The Grift Halftime Report

It’s halftime. We’ve spent the last few months covering what’s happening in the dark side of online business— the players, the plays, the same tired tactics in shiny new packaging — and now it’s time to come into the locker room, take stock of what we’ve seen, and figure out what’s coming in the second half.

Spoiler: it’s not looking great out there.

We’ve been doing this podcast for five years. Every season we do it, we see themes emerge and after five years this season’s theme was “What’s Old is New Again…But It’s Worse.”

It was the season when we felt like we were repeating ourselves, back to the days when this podcast was a limited series.

From influencers replacing experts, to income claims making a comeback, to celebrity entrepreneurship just wearing different clothes — the playbook hasn’t changed. The packaging has.

So today we’re doing something a little different. Instead of a deep dive into one topic, we’re doing a halftime report for our season finale.. Three things:

The Players on the Field — who’s still running the grift in 2026
The Plays They’re Running — what this season taught us about the tactics
Second Half Predictions — where we think this is all heading

Let’s get into it.

The Players on the Field

Who’s still in the game in 2026?

The cast of characters looks a little different than it did a few years ago, but if you look closely, the archetypes are all the same.

The Creator CEO: This is the new dominant figure. Their primary asset isn’t a product or service — it’s their audience. The founder whose content gets more attention than their company. The influencer launching a membership. The person whose personal brand is the business.

As we talked about in our celebrity entrepreneurship episode this season: the faces changed, the platforms changed, the offers changed — but the playbook didn’t.

The AI Guru: Every major shift in online business creates a new class of experts. AI is no different. Some of these people have real depth. A lot of them were just early to market. And in a space where things move this fast, it’s very hard to tell the difference — which is exactly what they’re counting on.

The Manifestation Coach: Still here. Still thriving. Now apparently on Real Housewives. (We’ll talk about Maggie’s favorite person in a few).

The Income Claim Machine: The 7-figure dream never died. It just went silent for a minute while the FTC was paying attention — and now it’s back louder than ever. OMG, why won’t this die?

The Plays They’re Running

(The “What’s Old is New Again” Season Recap)

Here’s the thing about this season: every episode was really about the same underlying play, just run in a different area of the field.

Play #1: Replace expertise with personality. Our influencers vs. experts episode laid this out clearly. The most visible person in your feed is almost never the most qualified. But visibility feels like credibility — and the online business world has been very intentional about making sure those two things feel identical.

Play #2: Bring back income claims, but make them aspirational The income claim cycle episode (May 18) showed us this: income claims never went away. They got smarter. Now they’re dressed up as “possibilities” and “potential” — with just enough plausible deniability that the FTC can’t easily touch them. The 7-figure dream is back, and it’s wearing a linen set.

Play #3: Promise an audience, don’t deliver one. The grift of audience growth— same promise as always. “No audience? No problem!” But the conditions are dramatically worse. Platforms are degraded. Algorithms punish organic reach. Fake engagement ecosystems have poisoned the well. And yet people are still buying courses premised on the idea that building an audience is easy.

Play #4: Rebrand celebrity entrepreneurship as the Creator CEO. Our celebrity entrepreneurship episode (June 15) made the point perfectly: the Lamborghini entrepreneur has been replaced by someone with a morning matcha and a nervous system regulation practice — but the underlying sales strategy is identical. “Look at my life. Don’t you want something like this?”

Play #5: The Worship of Wealth. This is the play that threads through all of it — and the one that feels most complicated right now.

We covered Amanda Frances this season, and what’s fascinating about her is what happens when you take the wealth manifestation belief system out of its controlled environment. Online, she controls the context completely. The audience already wants to believe. Everything is aligned to reinforce the message.

Then she shows up on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — a cast that includes people with genuine generational wealth — and the control is gone. And the Bravo audience, who normally embraces big personalities and even delusions as long as they’re entertaining, responded with something different: skepticism.

Which tells us something important about this cultural moment.

Because at the same time, Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire — and there’s immediate, vocal backlash. People are disgusted by the concentration of wealth. They’re naming it, calling it out.

And then Jessi Jean does a $1.2 million dollar launch — and people lose their minds. Not with disgust. With excitement. With “how did she DO that?”

We want to believe the capitalist dream is dead. We also very much want to believe it could happen to us.

That contradiction — I abhor the oligarchs, but I could be a millionaire — is the most important thing to understand about where we are right now. Because grifters don’t need you to be consistent. They just need that window of “what if that could be me?” to be open.

And right now? That window is wide open.

Second Half Predictions

The state of trust — and why that might actually be good news

Here’s something that surprised us as we mapped this season out: trust has collapsed. People don’t believe what they see anymore. Deepfakes, AI content, fake testimonials, Stripe screenshot “proof” — the landscape is so polluted that skepticism is basically the default now.

And honestly? That might be the most protective thing that’s happened to consumers in years.

The grifters aren’t going away. But because the automatic deference — the “they have 100K followers so they must know what they’re talking about” — that’s eroding. Slowly. Unevenly. But it’s happening.

The question is whether that skepticism gets weaponized too. And we think it will. Watch for “I’m the real one, everyone else is fake” becoming the new sales pitch. Authenticity performance will get louder as actual trust becomes harder to establish.

The Economic Pressure Cooker

Here’s our actual prediction for the second half of 2026: more of the same. But worse.

The economy is not getting better. Businesses that were already struggling will become more desperate. Now, going and getting a job isn’t the fallback plan anymore. Jobs are hard to get. The safety net dissolved.

So you have people who are economically stressed, who have already built some version of an online business, who are watching that business slow down — and the message from the grift ecosystem is: you just need the right strategy. The right course. The right coach. The right audience growth play.

Desperation makes people more susceptible. We know this. But what’s new is that the exit route is blocked. It’s not “should I keep doing this or go back to my day job” — it’s “I have to make this work somehow.”

That’s a very specific kind of pressure. And the grift economy will exploit it.

The Wealth Worship Prediction

The Jessi Jean/$1.2M launch moment will repeat. Over and over. The format will change — maybe it’s a different number, a different person, a different platform — but the dynamic is the same.

Public disgust at concentrated wealth at the top. Private envy of people “just like us” who broke through.

That gap is a grift waiting to happen. Expect the second half of 2026 to be full of people selling the idea that their path is different from the oligarchs — more accessible, more ethical, more “aligned” — while running the exact same wealth-worship playbook underneath.

Final Thoughts

So here’s where we land after a full season of this.

The plays aren’t new. The players aren’t new. The packaging is new — the aesthetics, the platforms, the vocabulary — but underneath, the same things are being sold to the same fears.

What IS new is the conditions. An economy under pressure. Trust at a low point. AI lowering the barrier to both creating content and running scams. And a cultural moment where we simultaneously despise concentrated wealth and desperately want a piece of it.

We’re not saying don’t try to build a business. We’re saying: know the field. Know the plays. And when someone shows you a life you want and says “follow me, I’ll show you how” — ask who they were before they started selling the dream.