Part One: The Websites Behind An International Rapist Network

**Sophie** (0:01)
CoolZone Media.

**Robert Evans** (0:05)
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast to retell you everything you don't know, worst people in all of history, all that good stuff. And to talk about some pretty terrible people and a pretty terrible thing that happened this week with me, my good friend, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome back to the show.

**Bridget Todd** (0:24)
Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here as always.

**Robert Evans** (0:28)
Hey, Bridget, we're so happy to have you.

**Sophie** (0:30)
You want to tell the folks about your new audio book?

**Bridget Todd** (0:34)
Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. Yeah. Speaking of things that might make you feel itchy or uncomfortable or weird, have you two ever heard about folks who are experiencing intimate relationships with AI companions?

**Robert Evans** (0:48)
Boy, howdy have I. Both from that movie Her and then since in the real world.

**Bridget Todd** (0:54)
Yeah. I have always been fascinated by movies like Her and Ex Machina and Blade Runner.

**Robert Evans** (1:00)
Ex Machina is pretty fun.

**Bridget Todd** (1:01)
Ex Machina is good, although it does show the dark side of what happens if you surround yourself with sexy bots. But yeah, so I have always been fascinated by the intersection of bots and AI and the people who want to connect with them. I have a new audio book out called Love at First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy, that basically tries to answer the question of, why are we all so fascinated with technology and people getting emotionally close to it and what are the risks? What do we lose when tech companies like OpenAI are vying to be where we go for emotional support?

**Sophie** (1:37)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (1:37)
Well, Bridget, I suspect part of the answer, at least for a lot of the men who find themselves in love with chatbots, is that it's like a woman, but she doesn't have any will of her own, right?

**Bridget Todd** (1:50)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (1:51)
That's really relevant to the episodes we're doing today. We're not talking about AI chatbots, but we are talking about something else that the internet and the tech world has enabled that's pretty horrible. As we're all well aware, over the last 20 or so years, our civilization has handed the proverbial wheel over to a bunch of assholes who created websites right around the time you and I graduated high school.
Of these men, Mark Zuckerberg has probably done the most damage, but if we count PayPal as a website and it is, then Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are in the mix. To be honest, I don't know if I think Musk or Mark has more of an edge given the last couple of years, but they're all up there.

**Sophie** (2:28)
Don't forget Spiegel.

**Robert Evans** (2:30)
Don't forget? Sure, of course.
Now, wait, Spiegel?

**Sophie** (2:35)
Isn't that his name, Evan Spiegel?

**Robert Evans** (2:37)
Who the hell is that?

**Sophie** (2:38)
The Snapchat guy.

**Robert Evans** (2:40)
I don't think about Snapchat. Does anyone?

**Sophie** (2:42)
What has he done?

**Bridget Todd** (2:42)
He goes under the radar a little bit.

**Sophie** (2:44)
Yeah, he's the Snapchat guy. When I think of him, I think of how he created all those filters. Well, he didn't personally, but created an app with all those filters that caused so many people to have an unhealthy relationship with what their face actually looks like. Yeah, that makes sense.
And just cause a bunch of fraud and give people body dysmorphia.

**Robert Evans** (3:10)
Yeah, probably was a bad idea or at least a flawed idea. And look, all this is to say, we should be asking ourselves as a society, what should we do to men who get rich off of creating websites that ruin people's lives at scale, right? How should we handle them? That's a salient question to everybody listening whether you're in the United States or Canada or India, or for example, France, which is where we're going to be talking about primarily today. This week, I'm going to tell you the story primarily of one website, although we're going to talk about a couple of different websites. The specific site that we're going to focus on most is certainly lower on the bastard list than Facebook or Twitter or Telegram in terms of the actual aggregate amount of damage it's done, but that doesn't mean that it's minor. In fact, the stuff that this website specifically enabled is much more horrifying than what you tend to hear of on any of these other sites because of the clientele that it solicited. And the website we'll be talking about this week was called Coco, or coco.fr for most of its life because it was a French website. And yeah, so far, the reason why we're talking about this is that France has recently become the only country on earth to take real steps to try and punish founders of websites and tech companies, right, for the damage that their sites have done. They've gone after the founder of Coco, this website we're going to be talking about, and they've also gone after Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram.