Cops Are Using AI Bots to Surveil People

In today's world, data breaches happen all the time, and even the most secure companies can't always protect their employees' personal information from ending up in the wrong hands.

That's where Delete Me comes in.

DeleteMe is a service that removes your employees' sensitive information from hundreds of data broker websites, sites where hackers can find phone numbers and emails within seconds.

Rachel Toback, CEO of Social Proof Security, says attackers use this data to target employees with phishing phishing messages and AI-powered phone scams.

But DeleteMe makes it harder for these bad actors by scrubbing your employees' details regularly.

It's simple.

Attackers are lazy.

If it's too hard to find contact info, they'll move on to easier targets.

DeleteMe takes care of this for you, doing the heavy lifting so you don't have to.

And over time, they keep removing the information so it stays down, protecting your team from constant exposure.

If your business has a social presence or deals with clients, you need Delete Me.

Visit deleteme.com slash 404media and start safeguarding your team's information today.

That's deleteme.com slash 404media.

Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL.

404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support.

To subscribe, go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week.

Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments.

Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co-founders Sam Cole.

Hello.

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hey, what's up?

And Jason Kebler.

Hello, hello.

You want to chat about merch quickly, Jason?

Yeah, so a few things.

One, if you're watching on YouTube, we have new merch.

We have the horse t-shirt in white.

We have a death metal hat that I'm wearing.

We have another hat.

And if you had wanted to order merch, most things are back in stock.

So you can find that on our website.

Use the merch button at the top.

I'll make sure I ship it out as quickly as possible.

I've also got a few people asking what the 404 horse is.

Do we have an explanation for what the horse is?

I mean, I know what it is, but yeah.

Yeah, but

there's, there's new, maybe new listeners.

It was the 404 page at Motherboard, which is Vice's tech website that we all used to work at.

And it was this galloping cyber horse.

And so it's a nice little homage, I believe.

And we've

We've taken control of the horse.

I also have a tattoo of the horse to bridge the gap.

But you can now get the shirt in black or white.

The other very quick things is

we have just launched a referral program, which there's information about in the email that we sent today.

There'll be more information on the site about how to do that.

What this is, is like if you send a link to your friends, you get credit for that.

And then I'll send you merch if you send it to enough friends.

We really hope that this works for us because we found that sort of like person-to-person recommendations has been the best way to grow our website and to grow our podcast, so on and so forth.

And so we wanted to gamify that a little bit.

We're using this software called Viral Loops, which seems to work with our CMS, but it's a little bit buggy.

So if you find any bugs, just like email me about it.

And then the last thing, and Joseph will say this before we get into it, but

we published an article today about how we're navigating the recession.

And we're going to talk about that a little bit as an independently owned journalist-funded

news website in the bonus section this week.

So for people who like behind the scenes stuff, you can get access to that by subscribing to this,

subscribing to us.

Go to 404media.co and subscribe to us.

There's also an article there about some of this stuff, but we're going to get more in depth in the bonus section at the end.

Yeah, sounds good.

Not going to do a full segment on these because we already spoke a lot about ICE last week.

I just wanted to briefly mention two stories.

One was that I got a leak from inside Palantir, the data analytics company, and the work they're doing with ICE.

Go check that out.

I'll put it in the show notes.

And another one is a document describing an ICE tool that plans to get health, labor, and housing agency data.

Again, not going to go on about them too much because we did a a whole segment last time, but it felt worth sort of closing the loop on those.

And we're going to keep an eye on that broader story as well.

But for this week's stories, we've got a huge one here from Jason and Emmanuel.

The headline is, this college protester isn't real.

It's an AI-powered undercover bot for cops.

So

let me very briefly summarize.

This company called Massive Blue has developed this tool and it's marketing to, and in some cases selling to police around the US and it's basically deploying AI bots online in various places and then they will engage with people in an undercover capacity.

That's obviously wild.

Was that a fair summary, Jason or Emmanuel?

And what are some of these personas that we're talking about?

Emmanuel, why don't you talk a little bit about how we did this story and sort of like what this company does?

Sure, yeah.

That's a fair summary from Joe, though

I think

as listeners will find out as we continue to talk about the company, part of the

problem/slash interesting thing about it is that it is very

ambitious and has all these sprawling features of stuff that it says that it can do.

But yeah, at its core, it is a company that monitors social media, somehow identifies suspects of various crimes via its scanning of social media, and then

critically

creates these AI-generated personas with specific personas for specific purposes.

And

those AI-generated personas talked to suspects to gather intel.

So if, for example,

the software recognizes someone that it suspects is involved in human trafficking and child trafficking specifically, in a presentation that we got, it

has

a child trafficking AI persona called Jason, coincidentally.

And it has a little has a little

AI generated image of this kid,

which you know it looks like a pretty high quality ai generated image of a child and there's a backstory which says he's 14 years old he's from los angeles his parents immigrated here from ecuador he's an only child uh he has a bunch of hobbies like anime gaming comic books hiking then it has a bunch of personality traits he's shy he's self-conscious

He has difficulty interacting with girls.

And then also it says, I I think was pretty interesting, his parents don't allow him to be on social media.

And he hides his Discord account from his parents, which are just very little interesting details of the biography that the police is choosing to say that this kid has.

Very, very elaborate.

Very, very elaborate.

And then,

so this is a slide in the presentation that Massive Blue is showing police officers.

And on one side is this biography that I described.

And then on the other side are screenshots that are

giving you an example of what a chat might look like.

So someone, and this is like a green and gray chat exchange as if they're texting, right?

So someone reaches out to this Jason persona and says, Your parents are around?

And he responds,

it's going to be difficult to quote this directly.

I'll read the part of Jason.

Okay.

We're going to reenact it now?

Wow.

Okay.

Dramatized.

But

the implication is that this is a chat between the AI persona, which is pretending to be a child, and some sort of suspect, presumably in a child trafficking sort of thing.

Right?

I'm just giving them the context.

Okay.

Okay, cool.

Can I get in character?

I'm sorry.

okay

i'll do it straight your parents around or are you getting some awesome alone time

just chilling by myself man my mom's at work and my dad's out of town so it's just me in my vid games

you want any social any other social

Nah, my rents don't let me use some

SM social media, but I do have Discord, tongue out smiley face emoji.

Right.

And then he asked for his Discord handle and he gets his Discord handle.

And, you know, this is supposed to illustrate that to say i bot you know is able to like um

honeypot someone who is reaching out and

alleged not allegedly but you would assume like preying on kids in some fashion this is the what it's meant to show yeah and sorry just to back out a bit since jason

um

asked that we explain how we how we found this someone reached out to us said they got a presentation

um

this was like an the type of thing that we saw

and then we filed uh foyas at a bunch of uh

do you know how many police i filed 67 freedom of public records requests uh in arizona and texas because we knew that they were operating in Arizona.

And then through

basically, like, I started getting documents back.

And one of the really interesting things about this was that the company really didn't want us to have any documents about it.

Like, a lot of the records that I got back were emails from Massive Blue to

the police departments in question saying,

don't release these documents, more or less,

which is complicated, and we don't need to get into it.

But basically, like, some states allow the third-party subject of public records requests to say, like, hey, don't release these, these are trade secrets, or these are confidential, or something like that.

So, then I learned that they had pitched the Texas Department of Public Safety and to some police departments in Texas because they were mentioned in these other documents that I got back.

So, I went and filed a bunch of FOIAs there.

And over time, we were able to to get a lot of information about how this company works.

And then also some of the presentations that they were giving to cops, which explain like the types of personas that they were making.

And in this case, as Emmanuel said, the personas are basically like social media accounts that will interact with people out in the wild, but they'll also interact with people one-on-one.

And they come with like a profile picture.

They have the ability to generate images using AI.

If like, I don't know, a child sex trafficker or an alleged child sex trafficker says like, send me a picture of yourself, like the tool can nominally do this.

Let me summarize sort of why this is different.

And I think it's obvious, but I also think it's worth spelling out is that we've covered a lot of social media surveillance companies, you know, ones such as Shadow Dragon, bought by DHS or whatever, or, you know, there's Data Miner as well and a bunch of others, Fivecast that's come up recently.

And what those companies will typically do is they will scan social media for certain activities.

So maybe they're looking for keywords that they believe are linked to drug trafficking, like slang terms or whatever.

Or maybe they're looking at posts from a certain physical location.

So maybe they can find out where protests are going to be or where protests have moved or something like that.

It's sort of passively monitoring social media, even though there could be some selectors or keywords or variables or whatever.

And with that, you know, a police officer could just collect the information and then maybe use it.

And, you know, you can imagine

if someone tweeted like a threat to the president or something, the Secret Service might see that and then go act on that information.

That's very, very...

Well, normal.

I think it's just standard.

That happens all the time.

And a police officer could also potentially, you know, see something on social media and decide to go undercover themselves.

What's different here, it's like it's doing the whole thing.

It's identifying, it seems potentially a target.

It's then deploying this persona.

So there could be that child that you were describing a minute ago, or there's a college protester one.

I think there's another protester one where it gets into a bit more detail.

There's a pimp one as well.

And this tool from the company Massive Blue will then go and deploy that.

It seems autonomously, but I guess that it could be semi-autonomously.

And maybe they decide to go do that.

But the point is, it's going another step further.

And I haven't seen a company do that before.

Like, is that what stood out to you, Jason?

Yeah, I mean, we also haven't seen cops in the past create these fake profiles.

You know, cops have gone undercover a lot, but

this is basically a company saying, like, we will create an AI with a backstory to interact with potential suspects.

And then it seemed like they also sort of proactively go out and try to identify potential suspects because we got some emails where

one of the people at the company was asking the police for a list of words that they wanted to monitor on social media.

So, you know, things like protests, things like, you know, drugs, I don't know, just like different keywords that then would trigger these bots to go interact with them.

And crucially, it's like they can interact in a group setting, but they can also go one-on-one.

So,

you know,

a lot of the screenshots are like, you might start on Twitter and then join a Discord and then like continue that same persona across different social media platforms.

We haven't gotten into it yet, but like this is interesting and sort of makes sense for say child sex trafficking or drug trafficking or like like some pretty bad crimes uh but then they also have a list of potential uses and this ranges from traffickers money launderer and then they also have on here escorts juveniles college protesters really notably and then they also say external recruiter for protests

such as like what does that mean i mean it's people who i guess are like taking out i mean like Craigslist ads to recruit protesters.

Like, the vibe I got was like, George Soros is paying these people to protest.

Like, the miss.

But they're actually building a product around it almost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so one of the like wildest personas that we saw was this, I mean, again, fake woman named Heidi, who they call a protest persona, and they call her a radicalized.

AI persona.

And her backstory is she's 36 years old.

She's from Texas.

She's divorced.

She has no kids.

So, like a childless divorcee whose hobbies are quote, activism, leader of a local group, and baking.

And then her personality is body positive, lonely, outspoken, and seeking meaning.

And then the

social media platform she's on are Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Reddit, and 4chan.

So we have this like divorced mom protester on 4chan, or not mom, divorced childless,

essentially like cat lady is what they're going for, I think.

And there's an image of her.

She has like a tattooed arm.

Her hair is dyed purple, and it looks like she's at a protest, maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe this isn't entirely clear from the documents, but do you know if like that persona with all of those brutal characteristics, like Jesus, okay, were they made by somebody inside Massive Blue working on this tool with like, I'm going to make this persona and here's all the characteristics I want, or was that made by the AI?

I read it as the former, but like, do we actually know?

So these are from like a pitch deck to cops.

And so they're example personas.

And so I, if I had to guess,

these attributes were like, are like represent the prompt that is given to Heidi.

Right.

You are this.

You are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then there's another one that's a 25-year-old from Dearborn, Michigan, which is a really like a heavily Muslim place in the U.S.

And they say that her parents are from Yemen.

She speaks Arabic and she's active on

Telegram Signal and her phone has access to international SMS, which is just like,

I guess what I'd say is, like, almost all of the personas that we saw are like

people of color, leftist coded, like

protest-type people.

Or

a child.

Yeah.

Or a child.

Yeah.

But even the children are almost all

like Hispanic.

or black, like the ones that we've seen in these, in their slides, at least,

which I think is just notable because, like,

I guess we'll talk more, but the

people behind this company, Massive Blue, come from a border patrol background.

The most public-facing person in this is a guy named Chris Clem, who was a border patrol agent for, I think, like 27 years, a long time.

And he was a border patrol agent in Arizona.

He's testified before Congress about border security and illegal immigration.

And then over the last few months, he's been posting on LinkedIn almost daily with images of him with RFK Jr., with Tulsi Gabbard, with

like high-ranking Trump administration officials.

So he's very interested in this, in like illegal immigration, border security, so on and so forth.

And so that's like the type of

people that they're trying to catch, more or less like that that's sort of what he says in an interview with theo vaughan who's really popular youtuber um he says that we want to work with border security on this yeah that makes sense and

um as far as we know who is buying it or at least demoing it you mentioned i think a department of public safety um can you give us a quick rundown of who has bought it who has tried it out as far as we know yeah so uh yuma county in arizona tried it which Yuma is near the border.

And then the other one is Pinall County Sheriff's Department, which is also near the border.

It's like, I think it's where Tucson is.

And Yuma ended up not buying it, but Pinal did using

like a grant from the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

So basically like Arizona State Police gave them a $360,000 grant.

to use this software.

They've been using it.

It's deployed.

It's been out there for about a year.

And so far, they have, it's led to zero arrests, which is really notable.

And something that we were able to confirm with the sheriff's department, but then also there were like city or county council meetings where, you know, local politicians are like, what is this software?

And why are you using it?

And what does it lead to?

And very interestingly, they don't say a lot about it because they're trying to keep it more or less under wraps, like how it works and what it is.

Yeah, I will say 360,000 is actually quite a lot for a software tool.

Like when you look at the stuff like Babble Street or the other social media monitoring tools, sometimes that can be like 5K, 10K per user license or something like that.

360,000 is a hell of a lot of money for this sort of thing.

You mentioned that it hasn't been linked to any arrests.

So

is it effective?

Does it actually do what it says on the cover?

Or

do we not know?

And that's kind of the point.

Well, we don't know.

I mean, we really don't know.

There's a recon report that was put into this

presentation, which again, these are numbers directly from Massive Blue.

We have no idea sort of the effectiveness of this tool, but they basically said that they scanned Dallas, Houston, and Austin for potential suspects.

And it says that they identified 1,417,000 unique human traffickers in Houston, 1,327 in Dallas, 522 in Austin in one day.

And those numbers seem crazy.

Like those numbers are really high.

And I think the experts that we spoke to said, you know, the potential for sort of like false identification of people is really high.

The other thing is that like college protesters are doing a First Amendment protected activity.

Like that, that isn't, it's not a crime to protest on colleges, no matter

sort of what the administration is trying to say.

And, you know, people are getting their student visas revoked for protesting, but that is not supposed to be happening.

And so

I don't think it doesn't seem very effective.

And then also in their marketing, like when they've done interviews, they've talked about this tool being a quote cyber wall and using just like crazy buzzwords.

At one point in an interview, they said that it could be used to hack,

like take money back from hackers who had broken into your 401k, which is just a completely different use case from cop surveillance.

And so there's a lot of red flags here, I would say.

It's we can keep going down the list of all the features that the company is capable of.

And the further down the list we go, the more crazy will sound because it goes into like it's Web3, it does cryptocurrency, it can actually use the AI for good for doing community outreach and stuff like that.

So there's no end to what it says it can do.

I think the point is not

if it's effective or not because we can't say for sure.

If I was to go on an a limb, I would say it probably is not effective because it's just hard to imagine a chatbot being better at

undercover work than a human investigator at this point.

Maybe you're able to do more at scale if it's all automated, but I don't know.

I just like, I struggle to imagine the criminal who is volunteering incriminating information to chatbots that they met on the internet.

Regardless, the point is: whether it works or not,

people are paying for it.

Like people who live for Arizona, who live in Arizona, are paying for this kind of technology and they're paying for it while the company refuses to tell the city council how it works and refuses to tell us how it works.

So,

regardless of whether it's effective,

people are paying for it.

And that, I think, is

really important.

And it may never work.

And still,

we know for a fact that, you know, the government will pay for projects that go nowhere.

And this project, I think, also has the potential to be very dangerous, as Jason says.

Like, can it actually detect thousands of human traffickers in Houston by looking at Twitter?

Probably not.

But you might get investigated for being flagged as one of those people.

Yeah, Sam, I was wondering if you could give, like,

does that pass the smell test even remotely vibes where like this tool detected a thousand

quote-unquote human traffickers in Houston in a 24-hour period, just as someone who's covered sex work a lot better than I have a lot more thoroughly.

I mean, definitely not

from my first like impression of it.

Um, I don't have the data on how many sex traffickers there are in Houston, Texas,

but I do know that like

sex workers, especially like at working at

massage parlors, for instance, like these gray areas of like the legal business doing possibly technically illegal things, they often get raided and called sex traffickers because

cops go in there and they say, oh, you're running this business.

You have people here illegally doing sex work and you're profiting off of it.

You're sex traffickers.

And this is something that sex workers have been concerned about for a very long time is this constant surveillance of them online, of

this automated version of surveillance, which is like the next step in

police surveillance online that I think we're seeing growing.

where it's just like you get scooped up into this bucket of trafficker quote unquote and then

they can kind of pursue you in that way.

But yeah, I mean, trafficking is always kind of like a red flag term because

it gets a lot of things get caught up in it that aren't really strictly trafficking, sex trafficking in particular.

There's a lot of trafficking that happens in the United States, and a lot of it is labor and like food industry and things like that.

It's like there's trafficking happening that's not sex trafficking all over the country.

But I think in this case, you you know, you can always count on the cops to buy a new toy

and use it stupidly.

So hopefully they don't use it at all and they waste a bunch of money.

That's kind of the best case scenario here, which I think is really dark.

They just waste people's taxpayers' money on something that's just a toy that they think is cool and flashy because it's AI.

And people, you know, they have these pitch decks that you guys just described.

And they're like, yeah, sure, pay for it.

And we'll see, we'll find a way to use it.

Yeah, I think last thing is

human trafficking is a buzzword and it's been used, it is used a lot of times by like nonprofit groups, by cops, et cetera, to say, as like a euphemism for

illegal immigration and a variety of different crimes.

And it's something that's easy to get

funding for.

Like, in like this tool was part of a human trafficking grant, and so that's one of the reasons why it got why Pinall County was able to get money for it was because there was like a human trafficking grant from the Arizona state police that went to them.

But

sort of reading between the lines,

I think that this is supposed to partially be a tool to identify undocumented immigrants.

Like, that is my opinion, but that is extremely the vibe that comes off when you're like looking at what they're pitching and then also what Chris Clem has said publicly and his background as a border security, as a

border patrol agent, and also everything that he has.

He goes on Fox News constantly to talk about illegal immigrants and about border security and that sort of thing.

And he's like the most public-facing person here.

But

historically, state and local police don't

like go after undocumented immigrants, but they do go after human traffickers.

And so, when I talked to Pinal County, they said, oh, we don't do immigration cases.

We do human trafficking cases.

And so,

I don't know, like, surely there's some experts out there who probably know a little bit more about the use of the term human trafficking for

undocumented immigration, like the sort of dichotomy there.

But

that's sort of what I got while reporting the story.

Yeah, totally.

All right, we will leave that there.

Maybe we'll explain a little bit more how we got some of these documents

later on as well.

But when we come back,

we're going to talk about one of Sam's stories where I read the headline.

I have literally no idea what it means or anything.

Hopefully, well, we will

when we talk about it shortly.

We will be right back after this.

The 404 media podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp.

There's a lot of economic uncertainty right now.

The stock market goes up, the stock market goes down, who knows what's going to happen next.

The most secure type of investment you can make is an investment in yourself with therapy.

Traditional in-person therapy can cost between $100 and $250 per session, which is tough in these unstable times.

BetterHelp's online therapy can save you up to 50% per session.

With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time.

BetterHelp seeks to make therapy accessible, not a luxury, helping you get quality care at a price that makes sense.

Talk therapy is particularly good for navigating turbulent times like these and can help you find grounding and stability in an uncertain world.

With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally.

Your well-being is worth it.

Visit betterhelp.com slash 404 media today to get 10% off your first month.

That's betterhelphelp.com slash 404 media.

One of the smartest apps you can have on your phone in 2025 is Upside.

Upside gives you the power to earn more on the stuff you buy all the time.

Whether you're filling up your tank, going out to eat, or shopping for groceries, the Upside app lets you earn cash back on every purchase.

Upside users are making as much as $280 a year.

I use the Upside app to get gas at the station right around the corner from my house, and I got 25 cents per gallon back on my first tank of gas.

With all the economic uncertainty right now, that's what I like best about Upside.

I'm able to save money on the things I'm already buying, the necessities.

To get started, download the free Upside app.

Use my promo code 404 and get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.

There are more than 100,000 gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants to earn an average of 8% back on restaurant and grocery purchases.

The best part?

These stack on top of whatever credit or debit card rewards you might already be earning.

Start getting hundreds of dollars back per year.

Download the free upside app and use promo code 404 to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.

That's an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas using promo code 404.

Something unique about my mom is she listens to this podcast, which I really appreciate.

But I'm also about to give away her Mother's Day present.

So, mom, earmuffs, please.

I want to make Mother's Day extra special for her this year.

That's why I'm giving her a unique, heartfelt gift that'll make her truly feel loved.

It's called Story Worth.

Each week, Story Worth emails your loved one a memory-provoking question that you get to help pick.

Questions like, did you ever get in trouble at school?

Or, how did you decide how many children to have?

That's a really interesting one for me as the oldest.

All your loved one needs to do is respond to that email with a story, long or short, it doesn't matter.

They can either write a story or record it over the phone for StoryWorth to transcribe.

You'll be emailed a copy of your loved one's response as they're submitted over the course of the year.

You'll get to enjoy their retelling of their stories that you already know and be surprised by stories you've never heard before.

After that year of fun, StoryWorth compiles your loved ones' stories and photos into a beautiful keepsake hardcover book that you'll be able to share and revisit for generations to come.

With my family StoryWorth book, I'll be able to learn more about my mom and have a family heirloom that I can pass on to my kids one day.

Families love StoryWorth.

That's why it has more than 40,000 five-star reviews on TrustPilot with millions of stories preserved since they were founded over 10 years ago.

Give all the moms in your life a unique, heartfelt gift you'll all cherish for years: Storyworth.

Right now, save $10 on your first purchase when you go to storyworth.com/slash 404.

That's storyworth.com/slash 404 to save $10 on your first purchase.

All right, and we are back.

I was going to go in completely blind on on this one, Samba.

I was like, no, no, I do need to refresh my memory and fully understand what's coming in.

I mean, I went in completely blind to the experience, so it would have been appropriate.

Yeah.

Okay.

But I read the headline and then my brain starts to cross wires.

But the headline is, I went to go see God's influencer, the millennial saint, Carlo

Acutis.

Acutis?

Sorry, you're going to have to help me.

I don't know.

Acutis.

Okay, that's our mispronunciation of the week.

I'm really, really sorry.

I haven't done one of those in a a while.

So, as I said, I have literally no idea what this is about.

And then I did go and read it.

But who is

Carlo exactly?

Like, and I know you're not going to give me the full biography.

How about this?

How about this?

How did you first hear about this?

Like, you just happened to be in the area?

I don't know how I first heard about Carlo, Saint Carlo.

Blessed Carlo.

Sorry, sorry.

Saint Carlo.

Yeah, my.

Yeah, please.

Is this like, is this like topical because Pope died also?

It is now.

Yeah.

It is now cost.

That's why I was covering it.

There's like a more specific connection between them, Sam.

I don't know if you realize this.

I mean, he was going to, Pope Francis was going to make him officially a saint, I think, later this month.

Well, there is that, but there's also, he was, the shrine for the saint is in Assisi, right?

And Pope Francis is named after

Saint Francis of Assisi.

Yeah.

I didn't remember that.

Yeah, I went to Francis's uh

basilica, also pretty sick place.

Um, but yeah, I don't know, I don't remember how I came across this at first.

I mean, it's it was in the news a lot, is kind of the answer to that.

And then I happened to be in Italy for a conference.

Yes, so you happen to be in Italy for a conference, and then you decide to go and see

Carlo and his uh body that's on display.

How about this?

Um, why is he like God's influencer?

Is it like he's really young or he wears unusual clothes for somebody who's called a saint?

Like what's the attraction here?

He

so he was born in the he was born in 1991.

So technically he's a millennial and he's considered the first millennial saint.

But he died when he was 15.

died of leukemia.

It was pretty sudden.

I think it went downhill pretty fast.

But before that, he spent his 15 years of life being extremely, extremely into God,

extremely pious, extremely dedicated to the Eucharist,

which is a part of Catholicism.

I just disclaimer, I know almost nothing about Catholicism.

I grew up evangelical.

I did not ever attend a Catholic Mass in my life.

So hopefully I did not offend any of our Catholic subscribers writing about this, but people seem to be chilled with it because Carla would have been chilled with it because he's a millennial and cool, like that.

Is the marketing that the Catholic Church is putting out with Carlo's sainthood?

So, that disclaimer out of the way, let's stumble through an explainer of Carlo, I guess.

But yeah, he,

I think, so just to kind of sum it up, like without going on too long about his life,

he

comes from a pretty wealthy Italian family.

And

he, I think, the way you get into sainthood in modern times is connections, it seems to be.

So you can't just be like really good and holy in your life.

You have to have people noticing it and then kind of submitting that for you to the church.

Like, hey, this guy deserves to be a saint.

So that's kind of what happened with Carlo after he died.

But during his life,

he was

pretty normal as far as teenagers go, as far as like Christian teens go, I guess.

He played one hour of Xbox a week because he didn't want to be addicted, quote unquote, to gaming.

He didn't want to dedicate too much time to gaming because he was dedicating most of his time

to God.

But,

oh, and he was like a programmer.

He made websites that like were for the church, for volunteering websites, things like that.

So he like had these kind of like

cool talents of the tech age that he applied to

the church.

And that was kind of like what made him

like made people pay attention to him after he died.

And then after he died, there were a couple of miracles that happened

around

his death that then kind of rose his case to higher up in the sainthood ranks, I guess.

Well, I'll say alleged miracles there.

Let me just give that caveat.

It's all all legendary.

Okay, sure.

So, sorry to be cynical, and almost to bring sort of the tech side of this, because when I was going through, I found this particularly interesting.

So, the cynical side of me is like, it's almost like a marketing thing.

It's a thousand percent.

All sainthood is marketing.

Sure, wow,

that's a a good, that's a good line.

All Christianity is marketing.

Sure, but then specifically, like, there's a YouTube connection in there.

There's an eBay connection in there.

What's this YouTube video that you put in there?

It's like a pretty well-produced piece of like marketing or like, what is it?

Yeah.

So since the church has decided to raise Carlo to the status of like millennial sainthood in an effort like to kind of reiterate what you just said about marketing, in an effort to get young people into the church, because the church is having a real crisis with young people.

Young people aren't replacing the older generations fast enough.

People are leaving the church, not joining it,

etc.

So,

part of this is

the marketing of his sainthood is really interesting.

So, what you're referring to in the story is a trailer for a documentary produced by the Eternal World Television Network, which is such a sick name.

I'm jealous of it,

which is the Catholic Church's like

state television equivalent.

You know, it's like the Catholic Church pays for this.

They made a documentary about him and about

this group of teenagers, I think they're in high school,

going to Assissy to see him and to kind of make this like pilgrimage, so to speak, to like

get into the lore in person.

And, you know, it's like the

documentary is like interviewing these kids and they're like, I'm excited to eat pizza.

And at the end, they're like, my life has changed, you know.

Okay.

But it's, it's all kind of part of this big like marketing push to get Carlo in the news, which has worked really well.

by the way.

Well, you went?

And yeah, I went.

I logged it.

Yeah.

It's like I logged it.

Aftermath logged it, which was great.

Lots of other, like every other news outlet is like written about Carlo, the millennial saint.

So there's like SEO power behind Carlo at this point.

Right.

And there's also a live stream of the church.

So you could watch.

So you didn't even have to go anyway.

Yeah.

You went all that way and you didn't actually need to.

I could have done it from here.

What?

What was it actually like

in there?

Exactly.

Just describe the scene a little bit so you you're you're kind of walk down like this it's almost like it's not quite a dead end path but it kind of looks like it but like at the end of the street in a casi which is a very like old um stone work

stone streets stone buildings kind of place um so you kind of walk down this narrow alley and you come up to this church and it's like a small church it's really not a big deal like place

there's not huge decorations or anything there's a little poster on the wall outside the church of carlo and jesus which is sick.

It's like a Photoshop.

Obviously, it's Photoshop.

Carlo wasn't really with Jesus and nobody took a picture.

But it's like you walk in, and there's signs everywhere that are like this way to

like Disneyland.

It's like you're following kind of like a path and you're in line with people.

But it's a little tiny church.

So you're kind of going in and out of the pews to get in line.

And then you get in line and people are waiting to approach the tomb, which is like stone and then glass on the front.

Um, and he's in there

dead.

And like, it's strange.

It's this is majorly the reason why I wanted to go because I was like, I have to see what the body itself looks like because

part of sainthood is they dig up the remains years later because it takes years to get, you know, to the point where it's like the church says go for it.

They dig it up, dig him up

and move him to Assissy.

And they kind of say, Oh, did the body decompose the way bodies normally do, or did it not?

Because he's a saint and

they are special and don't decay.

So I got in line.

I was really curious.

There's a big no-photos sign.

Everybody was taking pictures.

No one was respecting the no photos.

Yeah, and then you kind of walk up and you kind of shuffle by.

You get up to the glass.

And there are people like kissing the glass, like kissing their hands and kissing the glass, kneeling, doing like the rosary,

praying.

Lots of stuff was happening.

Most people who were there just gawking like me

just to see it.

And it was kind of mesmerizing because like the people are all very focused on looking at his face.

And his face is wax.

If there is a body under there, which supposedly there is, they covered it with wax and made it look like him

because

obviously he decayed normally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's dressed in like sneakers and like, he looks like he's straight out of, you know, 2006.

Like he looks like a kid I could have gone to high school with.

This is just so eerie that his face is all over

posters and magnets and

everything else.

I think that's just the last thing I want to ask, kind of related to the marketing is so people are selling all this memorabilia

about this saint as sort of a

as a, you know, marketing SEO tech play

for the religion.

Like, what are people selling them?

What are they selling?

They're selling magnets, rosaries, keychains.

It's the church is selling them.

Like, it's a setup inside the church.

There's a gift shop that you can go through after you're done gazing lovingly into St.

Carlos' wax face.

Um, and in, I was also in Rome for a bit, and there's tons of just like street vendors and people like that selling off bra off-market, uh, black market Carlos stuff.

Um,

yeah, it's people all over the city, all over Italy, I'm sure, all over anywhere, anywhere Catholics gather, I'm sure there's Carlo merch being sold.

Um,

yeah, it's, it's a wild, it's a wild thing.

They also kind of yassify him, like like in the pictures.

He looks how do you mean?

It's like AI or something?

Not AI, I don't think, but like he looks like hotter than he does in the pictures of him as a normal 15-year-old.

It's like he looks very, like his hair is very good.

And like, right.

You know, it's like his eyes are like a little bit eyeliner.

I don't know.

It's like, it's very, the pictures of him are very striking in a way that's like they.

They want this to look, I mean, obviously, if you're going to make a saint, you want him to look good.

So

they're appealing to that part of it, I think.

Yeah, but they didn't, they didn't yasify the pope, as far as I can remember.

So, you know, it seems pretty unusual.

Did you read about his miracles at all?

A little bit, yeah.

I didn't really go down that road too far.

It was, they seemed pretty,

pretty decent.

It was like somebody got into a bike accident and he.

Oh, I missed that one.

So maybe that's the other one.

Because I was trying to figure out

because you need to have two miracles attributed to you in order to achieve sainthood right um and i was like how how how has this child

how did he do two miracles so he didn't while he was alive right

it's like someone prayed like someone's mom who was in a car accident prayed to him

and

there was a relic involved which is like a piece of your body after you die or clothing or clothing or hair.

And then they say, Oh, it's because I prayed to Saint Carlo that my daughter is recovered from this bike accident.

Um, and then it's like, Oh, chalk that one up for

Carlo, right?

And then the other one was a similar story with cancer from with some kid from Brazil, I think.

Yeah, uh, same thing, yeah,

yeah.

Well,

Sam, you're now officially on the religion influencer beat.

No, oh, okay, that was that was a one-off, a one-off, a one-off opportunistic piece.

Maybe there's so much

of this going on that's very mundane and modern.

And I think this stood out to people because it's sainthood, which is a big fucking deal.

It's like the last saints that were made saints were born and died in the 1800s.

So it's the first saint in a minute.

And it's also a teenager, which is like cool.

So I think that's why people are interested in this.

But there's a, there's just, I mean, listen, I went to a lot of youth groups.

It's just everywhere all the time within Christianity where they're trying to make religion and Christianity cool.

And this, I think, is probably decently probably working.

It's working for sure.

And it's also like the virtues that he is, that people are into about him are like, don't game too much and be nice to your friends.

You know, it's like, okay, cool.

I agree with half of that.

He only allowed himself one hour of gaming per week, yeah.

He was very, uh,

very

dark souls, yeah.

He played Halo, Mario, and Pokemon, so it's pretty hard to like catch them all on one hour.

He must have been trash, I would honor that, yeah,

but yeah, but it's also at the same time, it's like the like these influencer things are happening all the time, and with this, I think it's a big deal because it's working.

And Catholicism is kind of back, like JD Vance being an adult Catholic convert, crazy.

Silicon Valley and stuff.

Silicon Valley, like the trad stuff that teens are more and more into,

the modesty movement, things like that.

It's like, this is all very much happening at a moment that

is ripe for this kind of thing to be popular.

And I think a lot of that is very insidious in terms of, especially like women's rights, reproductive rights, things like that.

So yeah, it's like, part of me wants this to be like a, like, I really resisted this being like a cynical

story.

I wanted to have fun and go on a field trip.

But of course, all of that is like in the back of my mind the whole time

exploring this stuff.

So

I don't know.

Yeah,

I think tying it to sort of that rise, as you say, with Jamie Vance and then the tech industry.

Well, I think that's a really good place to leave it and sort of shows shows why this matters.

Jamie Vance, the last person to see the Pope before he died, apparently.

Yeah, one of, right?

Day before.

The last visitor, perhaps.

Yeah, I've just thrown that out there.

Throwing that out there.

All right.

We'll leave that there.

If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about the state of 404 media briefly, the business and so-called economic headwinds, whatever that means.

I mean, you're going to see what we mean in a second.

You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co.

As a reminder, 404 Media is journalists founded and supported by subscribers.

If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co.

You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast.

You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week.

This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope.

Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for the podcast.

That stuff really does help us out.

This has been Forreful Media.

We will see you again next week.