well, this is a huge problem. Now, if you looked at, I think, social awareness of white collar crime, like, how much worse of aware of the criminal activity? I think it's pretty low, given that that's the problem. And while the government does bring a decent amount of white collar cases. In general, I think the enforcement rates are also pretty low compared to how sort of big the economic and social problem behind white collar crime actually is. So let's go for like a three, maybe three and a half to get us started.
Nick VinZant 3:57
Wow, yeah. Because it seems to me the kind of thing is like, I care about that, but I'm,
Dr. Will Thomas 4:04
I look, I think, I think there's a perception that maybe because White Collar Crime involves business, or, you know, doesn't like to directly involve violence in the way that street crime does, that it's, you know, it's less serious, maybe it's not a big deal. I think the other big challenge when we think about white collar crime is that's a huge number I just gave you, but it's really hard a lot of the times to put a face to the number. And actually, like, if you think about what white collar crime is, take something like fraud. Like, the whole point of fraud, right, is to deprive somebody of their money or their property, but more importantly, like to get away with it like a good fraud is one that people don't realize happened. So there's a mistaken impression that, you know, there's not real victims of these crimes, but actually, lots of people are harmed. People lose their life saving. People lose huge amounts of money they might not just realize. It until it's like, much later on, because, of course, that's how the crime is designed to work. So, you know, it's this kind of thing where it doesn't look like other kinds of crimes, and also it's hard to detect. It goes on a lot longer than we expect. We can't, sort of easily identify the causal pathways, and all of that contributes to this feeling of, oh, yeah, that's like, I guess it's a serious thing, but not something I really care about, yeah,
Nick VinZant 5:21
and that's the thing is, like, if it's such a serious thing, why don't we kind of care? Yeah?
Dr. Will Thomas 5:26
And I do think what's interesting is we will have sort of moments where people care a lot about this, and usually there's some effect. So either there is a big economic crisis where you suddenly start to worry about what was going on behind the scenes, or there's, like, a spectacular white collar crime story that sort of breaks through, right? Like the narrative is too good. So everybody knows who Bernie Madoff is, right?
Nick VinZant 5:48
Yeah, that's the one that came to my mind, right? Like Bernie Madoff the most recent,
Dr. Will Thomas 5:52
sort of, well, not much, but one of the big ones recently was this company called Theranos. So right? If you don't, if you haven't, sort of run into their nose before, this was a Silicon Valley darling. It was gonna revolutionize healthcare, right? They invented this little cool product. It was like the iPhone for blood testing. And it just turns out, right? The entire business was a house of cards. Their machine didn't work. And when I said it didn't work, like, it's not like they were getting close, it's like it
Nick VinZant 6:19
could not work, like it was never going to happen. It was never going to happen.
Dr. Will Thomas 6:24
And so that, I think, was a case of companies attention. Because while it's true, it lost investors billions of dollars, which is a big deal, it also it had this tangible impact, right? They had a fake product. It was causing real people, real harm. So it's a standard white collar case, but I think that human to human connection made it sort of pop into social awareness and be the kind of thing that people plugged into. The problem is that's one case, right? And while it was a big case, there's lots of smaller things going on all the time that don't really attract that kind of attention.
Nick VinZant 7:00
When you look at kind of the numbers behind it, are we talking about, okay, it's $800 billion because there's just a huge amount of $10,000 $100,000 like smaller some things, is it more smaller, a lot of smaller crimes, or just a couple of big ones? When you
Dr. Will Thomas 7:18
look at the federal cases, the median loss amount tends to be in the millions. And on the other hand, there's a lot that's just like lost, and we would call this deadweight loss. And so the way to think about this is markets in particular. I mean, they run on trust in ways that I think we often sort of forget about or overlook. That there is so much in any good business transaction where you and I are sort of relying on each other to act in good faith, to be good participants. And it's true, right? That I could dig deep and hunt out all the information I could about you not trust you for an instance, it's also gonna be really expensive. So if I can't trust you, the way I fix this is I spend a lot of money to replace trust with investigation that is fundamentally deadweight loss, right? That money would have been more valuably spent if you and I could have agreed in advance to, like, not scam each other. And in some respect, it's a weird way to think about criminal law, because usually we think about criminal law as a punishment, and it is but sort of counterintuitively, we need punishment to enable trust and cooperation. Yeah, I
Nick VinZant 8:29
think about this a lot of times. Maybe this is related, maybe this isn't, but any money that's in my bank account like it's just a number, I have no idea if that thing's there's the fundamental trust that has to be there for society to exist. And
Dr. Will Thomas 8:41
you know, it's interesting, because on the one hand, I think we all appreciate that white collar crime is bad in some abstract sense, but it's not the kind of thing we focus on. And on the other hand, when people start thinking about when they focus on it, they have really interesting emotional reactions to it, right? There's a deep disgust for white collar criminals. And I think it kind of goes to this idea that we feel like somebody's trying to get away with exploiting the rest of us. And that's that's not necessarily how we feel with, like, the rest of criminal law, right? If somebody commits murder, it's not like you and I are annoyed that, like we didn't get to do that, right? Like, no, no. But the white collar crime that kind of that fairness rationale is like, really fundamental to the practice, right? So that's often where the public ire gets triggered, where you see something that makes you think, what's really bad about this is, if I knew we were all going to break the rules, I would have done it too, but I played by the rules, and I'm suffering for
Nick VinZant 9:40
it, right? Like you're taking advantage of this system. Exactly. When you look at White Collar Crime, like confined it's kind of the big one, so to speak. Is it usually just one person? Or is it? No, it's the whole system business. So
Dr. Will Thomas 9:59
when you see from. It tends to take two forms, either it's the random person inside the company, or maybe the random couple of people who are, for whatever reason, trying to skim something for themselves, or maybe they got over their skis and are trying to call back. So it tends to be a handful of actors. That's case number one. Case number two is much more rare, but it is a real phenomenon, and that is where the harm really is, sort of corporate in nature. And by that, what I mean is like it really is sort of built into a corporate culture. It's deeply felt. It kind of keeps being carried out by not just a set of individuals, but like coming through leadership. And in fact, the United States, we have something called Corporate criminal liability, sort of a subset of white collar crime. And it turns out in United States, a corporation can be convicted of a crime, just like a human being Ken, and we've done this for a long time. We've done this going back to the early 20th century, but it reflects that second group, right? That sometimes there's crimes that that aren't like the random bad actor. It really does seem to be like the bad barrel is driving this kind of misconduct. It's more rare, but it's definitely a big thing
Nick VinZant 11:16
would is there an example that you can think of right off the top of your head? The one that jumps to me is like, Wells Fargo, when they were, like, creating accounts for people or something along, yeah.
Dr. Will Thomas 11:28
So as it turns out, my expertise is in corporate crime, so I can think of a bunch of examples, but live for all the Wells Fargo, it's a great one, right? Wells Fargo, what's going on is, you've got a massive scandal where fake accounts are being created on behalf of customers. It's causing harm to the customer. It's causing all sorts of case. So what's going on there? It's not you got, like some random, you know, Customer Sales Rep who's just generating millions of these things, all of the reps are doing this. Why are all the reps doing this? Well, you take a step back. You look at the internal compensation system at Wells Fargo. And Wells Fargo basically said, look, you've got to hit a quota of new accounts or you get fired. And we're not telling you you need to break the law, but we are telling you that like it's almost impossible to hit your quota unless you're doing something unethical, right? And that starts to look more like it's not a bad actor, right? It's just like anybody who gets a job there is likely to fall into this kind of trap. So we see this at Wells, Fargo, but other big companies, you know, we see a lot of this plaguing Boeing over the last sort of five to 10 years. We saw this with BP earlier in the mid odds crimes that are in some respects more consequence of bad organizational culture than just like, you know, the one bad person. So healthcare fraud, financial fraud, all these sorts of things that is kind of like, that's the stew of white collar crime. So it might be the case that all the business practices are fine, but insurance fraud is definitely a place where we see a lot of white collar cases, and we see it frankly on both sides. We see it both somebody trying to scam insurance company, but also insurance companies trying to essentially scam their their clients. So this is the kind of thing, particularly if UnitedHealthcare looks like an outlier in the field, where prosecutors want to take a second look or take a closer look to figure out, like, Why exactly are they unlike all the other businesses, and in general, I would tell you, and I sort of said, you know, I don't think all businesses are corrupt. I think most industries will sort of report a similar problem to which is they'll say something like, there's like, there's always the one bad actor, right? There's the person who makes us look at that. So BP is a great example of this British Petroleum right? They have to Deepwater Horizon spill in the early aughts. It's a huge national story. If you look at the five years before that, BP, I can't remember the exact number, but BP had a bunch of regulatory violations, right kinds of things that aren't quite criminal, but like, are suggesting something's going wrong. BP had something like 97% of the violations for the entire oil and gas sector. You think about somebody like, you know, Exxon, right? The like, the poster child of bad actors at one point in history, they had like, one violation, and BP had 715 or 716 or something. So you can see how an entire industry says, like, part of the problem is, if you're not going after those people, you make all of us look bad, right? So other insurers, I'm sure, are sort of screaming to the rafters of, hey, if we don't look anything like United Healthcare. Maybe that says something about them, not about the insurance agency. Is
Nick VinZant 14:44
there when you look at people who commit white collar crime, and let's just stereotype the crap out of people, absolutely, yeah. Is there a general stereotype of the type of person who's going to be committing white collar crime? So. So there's a couple things
Dr. Will Thomas 15:01
we can sort of point to that that stand out relative to, like the baseline criminal population. White collar criminals tend to be older. So the criminal population tends to be quite young. It's really, you know, sort of in the 20s, whereas this is more in the 30s, early 40s. I would say the white collar criminals tend to be better off, right more middle class, more upper middle class, although there's plenty of crime that goes on sort of across the spectrum, but the sort of standard psychology we point to, as we say, somebody who sort of has the ability, right? They're in a position to take advantage of a situation. They have a motive. The motive is usually financial, but also the motive is usually tied to something like they have come to believe that's not really wrong, right? Then maybe they're sitting around the company and everybody else is doing it, so they want to do it too, or maybe they have been sort of shading low gray and gray and gray over the years, and suddenly that last step doesn't quite feel like it. So oftentimes what we find out is people have committed white collar crime, and they try to cover it up, but they they're way too late to cover it up, because by the time they realize they've crossed that line. They're like, you know, they've already hung themselves in all the records that everything you need to know is kind of sitting up there.
Nick VinZant 16:26
Um, do you think that our perceptions about it are changing? Do we is there a sense that, like, oh, people are starting to take this more seriously? People getting pissed off, you know? You
Dr. Will Thomas 16:36
know, I mentioned earlier that the public always has this kind of residual disgust around it. I think events will trigger sort of public anger or frustration, and then usually things kind of recede in the background. So we have these moments where there's a lot of public attention, and sometimes there's legal change that surrounds it, and sometimes there's not. So the hope is always, when something pops up, it really does motivate either legislators or just citizens to take action and sort of make a moment out of this. So I'll give you a recent example, right? Last sort of few weeks, stock markets have been crazy, right? The United States is announcing tariffs. Other countries respond. Then we pause, so without getting too into the weeds of why or how we know this, but suffice to say, a lot of people, including a lot of public commentators, are suspicious that some government officials, some people sort of close to the administration, maybe even President Trump or his family, made trades in The market knowing what the government was going to do around tariffs before that information was known publicly, which, if look, if that is true, you could make a huge amount of money. But if you knew what was going to be announced, and you created before it happened, make a fortune. And we do see some spikes in volatility and volume trading in ways that are at least suggestive of maybe some bad behavior. The
Nick VinZant 18:02
one that jumped out to me was like, Marjorie Taylor Green, who is a representative or Senator, I get confused, but from the south somewhere that like, okay, all of a sudden, lots of money, tariffs get lifted. Boom,
Dr. Will Thomas 18:16
exactly, right. So it's the kind of thing where you know, causation doesn't or correlation doesn't imply causation, but it like, kind of like winks at it. So I think this moment, we're seeing outrage around this kind of practice, and a lot of people, I think, are correctly asking, like, why are public officials even allowed to buy or sell stocks in the first place? It just seems like no good reason for it. This has been an issue for years has been attempts to sort of change behavior. There's actually a law called the Stock Act that's supposed to prevent them from from engaging bad behavior. It's got a huge loophole in it. So it'll be interesting to see. Right? Is this going to be one of those moment where public outrage leads to a genuine change in the law that has sort of durable consequences, or do people get upset and in six months, it fades away.
Nick VinZant 19:01
Yeah, I think the thing is, is that for me, like speaking for the public, whatever level I can speak for the public at I get outraged, I get upset, and then I just feel like, well, it's just gonna that's just how it is, and it's gonna go back and nothing's gonna happen to these people.
Dr. Will Thomas 19:16
That is a persistent worry and anxiety that I have around white collar crime, I tend to think that enforcement is a really important tool of public trust. So we saw a very similar attitude around the 2008 financial crisis. One of the things you heard constantly back then was like, you know, no bankers got prosecuted. Nobody went to jail for the 2008 financial crisis. And that's basically true. Now, you know, I could argue that the government did all sorts of things and had lots of intervention. Things, they had lots of interventions, but I think that's deeply corrosive of people's trust in institutions if they are seeing what looks like obvious wrong, and they're not seeing people being held accountable for that kind of behavior. And so I My worry is. Always, you know, we sort of punt on this stuff at our peril. It does long term damage to institutions, the way I sort of describe this to my students, as I say, you know why COVID crime is contagious, if you don't sort of try to root it out, it gets in the system, and once it gets in the system, it's really hard to get rid of. When
Nick VinZant 20:19
you look at enforcement, what's the difficulty finding out about it or proving that somebody did it on purpose? The proving
Dr. Will Thomas 20:25
of white collar cases is really hard because it's central to criminal law in general. Is what we call mens rea, right? It's the guilty mind, it's the mental state. And so the question is, always, can you show after the fact, based on, usually just paper records, that somebody was intending to deceive, right? Was trying to defraud, as opposed to just like I made a stupid business decision? So to give you a sense, I mentioned Theranos. The founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, was prosecuted and convicted of securities fraud. She's currently serving about 11 years in prison. Most criminal cases from discovery to resolution a couple of months. It's about how long it takes government to wrap up Holmes's case. You know, everybody knew what was going at their house in 2016 the government doesn't feel comfortable bringing case until 2018 it's two years later. Her trial doesn't start until 2021 the trial lasts six months, right? That's like most trials are counted in days, and then, because of all this sort of all this sort of back and forth and what's going on, she doesn't actually report to her prison sentence until June of 2023 so that's what five to seven years from start to finish, compared to five to seven months? I
Nick VinZant 21:52
don't think I'm going to ask this question very well, so this may take a minute, but if you were to look at the instances in which there's a debate between, were they doing something illegal or were they doing something stupid. What percent of the time would you say? Oh no, they were actually just stupid versus no. They just used that as a cover up because they were really doing something illegal.
Dr. Will Thomas 22:19
So that So, right? The the illegal versus stupid, it's like the complicated, cheesy way to put it, but that's like the complicated, theoretical question, right? What? Yeah, what was their mental state? On the other hand, like, those are borderline cases, but just because there's dusk and dawn doesn't mean there's not night and day and so, right, oftentimes, when you look at these cases, the defendant is going to want to say, Oh, I was being stupid, intentional. And it's not a he said, she said, It's shocking how many times you can find records where it's very clear the person knew what they were doing. In fact, they say it all over the place. We had a series of cases a few years ago with some different financial traders. One of the traders actually said, like, Let's go commit some securities fraud in the chat, right? So, like, oftentimes there's more evidence than people appreciate. And the way I sort of describe this is it's hard for the government to detect fraud, sort of generally, if it's just floating out there and ether, but the moment they get wind of anything suspicious at all, it turns out that they're really good at being able to figure out, was there fraud here or not, so they tend to bring cases where they're able to build a story. So I would say most of the times you see a case successfully brought, it's because prosecutors have pretty solid evidence that it we have definitely crossed the line here, yeah, and because there's enough of those cases, for the most part, they don't tend to take a risk on the really borderline cases, which is where it's unclear
Nick VinZant 23:50
if you were gonna to use the one to 10 example, again, right? Like in terms of evidence for the government to bring something against somebody for white collar crime, one is the lowest, 10 is the highest. They need to be like an eight in terms of evidence. They need to be like a six. Like, where do you think that they would need to be before somebody's going to bring a case?
Dr. Will Thomas 24:10
I'm not going to bring a case where I'm a five out of 10, right? Unless there's, you know, unless I just think, like, I know this person did. I know it's a scam, and I will find a way to convince the jury most of the time. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say, like, I'm going to bring a case if I really believe in good faith that I'm going to clear that threshold. So prosecutors tend to be in that sort of, like, you know, eight out of 10 range before they they agree to bring a case.
Nick VinZant 24:36
Are you ready for some harder slash? Listener submitted questions. I love it. Yeah. What's up? What's the worst company in the world?
Dr. Will Thomas 24:44
You know, here's what's interesting about businesses. The companies that are doing something really, really terrible are often good in some other way. So Volkswagen, right? Volkswagen has a diesel gate scandal. So. They are selling cars that they say meet environmental standards, and they don't. And this is not like we made a mistake. We didn't understand what's going on here. Volkswagen ended subsidiaries, wrote software that was designed to detect when government regulators were detecting what the car was doing, and then, like, switch over to an entirely new internal sort of like Carson, this was high level, deep in the weeds, super like, you know, corrupt behavior. Also, Volkswagen really good record historically on labor issues. So it's like, they're just terrible in this one way, but just because they're terrible in one way doesn't mean not terrible the other.
Nick VinZant 25:49
Like, that's the kind of thing that what I know about business. Like, how does that happen? Like, that's so blatantly illegal and such a blatant bad idea that, like, you're gonna get in a lot of trouble if you get caught, you know, right? And yet, I
Dr. Will Thomas 26:04
mean, and this goes to our conversation about sort of type one and type two, by call of crimes that is such an organizational thing, like no one person pulled that move off, which means there were meetings. People sat down in a room and were like, the software is not successfully defeating the detection device well enough. Let's tweak it. Just wild to me. And at the same time, you have a company that's doing lots of great things in other spaces. So I think this is a fundamental tension, particularly at the corporate level, is that even the evil businesses are good in other ways. Yeah,
Nick VinZant 26:37
yeah, you get the thing, but in that kind of an instance, right? And then use Volkswagen as an example. But is that the kind of thing where, in my mind, Volkswagen is a massive company, like 1000s of people would have been involved in that potentially, right? Like 1000s of people, are they all going to jail or just, hey, here's a fine. So
Dr. Will Thomas 26:57
in the Volkswagen case, you can easily imagine that lots of the people involved didn't do something that rose to the level of the crime, because they kind of don't need all the elements. And actually, you can imagine, lots of those people don't even realize that they're doing anything shady. They're they're implementing something from their boss, but they don't just have enough of us sort of like big picture to realize what it's being used for. And this is, in fact, one of the reasons, going way back why the United States and Supreme Courts first recognized the idea of holding a corporation responsible. Because sometimes the crime is the fact that, like, this bad thing wouldn't have been done by any individual if they knew what was going on. It's precisely because everybody's in a position where they're contributing without sort of being aware that you get these really bad behaviors. So the fact that a company commits a crime doesn't prove necessarily that, like everybody involved does, it strongly suggests that at least some people did. But that is always sort of the tension. Do you bring a charge against the business? Do you bring it against individuals? Do you bring it against both? Usually we see it being brought against a handful of individuals who are really involved. And also the business,
Nick VinZant 28:07
does the punishment fit the crime? No, in the sense that all I don't, you know, I'll just use United Healthcare, because it's right at the top of my head, right where you're potentially denying all these claims. And who knows how many people could have suffered adverse consequences, financial ruin, death, all those kind of things, and the punishment might not even be there, like does the punishment generally fit the crime in your mind?
Dr. Will Thomas 28:30
So at the organizational level, I'd say no. Individual level, you know, we want to dig in a little bit more. I think white collar criminals tend to be sentenced more leniently than other criminals. So there's a, you know, there's a lack of sort of uniformity there. Now, if it were up to me, and I think that lots of our prison sentences are probably too long for what we want to accomplish, so I wouldn't say, like, punish the white collar people more. And say, like, let's do the white collar thing everywhere, in the corporate context, though. I mean, I think this is a constant worry, is that the punishments not only don't sort of meet the crime, but like, fall wildly, like vastly, below what we would expect. So P Genie is a good example of this. This is the utility company out in California. P genie has admitted, has pled guilty, to causing several of the largest wildfires in California history, including something called the campfire in 2017 it destroyed literally multiple towns. They just don't exist anymore. Over 180 people died as a result. So pg&e has pleaded guilty, and they've actually plead guilty to Manzar to causing the death of 185 people. And I don't have the punishment offhand, but I want to say that the fine imposed on peak Genie was around $3 million
Nick VinZant 29:56
what that seems like? Oh,
Dr. Will Thomas 29:59
even. Worse than that, there was, there's reporting that P Genie was initially offered the chance to plead guilty to arson. Now, arson is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as manslaughter. So you know, why wouldn't you plead guilty to arson? Why would you take manslaughter? It turns out, the way California sentencing law is written is there's a cap on how much of a monetary penalty you can oppose in manslaughter, whereas arson, it's just how much damage it cost. Now that that makes some amount of sense when we're talking about human beings causing the death of other human beings, right, right? Because you can put them in prison, but you can't put the business in prison. So pg&e actually went for the much worse crime, precisely because it got them a much lower sort of punishment in the end, quote, unquote punishment. Is
Nick VinZant 30:48
there any kind of, okay, just total devil's advocate, right? Is there any kind of a mentality? It's like, okay, PG and E did this, but if we just nail them to the wall, then all those people are going to lose their jobs, and then that's going to create another problem, right? Like, is there a certain amount of like, Oh, we don't really want to do that. Yeah. Look, I I
Dr. Will Thomas 31:12
can be critical of prosecutors all day and some of their behaviors, and I sort of said that some of them might be backing off good cases. I'm deeply sympathetic to exactly this worry. So like the famous case, the infamous case is Arthur Andersen. So Arthur Andersen was the accounting firm for Enron. Arthur Andersen got prosecuted by the federal government for obstruction of justice. Officially, the punishment was a quarter million dollars. So you might say, like, that's nothing, right? But Arthur Andersen is a publicly it was a public accounting firm. They provided accounting services to public companies, and if you are convicted of a crime under the rules of the SEC, you're not allowed to provide accounting services to publicly traded businesses. So it turns out like if you're a accounting firm that only has public clients, and you're not allowed to have public clients like you, you just go away. So prosecution of Anderson and its conviction led almost immediately to its dissolution. That was 30,000 people who lost their jobs. There's no question that some people at Anderson were doing terrible things, but I think everybody agreed like that was not the outcome you wanted. And so prosecutors are are both paranoid of being that, you know, being that prosecutor who accidentally destroys the company, and they're also paranoid because sometimes the consequences aren't actually from the criminal law itself. It's from like some other thing that happens down the road as a consequence, it's kind of out of their hands. So they're really trying to walk this tight rope. And one of the ways they've done it in the past couple years is they've actually started what's called a prosecution agreement. They agree to, you know, hold off on prosecuting a business in exchange for the business taking lots of steps to remedy its past behaviors, pay some fines, etc. And this is sort of a it's a weird tool. It sounds like they're just giving them a free pass, but it's sort of premised on this idea that the prosecutor wants to get the results, but are worried that if they get the conviction, it's going to have these unintended consequences.
Nick VinZant 33:20
What kind of like when you look at kind of the categories of white collar crime? Which one would you say that has the biggest impact on us?
Dr. Will Thomas 33:29
Oh, good. So I would say right now the biggest impact, I mean, so here's a cheating answer. One of the biggest impact comes from fraud. Now the reason is, fraud is the most common thing we charge it just turns out, the way that the federal fraud statute is written, there's not just one, there's like 20. They all basically say the same thing. They're just for like, different categories of fraud. But you sort of put all those together, and that's like an easy way to grab folks. So from that perspective, I say fraud. Now from maybe another angle, I would say bribery is one of the biggest and most important white collar issues. So bribery specifically refers to bribing a government official, and bribery not just United States, but especially internationally, is a really, really big problem, like international corruption is a huge problem, and to its credit, the United States has actually done a really good job of helping to tamp down on international corruption by using its criminal laws by basically telling you as companies, it's a crime to bribe somebody out of the country. It's called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And the consequence of businesses not being able to do that is has actually led to, like, substantial decreases in corruption around the world. So in terms of the most impactful, I'd say bribery
Nick VinZant 34:56
for you, like, What's your most when you look at kind of different incidents. Just instant incidences, incidents, whatever it is, is there one that stands out to you is like, that one fascinated me. Awkward
Dr. Will Thomas 35:08
confession. Whenever there's a new, big scandal, I get a little excited because I think, like, oh man, there's gonna be something really clever and amazing, weird going on here, and I don't like it, but at least I'm gonna see something novel and sophisticated. And I would tell you, I'm regularly disappointed. So the people who follow the crypto space, Sam bankman Fried was, you know, one of, like, the crypto gurus, until his company blew up, and Sam bankman Fried was prosecuted and convicted of all sorts of fraud. And I thought when that was happening, like, I don't know crypto This has got to be weird and crazy and complicated. I'm going to learn some financial schemes. It's like, not even a little, like, he just had an Excel sheet that said, like, I owe all this money, and he's just, like, the most basic, obvious thing. And so one of the maybe depressing realities around white collar crime is it's often not that sophisticated. It's usually just pretty brazen. But it turns out, the way lots of business entities work and businesses United States work is lots of information just isn't public. And that's, that's fine, that's good, but it creates space for, you know, the brazen to get away with fraud for long time. Yeah,
Nick VinZant 36:20
you always think it's going to be some big new thing, and it's like, oh, it's just a Ponzi scheme, just straightforward, like, it's just a straightforward Ponzi scheme, like, I thought it was going to be, was there? Is there one, though, that you would think of as like, Oh, that was like,
Dr. Will Thomas 36:33
there have been some in the past. So, for example, there was a huge scandal around banks colluding to manipulate the LIBOR rate, and as a result, the library is sort of like this international exchange rate used by banks. It's a super useful proxy for all sorts of information. At some point it wasn't even clear that they'd done anything criminal, because nobody thought anybody could figure out a way to to manipulate this vitally important World Index. But they figured it out. These bunch of folks got together and at different banks were able to sort of manipulate this thing, and the knock on consequences were huge. I mean, you had to rechange all sorts of regulatory calculus. We had to figure out what's going on here. So that was one of those where it was extremely brazen. It also was just sort of a little impressive to me that somebody figured out how to sort of poke at, like, one of these, like, you know, foundation, sewer pipe, kinds of things that's running in the world economy that matters a ton, but nobody really knows about so that's good.
Nick VinZant 37:40
Best Movie about white collar crime, worst movie about white collar or TV show which, whichever way you want to
Dr. Will Thomas 37:47
go. Okay, just because I'm sitting in university, I'll have to include a book on here, because it's also just great book. I've mentioned Theranos. If you haven't read bad blood, it's amazing. It's written by John Carey. He's, he's the reporter that sort of uncovered the Theranos scandal. The beginning, phenomenal book. It's good for that scandal. It's also just a really good look at, like, the how to sort of fake it till you make it eat those in Silicon Valley really, just like, take off and go dangerously wrong. So, bad blood. It's great. There's a documentary on HBO, but, but the book is better movies. So this one is off the beaten path. I'm not gonna say it's the best movie, but it's the one that no one else recommends. I think you should watch the movie the other guys starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. It is. It is exactly as stupid, right as you'd expect a buddy cop movie with Will Ferrell to be. It's also secretly a movie about, like, all of these problems around white collar crime, like why it's so hard to police, why it's so hard to get people to pay attention to which is, actually, it's not a surprise. The director is Adam McKay. And Adam McKay directed The Big Short, which right is a movie about the 2008 financial crisis. So it's not, it's not a smart movie, but it's kind of clever. And also, by the end, you realize the whole movie is about trying to make white collar crime enforcement sexy. So that would be my pitch for like, I'm not saying it's the best, but it's but it's overlooked,
Nick VinZant 39:21
very broad question, what do you think about what's going on now,
Dr. Will Thomas 39:26
you know, there's a lot of movement in the white collar space. There's been lots of pronouncements. We will see what happens. This is one problem in the white collar space. Is DOJ at the Department of Justice. Every new Department of Justice likes to make big announcements about what they're going to do in white collar going to do in white collar they don't always like to follow through on what they announce. I will say that the current administration has announced that they're going to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for the next sort of six months or. So and then after that, only prioritize cartels, only go after drug cartels for bribery related stuff. I think that's pretty short, cited as a practice. The rationals they're giving is something like US companies are kind of disadvantaged internationally. I mean, guess what? They're not allowed to participate
Nick VinZant 40:23
in driving because they're not allowed to commit crimes. Like it's, yeah, but I actually think
Dr. Will Thomas 40:27
it's short sighted another way, which is the FCPA was really helping us businesses, and not enforcing it is going to hurt them. It really helped them, because everybody knows about it. So it's a great defense if some random foreign official comes to you and says, like, pay me something. Company can just say, like, I must bribe you. But we all know how the FCPA works, and they're not crushing if you do. And now that defense is it's not not going to be available to them, so that that hurts them. But also, the FCPA is enforced almost half the time against international companies committing bribery, but using US markets. So actually, the FCPA was being used to level the playing field on behalf of US companies. And so pausing enforcement is actually gonna, like, you know, it's gonna make it easier for other non US companies to get away with it. And if I were a US company or via US General Counsel, I'd be telling my firm, like, just because they say they're not going to prosecute, it doesn't mean that's true. They can always change their mind, and you can't get mad at them, so don't change what you're doing. So I actually think this is an instance where, you know, I didn't I disagree with the original rationale, but I also they're kind of missing how white collar enforcement was helping the US economy succeed not actually hurting
Nick VinZant 41:43
it? I want to thank Dr Thomas so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media sites. We're Profoundly Pointless on tick tock, Instagram and YouTube, and we've also included his information in the episode description. And if you want to see more of this interview. The YouTube version will be live on April 17, at 12:30pm Pacific. Okay, now let's bring in John Scholl and get to the pointless part of the show. Do you think you could commit a major crime and get away with it?
Speaker 2 42:18
No, but I don't think, I don't think most can commit major crimes and get away with it. So I
Nick VinZant 42:26
would have to agree. I think that the only way that I could get a major away with a major crime is if I was just totally random. I think that's the only way to really do it, because otherwise there's just too much backtracking on it. Like, I certainly couldn't plan to, like, rob a bank. I
Speaker 2 42:43
would love to see how many people never get caught for serious crimes. I feel like most people that commit whether it's defrauding people of millions of dollars or murdering people, I feel like you get caught eventually. I think
Nick VinZant 42:57
there's a big difference, though, between people knowing that you did it, and being able to prove that you did it, I think we generally always kind of know who probably is responsible, even for some of the big like unsolved serial killer stuff. I mean, there's a few, but I think that people probably always know they just can't prove it that you did it. So I pulled the audience 58% of people say no, they could not commit a major crime and get away with it. 42% of people think that they could commit a major crime and get away with it. I think that's way too high. I don't think that you're thinking all the details out.
Speaker 2 43:37
Shout outs, alright, let's see. We'll start here with Beckley Anderson, Jake Kretschmer, Anastasia, Vives, Zach dilloway And I, I was thinking about Zach's. I don't think I know Zach in real life, which is kind of weird to say I know very
Nick VinZant 43:57
few zachs. I knew is Zach LaRue, who was one of the more interesting people that I've ever met in my life. Is it a Zach, how do you feel? How do you feel about the difference between a Z, a C, H and a Z, a K. You ever met a Z, a K? Zach,
Speaker 2 44:12
not that I can recall, but I do feel if you have the k instead of the H, you're going to be a little more wild. You're going to be a little more crazy. I think crazy. It's a little crazy. I feel like the H is like, Hey, I'm Zach, but I'm the boring kind of Zach, alright? Jacob Fink, Mike Lindeman, Augustine Davidson, that's a
Nick VinZant 44:32
that's a mouthful. Augustine, is it a boy or a girl? Looks
John Shull 44:36
to be a boy. Man,
Unknown Speaker 44:38
not a boy. A man, boy, man, uh,
Speaker 2 44:42
Lady Boy, if anyone watched White Lotus, they know exactly what I'm talking
Nick VinZant 44:46
about. I did not. I'm not into that. Once everybody gets under a show, I can't get into it. I've actually watched some of those episodes. And
Speaker 2 44:55
anyway, Marcus, Garcia, Jonathan ho my. Yes, Denise Holzer and Zen Taylor, congratulations. Hmm, you are the chosen 10. Alright. So getting back to what you asked about, to open up this part of the show, speaking of crimes that you know, do you think you could get away with him? We're coming up on, unfortunately, the 30 year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Oh
Nick VinZant 45:23
god, I remember that I was in school. I remember they brought in, like they had to wheel in a TV, like they wheeled in a TV, and people watched it. And for
Speaker 2 45:33
all of you youngins out there, the quick 10 second synopsis of this is Oklahoma City federal building was blown up by two domestic terrorists. The I think it's still the largest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States, killed, like 168 people, and they parked the writer truck out front of the building, which happened to be literally right next to the daycare. So like 30 young children that.
Nick VinZant 45:58
Well, they did do that. I forgot about that. There was a daycare right there. So there was two people, Timothy McVeigh in the other one, but I don't remember what his name was, Terry Nichols.
Speaker 2 46:08
And, of course, Terry Nichols, they were both residing about an hour northeast of Metro Detroit. You know, guys had to
Nick VinZant 46:17
bring Detroit into everything, right? Like, what is it with people in Michigan and Detroit that they always have to try to insert it into everything? I actually know why they try to always insert in everything, because they know it sucks. They know that it sucks, and they're always trying to, like, insert it into something in the hopes that somebody else will validate their opinion, that someone else will be like, Oh yeah, Detroit, great place. And they have to keep bringing it up and bringing it up and bringing it up and bringing it up, because eventually they just want one person to be like, Oh yeah, Detroit liked it, and nobody's ever going to do it.
Speaker 2 46:48
I want to go back to this, but I have to say another part I was going to, I was actually going to put down the city of Metro Detroit and or the city of Detroit and Metro Detroit a little bit. Okay, okay. They have started. The City of Detroit just cut the ribbons on a like, new helicopter, like touring company that's now has a wing at Detroit's airport,
Nick VinZant 47:11
shootings, like bird's eye view of the abandoned houses.
Speaker 2 47:14
Like, what are you gonna now? Don't get me wrong, Detroit does have a beautiful like, river line, or whatever you want, riverfront with, with Canada and Windsor across the way. But like, how, like, like, what you're gonna do a helicopter tour ride, like, what
Nick VinZant 47:31
the abandoned plants like? And here's where there used to be something, and now it's, oh, look, there's people. What was your point about the Oklahoma City bomb?
Speaker 2 47:41
No, well, two things, I wanted to bring it up, because I can't believe it's been 30 years, because I was also in school. Yeah, I remember, you know, them willing in the TV on the big metal, like rolling.
Nick VinZant 47:52
That was a big, you know, when the TV got rolled in, they
Speaker 2 47:55
locked down our school, which, back then they didn't, it wasn't actually a lockdown. The teacher just shut the door and was like, kids, you can't leave. You can't leave. There's something going on.
Nick VinZant 48:04
What was the point of that into like, there was a bombing in Oklahoma City, so, like, shut the school down in Detroit. Well,
Speaker 2 48:10
unfortunately, once again, I think when these things happen, everyone immediately thinks it's, you know, someone, something, an organization from the Middle East, or something, and you don't know, you know, you don't know what that's going to happen. Yeah, you don't know at that point, etcetera. But I was going to say they, I think, like, there was always this thing about they did everything right, except they did one thing wrong, which was Timothy McVeigh, the main, I guess, a person main.
Nick VinZant 48:37
He was more than, yeah, yeah. He had fake
Speaker 2 48:41
he had aliases, blah blah blah to rent the trucks and get the, get the fertilizer for the bombs, blah blah blah, but he checked into a hotel room in nearby Oklahoma City with his actual name. That's like, you
Nick VinZant 48:53
always make some little mistake, exactly like you always make some little mistake that's going to get you and
Speaker 2 48:59
that, yeah, and that's why, when you had asked about, you know, major crime, it's like even people that have committed them that think they've done everything right, there's always that one thing that you forget because it's complex, and it gets you, and it got him, and now he's dead.
Nick VinZant 49:15
So, oh, he did that. Yeah, okay, all right. Well, thanks for bringing that up. Anyways.
Speaker 2 49:20
Well, it just kind of had to go with it, like I was going to talk going to talk about the anniversary anyways, because, you know, we're an informative show. You're a history major, and I'm sure you, you know, you love history.
Nick VinZant 49:29
Do you know how some somehow I got into a drunk conversation two weeks ago about the Peloponnesian War, which is the first time I have ever actually used my history degree. That's the only time I've ever and I actually, some reason remember the Peloponnesian War. It's totally worthless, totally worthless.
Speaker 2 49:46
I feel like his role to reverse right now, and I was talking about the Peloponnesian War, you would say, Oh, great, that's so exciting. Thanks for wasting our time. Peloponnesian
Nick VinZant 49:56
War was one of the big events in ancient Greece.
Speaker 2 50:01
Uh, let's see just a couple other things here. Uh, did you know that Elton John and Madonna had some kind of feud for like, the last four decades?
Nick VinZant 50:10
No, I don't know why we care about these things. I really don't understand why people care about celebrities. And apparently that's kind of a thing that's specific with the millennial generation that millennials care a lot about celebrities, and other generations don't as much.
Speaker 2 50:27
Well, we right. We care about the celebrities, but then the generation below us care about these streamers and Twitchers and all that stuff. Oh
Nick VinZant 50:35
yeah, I could see they just they the view a different they still have the same kind of thing. It's just a package differently. That's why I don't understand people when they complain about generations. Every generation is the same. Every generation doesn't like the generation above them or the generation below them. That's just how it works.
Speaker 2 50:52
Do you how do you feel about people? Let's see, how can I phrase this? How do you feel about people that like do snow blower maintenance to put it into the garage for for seven months, like they started up and they run it for for 10 minutes. Do you do that? Do you even have a snow blower? Do you even
Nick VinZant 51:12
need a snow blower? I live in Seattle, and I before, why are you getting upset about somebody doing maintenance for the things that they bought, bought and paid for, like, Oh my God, he's starting his car and taking care of it.
Speaker 2 51:25
I've never done it. I just put my snow blower away, and then I bring it back out, and it works. First of
Nick VinZant 51:32
all, why do you have a snow blower? Why don't you be a man and go out there and shovel it, snow blower? You go get you your snow blower. Should you, baby? Hand. You'll get cold in your body. To get tired, you go inside, have your hot chocolate, get your baby, pop out on the bed or bottom snow blower. Go out there like a man. I
Speaker 2 51:50
actually do shovel. It was given to me, actually, but I do shovel. So
Nick VinZant 51:55
I would highway if somebody tried to give me a snow blower, I would take it as a personal insult. I would take it as a personal insult that someone tried to give me a snow blower. Why do I look like I don't lift
Speaker 2 52:07
one thing? I actually, I mean, you're, you're a winter guy. You like winter sports. The snow can be quite heavy, and if you get a lot of it, well,
Nick VinZant 52:16
I'm sorry. Life doesn't sorry, no, difficult when you're gone, you want
Speaker 2 52:21
to talk to me. I shovel. So I've actually been out there shoveling, and my neighbors have asked me if I wanted to use their snow blower, and I've said no. So I
Nick VinZant 52:29
wouldn't even respond, just the kind of thing that I would just give a look and they would know.
Speaker 2 52:34
Well, it kind of all went down south when you don't even have a snow blower. Because, for some reason, and maybe I'm in the minority here. I figured, Seattle gets snow.
Nick VinZant 52:43
Seattle does rarely get snow. Seattle is a massive misconception. There are more misconceptions about Seattle than I really have ever heard about any other city that I've lived in. There's very low crime, there's not really that much rain, there's hardly any snow. We just tell people that so they don't come
Unknown Speaker 53:04
you know what? I don't good.
Speaker 2 53:07
Let's see. So Easter's coming up. At what age is it unacceptable to get an Easter basket? Oh,
Nick VinZant 53:16
I mean, I think once you get into the teens, you kind of gotta stop. Once you get into the teens, you gotta stop getting an Easter basket. You gotta stop trick or treating like Easter basket probably 10. You can go trick or treating until you hit 13, but like, I don't know, I would What did you stop believing in first Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny,
Speaker 2 53:42
probably the Easter Bunny. I don't even remember that revelation. I remember when I found out Santa wasn't real, for some reason that's burned into my memory. Thanks, Mom and Dad. But
Nick VinZant 53:50
oh, is that when you saw your mom and dad having sex with each other?
John Shull 53:54
Nope, nope. That was not during Christmas. I don't think, Well, I'm just, I'm just getting out of here.
Unknown Speaker 54:07
Man,
Nick VinZant 54:10
God, love to bring that up. God, that'd be so awkward. How old man, you saw it? I don't I we've talked about this. I know how old you are. Just tell me, get it over with. I
Speaker 2 54:19
don't know. I don't remember that six, seven or eight. I was old enough to remember, but young enough to still be kind of stupid to it, I guess.
Nick VinZant 54:27
Oh yeah. You were just like, What are they doing? You're wrestling. That's so I don't even want to think about, yeah,
Speaker 1 54:31
dude, no, um, where was I? God
Nick VinZant 54:35
damn it. You were thinking about your mom and dad and having sex. No,
Speaker 2 54:39
I wasn't something about Easter but I don't even want, I don't even want to talk about eating things right now, let's see. Do you have a favorite, favorite Easter candy, chocolate?
Nick VinZant 54:51
Oh, yeah, the Cadbury eggs. Man, the Cadbury eggs are by far the best Easter candy that you can get. I love those things. I. I love Easter. I'm not religious at all. I like, I'm not religious in any way, but I love Easter, like, I'll hide easter eggs. My kids go and look for them. Have I been to church? Not in the last 25 years, but I'll hide some Easter eggs. And just like, it's easier by me,
Speaker 2 55:13
honest to God, I have no idea how I'm gonna get through this episode without thinking about what your parents having sex? Yeah, thank you. Just keep just keep it on coming.
Nick VinZant 55:24
Yeah, your dad was,
John Shull 55:32
I apologize for everybody out there.
Nick VinZant 55:37
God, dang it, man, that's terrible. It is kind of crazy to think that you essentially came out of, like, somebody's like, you came out of your dad's Wiener, right? Like, if you think about that, that's ridiculous. Like, where'd you come from? I want
Speaker 2 55:57
everyone to stop and think about that right now. You everyone that's that's watching or listening this? You came out of your
Nick VinZant 56:04
dad's. You came out and party. You came out of your dad. It's true, right? It's true. That's just the facts of biology. Man, get over
John Shull 56:11
it. It's all right.
Unknown Speaker 56:14
I
Speaker 2 56:17
All right. Coming back here. Um, when did you stop believing in Santa or the Easter Bunny? I don't actually remember
Nick VinZant 56:23
any kind of like moment or something like that. I didn't have like, a moment of realization for either of those. I just remember one time seeing, like, my dad out there pissed off because he's hiding easter eggs and like he was really phoning it in. I think he just dumped him on the ground in a pile. Like, I'm going to die. Like, that's, I think, right. Like, that's the old man VinZant style, done with this. We were at, I don't remember Santa Claus though. We
Speaker 2 56:51
were at an Easter egg hunt last weekend, and this Easter Bunny guy shows up as the Easter Bunny, and he does his thing, and then he disappears. And you know, you're talking to some people, we go to walk back to the parking lot, and here's this, here's this guy comes out of the bathroom, like a community bathroom, with the head off, oh, cigarette out in his mouth. He takes a big, big puff of his Dart, throws the Dart to the ground and puts the head back on. God,
Nick VinZant 57:23
that's amazing. Do you imagine if you were a kid seeing that, like, it's the extra bunny. Where you want kid I'm on my break pretty much. I mean, their cigarette, like, flicks the ash or the cigarette out on there. Yeah, it was kind
Speaker 2 57:38
of like, you know, like watching AMC during the holidays, during Christmas, and bad Santa comes on, and you have to explain to your kid, like, why that's watching
Nick VinZant 57:48
Bad Santa. Just turn off the you don't have to, you know, I don't know if you know this, but if, like, a movie is on, or a TV show is on, you can, you can change the channel.
Speaker 2 57:58
I don't know if you know this, but I hate you. All right, that's pretty much all I had. Man,
Nick VinZant 58:06
okay, your dad was giving your mom all she could have.
John Shull 58:21
That's, that's why I have childhood trauma. That is
Nick VinZant 58:24
that would be horrific. I wouldn't want to see that. I wouldn't want to see that in any way. Not a, not a good thing. No, it's not. Let me try to see move something here. Okay, alright. Are you ready for top five? Unfortunately,
Speaker 2 58:36
I really just want to be done with this episode of talking to you. Okay, all right. Well,
Nick VinZant 58:42
don't you try them somehow. So our top five is top five stores we like to wander around in, okay, like that. What did you do? Well,
Speaker 2 58:51
you Well, I mean, it's the same thing. You had messaged me in stores you don't mind going to,
Nick VinZant 58:56
oh, okay, I feel like, all right, top five stores. You don't mind going to like, Oh, I'll go to that store. Yeah, I'll check that out. Yeah, number one, our number five. Sorry, uh, so
John Shull 59:08
my number five is Hobby Lobby.
Nick VinZant 59:14
My God, you are such a pansy. What are you doing in Hobby Lobby?
Speaker 1 59:18
Why is that so funny? Because you're a grown man,
Nick VinZant 59:21
like hot okay, if I was to die and go to Hell, two of the worst places that I could possibly be sent would be Hobby Lobby and Joanne's Fabrics. When I go into like a hobby lobby or a Joanne's Fabrics, I feel physically sick, like it physically makes me sick to go into that type of store like it to me, it's just all crap. What is all this crap?
Speaker 2 59:50
Yeah, I mean, it is crap, but I don't, I don't mind, you know, getting lost in it. Sometimes you find some deals. Sometimes you're like, Oh, that looks all right. Like, I don't know. I don't mind it. I. That's what this top five list is. I don't mind going to Hobby Lobby. Every now and again,
Nick VinZant 1:00:04
you get some nice yarn. Oh, look at these crochet look at these doilies.
Speaker 2 1:00:10
They like. My hobby lobby does have some locally sourced candles, which is nice. So
Nick VinZant 1:00:19
my number five is a car dealership. I don't mind looking around a car dealership, especially because there's not really any pressure that I'm suddenly just going to buy a car like you're not just going to convince me into buying a car for no reason.
Speaker 2 1:00:31
Yeah, no, no, I can't any place where they have open air salesmen and listen, I get I get it. I'm not putting anyone down, because that's what you have to do in a car dealership to sell cars, but I don't want to be bothered. Like, I don't want to be I don't want to be looking in the lot and have three different people come up to me, like, if I if I want to buy something, or I have questions, I'll come see you. I
Nick VinZant 1:00:54
feel the same way. If I have a question, I'll come to you. You don't need to come to me about anything.
Speaker 2 1:00:59
Yeah, like, it's the same thing, like in Best Buy. Now, when you walk in and they have like, you know, six or seven different vendors trying to sell you something like that, makes me just want to leave.
Nick VinZant 1:01:09
Did you ever play Bucha tag as a kid?
Speaker 2 1:01:12
No, but that sounds terrible. There used to be this store,
Nick VinZant 1:01:16
I think it still exists in the mall, called the buckle. And you would like, walk in and see how far into it you could get before somebody asked you a question. And like, I don't think anybody ever made it to the wall. Like, there's no way you would get into the back of that store without somebody. They were like, they would descend on you, like, the Huns, ooh, you should agree, right
Speaker 2 1:01:33
there. So my, my number four, actually, kind of along those lines, is Costco. Like, I don't mind. I don't like going to Costco. I don't like the parking I don't like how it's always busy. I don't like how there's five or six people that want to sell you something or have you sign up for a membership. But God dang it, they have great deals, or you think they're deals and their food is fantastic,
Nick VinZant 1:01:55
hm, I think that's ridiculous. Place to Costco. I'll get into that a little bit later, but I think that's offensive, and I almost decided to cancel this whole
Unknown Speaker 1:02:07
show after eight years, that that's the that's the
Nick VinZant 1:02:09
sense of that's the straw. Don't you ever besmirch Costco in my presence, putting it in number four is a besmirchment of Costco. My number four is a map store. There's this place here in Seattle that has all these maps, and I would go into that store anytime, any day. It's incredible, like just seeing all these maps at different places.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:31
Cool. It's actually pretty cool.
Nick VinZant 1:02:34
All right, don't forget, you saw your mom and dad having sex. Let's not forget about that. Oh, God, where would that be on the map store? If I was to draw a diagram in your house where you grew up, where your mom and dad were having sex, where would that be you? I better showed you a map of where that happened.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:55
Look, I have nothing. I don't even like. There's nothing you can say, Yeah, they're
John Shull 1:02:59
really except.
Speaker 1 1:03:03
Yep, just get it out. Just do it really big, give it to me. Okay, well, what did my mom get? Okay,
Nick VinZant 1:03:11
my number three started out being your dad, and then I switched to your mom later, and it didn't work out.
Speaker 2 1:03:16
My number three is like any kind of really expensive furniture store where you know, like, you're not going to buy anything like a like a Pottery Barn, or like a pier one or something.
Nick VinZant 1:03:29
You are a 70 year old woman. You are a 70 year old woman. These
Speaker 2 1:03:35
are stores I don't like. I don't mind going into. It's not just walking around
Nick VinZant 1:03:38
looking couches like, whoo. Hoo. Look at that night stand.
Speaker 2 1:03:43
I'm a married man. Like, what? I don't know what you like, wow. Do you see these
Nick VinZant 1:03:47
serving trays? Is that, uh, ottoman?
John Shull 1:03:53
I don't understand why
Nick VinZant 1:03:56
I'm fine. Like, what piece of furniture are you really looking at? Like, wow. Look at that. Like, what's when you go into the furniture store, what furniture are you first looking at? Like, ooh, honey. You know, I'm gonna be checking out the couches while we're here. I mean,
Speaker 2 1:04:10
I'm always looking for like, a good desk or something, you know, like a good like study area, for what, number three for
Nick VinZant 1:04:19
what? What are you doing? You just have a dick. What's
Speaker 2 1:04:23
your number three? A bookstore? I don't even understand why that's on your list. Bookstores are fantastic.
Nick VinZant 1:04:32
Oh, yeah, what? What do you mean why it's on my list? Like, bookstores are fantastic. Like that.
Speaker 2 1:04:36
You don't want that. You don't mind going to, that shouldn't be a don't mind going to store.
Nick VinZant 1:04:40
Oh, you're saying want to go. Oh, yeah. Like, that's okay, yeah, that yeah, bookstores are a bookstore, fantastic. I generally walk out of a bookstore, though, for every three times, I only actually walk out with a book once, for every three times I go to a bookstore. Otherwise, I just decide, like, woman, start reading. Uh,
Speaker 2 1:05:02
just to give you an update, I am now up to 14 books on the year so far, and not one of them is about submarines. So
Nick VinZant 1:05:08
it's pretty sad, when you think about it, that your wife is at 100 books and you're at 14 books.
Speaker 2 1:05:13
Well, you know, we read at a different pace. So
Unknown Speaker 1:05:16
don't the cat.
Nick VinZant 1:05:19
Don't weigh fine. To the store. I'm just glad you
Speaker 2 1:05:24
didn't make another sex joke about pace or anything. You really blew it there. My number two
Nick VinZant 1:05:29
was but when you saw your parents having sex, were they slowly, passionately making love, or was he like, giving it to her?
Speaker 2 1:05:34
My number two is fast food. Fast food restaurants?
Unknown Speaker 1:05:41
What? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 1:05:43
I have anxiety. I don't like going like, I don't like, I told the story like, a month ago where I literally left a McDonald's because I didn't know how to operate the the kiosk.
Nick VinZant 1:05:53
I don't, I don't under. I feel like this statement by you just threw in to question your whole understanding of this topic. Like, what do you mean? You'd like to just wander around a fast food restaurant?
Speaker 2 1:06:05
I don't know. No, no, no, it was, don't mind going to like, I so I took it as, like, you know,
Nick VinZant 1:06:12
oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, I don't, I don't.
Speaker 2 1:06:16
I don't really enjoy the interaction of, like, having to order, you know? I don't, I don't like, you know, then you have to wait. And then, if you sit there, you know, if there's play places at some of these things, like, I just don't, okay, I'm picking up. I put down. I don't mind it, but I don't, you know, I don't want to make it a regular habit either.
Nick VinZant 1:06:35
Oh, I think the different, the difference between us, is that when I think of, don't mind going to someplace that's to me, almost like, liking going there. Like, oh, I'll go there. There's not a single store that I would say I want to go to. There's no store that I would ever be like, oh, I want to go to there. But like, I don't mind going to some of these places. My Are we a number two? Yeah, my number two is a sporting goods store. I like to see all this stuff that they got, even for sports I don't play, like, yeah. I
Speaker 2 1:07:05
mean, it's, I just, I look at the prices of everything now, and I'm like, oh,
Nick VinZant 1:07:11
that's gonna be worse. That's good,
John Shull 1:07:13
yeah. Well, no, everything is good.
Nick VinZant 1:07:15
Are you? Are you preparing for the end of the like, are you preparing like, we're about to go way downhill.
Speaker 2 1:07:23
I mean, without getting into politics, yeah, yes, I will just answer your question, yes, yes.
Nick VinZant 1:07:29
Oh yeah. Like, I'm mentally preparing for a rough ride I
Speaker 2 1:07:33
have and listen, I this is gonna sound really deep end, and I'm sorry for you, those of you listening, but I was at the grocery store the other day, and I'm like, man, if things get so bad and like, like, strawberries at most grocery stores here are already, like, five bucks for like a pound, I'm like, Man, I'm I'm not buying them now. I'm not gonna buy them if they go, you know, up to eight, nine bucks, I mean.
Nick VinZant 1:07:59
But will you pay more prices? Will you pay higher prices for something or, like, Will you just stop buying it? Because for me, just to kind of echo on the strawberries point, I won't pay more than 250 for a carton of strawberries, and I just won't, and like, I probably haven't had them in a year and a half, because I'm not, I'm not going to pay more than that for that, like that, once it hits, things hit a certain price. For me, I'm not buying it anymore.
Speaker 2 1:08:23
Uh, you know, actually, the wife and I have decided that this year, and it's not necessarily just because of this administration, and we probably should have been doing this since, since, really, we met, we're going to plant strawberries and berries and, like, we're going to grow them ourselves. Mm,
Nick VinZant 1:08:38
yes, actually, I've done that before I moved into a house, or I bought a house that they had, like, a little planting thing outside, and they had strawberries, and I actually, like, grew a bunch of strawberries. And it's kind of crazy when you grow something, like, how much there really is? Like, Oh, that's a lot,
Speaker 2 1:08:53
yeah, yeah, but, and, yeah, it's, and it's, it's obviously not hard, and it's usually a hell of a lot cheaper than buying every week.
Nick VinZant 1:09:03
I can't keep talking to you about this. You really are
John Shull 1:09:08
wait for my number one. You're gonna love this.
Nick VinZant 1:09:10
I'm gonna get upset. What's your number one?
Unknown Speaker 1:09:15
Garden centers,
Nick VinZant 1:09:21
like what?
Speaker 2 1:09:23
Yeah. I mean, that's what happened, just like you said, hours from seeing
Nick VinZant 1:09:27
your parents having sex,
Speaker 2 1:09:28
nope, nope, that left me needing to go to an what are they? Ophthalmologists? They get my eyes fixed. But
Nick VinZant 1:09:37
here we go. I don't know. I'm optometrist. Optometrist, yeah, just, I don't know what the difference between an ophthalmologist and an up there. I don't I'm not getting into this with you. Okay, so you go to garden centers. Is there? Like, are you looking at trees? You looking at bushes, you looking at flowers?
Speaker 2 1:09:54
Well, I'm always looking at Never mind. Dad was, Oh, God. Yeah, can I I just want to, like, fade off here and just keep going and not come back? Yeah? Everything, man, everything. We actually have a couple of really nice ones around here in Metro Detroit too, that do like events, and it's more than just a garden center experience, like they have animals and bees like, and some of them have aviaries. It's good. Wow. What's your number one?
Nick VinZant 1:10:30
Then Costco, baby. I will go to Costco at any time. I will go to Costco at any time. I don't care how busy it is, I don't care what day of the week it is, I don't care if it's on a Sunday morning, I will go to Costco at any time, and I will get the giant Sunday that they have for 299, actually, and I will not feel bad about it for
Speaker 2 1:10:53
a second. I think we've done this before, but we really should revisit top five Costco foods.
Nick VinZant 1:10:58
Oh, okay, I'll do that. Don't. Don't threaten me with a good time.
Speaker 2 1:11:03
Tell you right now the the hot dog is going to be high on my list. Don't, don't, don't. I have nothing on my arrow mentioned. We should just end this episode now and just move on.
Nick VinZant 1:11:16
Okay, so did you see his wiener? Okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of Profoundly Pointless. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, leave us a quick review. We really appreciate it really helps out the show and let us know what you think are the best stores to just wander around in. You don't want to go there, but if you find yourself there, who's not the worst?