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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with my friend Maria Konnikova.
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This is an interesting episode and this activates the kid in me in some way.
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We re talking about con games and influencers.
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This is actually, her book is called The Confidence Game.
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We re talking about vulnerability to deception and persuasion and how all of us
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are vulnerable to deception and persuasion.
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And if you haven t been conned already, chances are really good that you will.
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So we re gonna talk about not only our own inability to spot deception, but how to avoid getting scammed, how belief works, how the nature of belief and trust actually works.
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and we re gonna tell some stories, of course, and even reverse engineer some con man s strategies so that we can defend ourselves and be more persuasive.
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So enjoy this one with Maria Konnikova, and with that, welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you expertise and packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with AOC and get some great stuff that we don t often share on the show.
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by signing up at theartofcharm.com.
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That s where we ll email you our fundamentals, topics like body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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I also do regular weekly videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
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We ve also got our live programs running every week in Los Angeles, California.
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In fact, we ve got guys from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are, you can make it here if you wanna learn and grow.
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were sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it, get in touch by phone or email me, jordanattheartofcharm.com.
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Get some info from us now so you can plan ahead.
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Looking forward to meeting you here at AOC.
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So Maria, first of all, thanks for coming on the program, I really appreciate it, and I ve read part of the new book, which is excellent.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence, if you can.
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I am a writer and I like to delve into people s minds and try to figure out what motivates us and what makes us do the things that we do and explain it in a way that s accessible to everyone.
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Great.
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And have you done that before?
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I hope so.
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Yes.
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You have certainly tried it.
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I think, talking about your first book, which is Mastermind, How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, which is actually, it sounds super fascinating.
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I haven t gotten to that yet, but it s definitely on the short list.
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It s a little scary, because when you read it, you re thinking, I m not gonna fall for this stupid crap.
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And meanwhile, that s the entire point, is that we are actually all vulnerable to deception and persuasion.
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That s absolutely right.
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And, you know, as I was researching the book, the deeper I got into it, the more just disgusted with humanity I became.
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I realized it just turned me into such a cynic.
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By the end, I just thought, you know, oh, yep, people suck.
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Everyone s out to get you.
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I basically shouldn t believe or trust anyone because I am just going to be totally gullible.
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And after just talking to con artist after con artist and looking through the techniques of persuasion,
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and why they re so effective, it just really made me realize that I am so vulnerable.
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We all are so vulnerable that it s scary.
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Yeah, it s a little bit borderline terrifying, because if you haven t been conned already, chances are you will be.
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In fact, a lot of the cons are so effective, even in the examples that you give in the book, are so effective.
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There was one example where a guy got conned out of some sort of betting thing, and the con artists were walking down the street a few months later, or a few years later, and the guy ran up on them, and they re thinking, the jig is up.
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Hey, can I bet with you guys again and try that thing again?
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And they re like, are you kidding me?
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We ripped you off.
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You want to do it again because you still don t even know?
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And these are educated people who are falling for this stuff.
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These are not lowlifes who will fall for anything.
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These are normal people, a lot of people that you can identify with when you read.
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Absolutely.
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Well, I think that that s one of the common misperceptions is that the only people who fall for it are people who are either really stupid, really gullible or really greedy, right?
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People who want a lot of money.
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And that s just absolutely not true.
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What you see is that for a lot of cons, the typical victim profile is actually incredibly sophisticated, incredibly savvy, not at all greedy.
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I think greed has very little to do with it.
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And that old saying, you can t fool an honest man, totally, totally wrong.
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Honest men are really easy to fool.
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And you d be surprised at how often you get cases like the guy who wanted to bet again because people really don t understand a lot of times that they re victims of a con because they believe it so much they want to keep believing.
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Why is it that honest men are easy to cheat?
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It seems like it would be the other way around, because when you think about greedy people, it s like, oh, look, this prince of Nigeria mistakenly left me money.
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And a lot of con men use other people s greed as a rationale for their behavior.
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They go, look, only greedy people fall for this.
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I m only scamming greedy people.
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And I heard that actually from, surprise, surprise, this Nigerian guy at the airport.
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I said, what do you think about all these scams?
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And he goes, you know what, those people deserve it.
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And I was like, oh my god, I did not expect that answer at all.
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And I m not saying surprise, surprise, because Nigerian people are scammy.
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I just mean the ones you see in your email inbox are always like, Nigerian prints this, bank of that, and it s all, they re so commonly known as 419 scams.
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But I was shocked at the rationalization that was proffered for this.
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And I think a lot of con men truly believe that they re doing something that s fine because their victims are somehow deserving.
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Yeah, and I think that that makes a lot of them able to live with themselves, even though that s absolutely not true.
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So let me, since you re in Nigeria right now, in terms of where your mind s at, let me give you another example of a really common Nigerian scam, and that s the sweetheart scam.
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So you get usually women, sometimes men, on websites, and they fall for some profile of some handsome man or woman.
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and they develop a really strong emotional rapport and then the person starts asking for money.
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Before you know it, they ve lost their entire life savings.
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This happens over and over again.
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Greed is the last thing that s motivating them even though oftentimes they ll give more and more money to this person.
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They have an emotional need.
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They have kind of an emotional vacuum that these
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often Nigerian con artists, are totally exploiting.
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And it s really depressing if you think about it, because these are people who just want, you know, they want love, they want affection, they want things that we all want, and they end up broke and emotionally devastated.
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Right, and honest people are actually probably easier to cheat because of the phenomenon that we often believe other people think just like us.
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Yes.
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And we do this as humans in general.
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That s why men think that women really base their value judgments based on looks, because we do that.
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And that s one of the reasons why people are having miscommunication issues inside relationships.
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And it s also why you might think that
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if you re super honest to the point of almost naivety, you don t even need to actually be naive.
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You would just think, well, geez, that s very unlikely.
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I remember a time, I was gonna save this for later, but I ve been scammed before as well, and I remember joking weeks and weeks later, my business partner, AJ, who also is a victim with me, we said, wouldn t it be weird if this whole thing was just like a scam and we never got our stuff back because that company wasn t real?
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And we started laughing.
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And that was actually what happened.
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But it was something that never occurred to us at all.
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Yeah, it could be a scam.
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Yeah, not once.
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And the funny thing is, so what you re saying is absolutely true.
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And what you find is that people who are more trusting
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they actually end up doing better in life.
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There s a lot of work that shows that trusting societies end up prospering.
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People who have higher levels of trust end up being smarter.
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They do better on a lot of tests of creativity, of intelligence.
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So this is a good thing most of the time.
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And what has happened is we have this small number of people who ve
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basically co-evolved with the nice ones to take advantage of it.
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And because there aren t that many of them, we are usually okay.
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Usually you ll get your stuff back.
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And so you don t really think twice about doing something like that.
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And then all of a sudden you don t get back because who saw it coming?
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And then you have the other end of the spectrum, where if you re very cynical, you are also a very, very easy mark.
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So you re at the other end, you re totally not trusting, but you think that you are so incredibly wise that you become completely overconfident, and so you become a really easy target.
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Correct me if I m wrong, but what it sounds like you re saying is we haven t evolved to be better at spotting cons
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because it s not an evolutionary advantage.
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It s actually more adaptive or positively adaptive to be more trusting.
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That s absolutely right.
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So we don t spot deception very well because it s actually really beneficial not to spot it.
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And I can give you a silly example, but one that illustrates it quite nicely from everyday life.
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What if I told you, you came in, you re like, Hey, Maria, so nice to see you.
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And I was like, Oh, Jordan, you know, it s really nice to see you.
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You look really tired.
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Did you have a rough night last night?
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Oh, that shirt doesn t really look good on you.
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Or if I said, Oh, you look wonderful.
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And you know that I m lying.
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So those types of not really cons, but small lies.
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are really useful for the ego if you can actually believe that you look good.
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Because if I say, you look really tired, or if I say, oh, you look great, but you don t actually believe me, then the end result is that you feel crappy about yourself.
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And that doesn t feel very good.
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Right, so we actually want to believe certain cons and certain lies.
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Absolutely, because cons, I think the reason they work so well is that they re all to our advantage.
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They all make us come off seeming better.
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So, you know, someone like Bernie Madoff, he would
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He would make you feel like you re a very savvy investor.
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He would make you feel smart.
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He would make you feel like you were part of a very exclusive club, not like you were a greedy sucker who was just giving him money.
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He made you feel really good.
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And that s what all con artists, even if it has nothing to do with money, what they do is make you feel good about yourself.
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You know, this makes a lot of sense, and the over-vigilant individual, the fact that they fall for this makes even more sense.
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There s a show I m sure you re familiar with called The Real Hustle, and one of the main con men, who s actually a magician, I guess, on the show, he s the one teaching these scams, is every show, his tagline is, if you re the type of person who thinks that you can t be conned, you re exactly the kind of person I want to meet.
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Absolutely.
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You know, one of my favorite quotes, and this comes from what a con artist once told David Moore, who wrote this amazing book about cons many, many years ago called The Big Con.
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And a con artist once told him that a New Yorker is the best sucker that ever was born.
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He is made to order for anything.
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You can t knock him.
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He loves to be taken because he s wise.
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So, New Yorkers are so sophisticated, they fancy themselves so ridiculously savvy that they re the best marks in the world because they say, oh, I m a New Yorker.
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You know, no one can con me.
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I ve been there, done that, seen that, and they re, you know, just pick one.
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You know, that s funny.
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So basically, the more we fancy ourselves fraud proof, the more likely we are to become a victim.
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Absolutely.
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Because overconfidence blinds us.
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It makes us think that we are very good at spotting liars.
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How many people would tell you honestly that, hey, oh, you know, no, I don t really know when people are lying to me.
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We all want to think that we can trust our gut instinct, that we re really good judges of character, that we re really good at reading other people.
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No one wants to say, no, I suck.
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I basically have no idea if someone s telling the truth or not.
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But we don t know.
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Most of the time we do suck.
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Fraud is way up because of the internet.
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I mean, whereas before somebody would have to have the gall to knock on your door and make themselves, their presence known and talk to you in person and risk getting caught, making it really hard to repeat this scam, now you can just email 25 bajillion people from some list that you bought online or stole and hope for a return on that.
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And Frank Abagnale, you d quoted him in your book, which is just brilliant, he said, one of my first criticisms was, look, all that stuff that Frank Abagnale did from Catch Me If You Can, you can t replicate that because technology, he said, look, everything would be a thousand times easier now because of technology.
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Absolutely.
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And that s something that s totally shocking to people.
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It was actually shocking to me because you d think that there s so much fraud prevention software that we ve gotten so technologically sophisticated that things like that can t happen.
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And yet you have these huge lapses.
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I mean, I don t know if you remember last year there was the big scandal where it ended up that the company that does a lot of the security clearances for the government was faking the clearances.
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Oh, my gosh.
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It ended up that it was thousands and thousands of people that the government had thought had been thoroughly vetted that had had no real background checks whatsoever.
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And this just went completely under the radar because no one thinks it can ever happen.
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And we all give up so much information on things like Facebook and Twitter.
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I mean, people who check into places don t realize how easy it then becomes for con artists to either pretend that they know them or to steal their identity or to do so many different things that will totally mess with your mind because you re not just leaving breadcrumbs.
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You re just leaving a blazing trail saying, Hey, here I am.
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This is what I m doing.
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Please come and steal my personal information, or please come and pretend that you re a friend who knows me.
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Oh, remember we met at that bar that night? 
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And no one wants to say, oh, no, I don t remember.
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And as soon as you have that one connection, you re in, and you ve suddenly hacked an entire network.
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Imagine if that person works at a security company.
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Oh my goodness.
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It s terrifying to think that there s so many people who were probably, they applied and they probably went, oh my god, they didn t catch that thing that I did.
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That s awesome.
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And then they re just working in this job, right?
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I wonder how many people they have to re-screen and who s going to get fired because, oh, now that we actually did the clearance, you are a major threat and never should have been here in the first place.
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Absolutely.
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And all it takes, I mean, for a con to succeed is one point of vulnerability.
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And with the internet and with social networks, it makes it so easy to find that one point, whereas before you had to do a lot of legwork.
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Yeah, it s just gotten so much easier, as Frank Abagnale said, and the idea that the victim is so common was scary to me until I read exactly what you had stated in your book, which is that human nature essentially says this, look, the common cliche is if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, but the exception to that rule is the rest of the sentence, which is, unless that good fortune is happening to me, because I deserve good fortune, and that s exactly what con men are relying upon.
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Absolutely.
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I mean, we all think that we re exceptional.
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You know, you are the protagonist of your life.
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I m the protagonist of mine.
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We always think that we re the most important person in the room.
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You know, there s a lot of people worry about leaving parties without saying goodbye.
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They say, Oh, am I being rude?
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You know, should I go and say goodbye to the host?
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And at some point I realized I said, no, you re not being rude because nobody cares.
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You re the only one who realizes that you re leaving early, unless you re the bridesmaid and it s a wedding.
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But otherwise, no one else cares.
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You are always more important to yourself than you are to anyone else in a room.
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And that comes with thinking that you really are exceptional in everything.
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One of my favorite studies that I learned about when I was researching this book was about drivers.
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And people interviewed drivers who had gotten into accidents while they were in the hospital and asked them to rate their driving.
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And almost all of them rated themselves as above average, even when they had caused the accident that had put them in the hospital.
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And that to me is just crazy.
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Oh my gosh, that s so insane.
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So basically that cognitive dissonance is so great that
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we can never really overcome it.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, we really want to believe that we are good at basically everything that s good.
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And that when it comes to bad things, that we have less of it.
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So if I ask you, are you honest?
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You ll be like, yes.
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Oh, I m definitely more honest than average.
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If I say, are you greedy?
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You ll say, oh, no, no, no.
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I m definitely much, much less greedy than average.
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And whenever you have evidence to the contrary, so if you just happen to get into a car accident, you just dismiss it.
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You say, oh, well, no, you know, the insurance might say it was my fault, but technically it was the other guy or, you know, it was a really dark night.
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There was fog.
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You ll just have a million things that can dismiss your role and still keep that pristine image of yourself in your mind.
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Yeah, this is something that isn t unique to cons or traffic accidents, I would assume.
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This is something that I think is pretty ubiquitous.
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I don t think it s unique to anything.
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I think almost every single human being experiences it, with one exception, actually.
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The one exception is people who are clinically depressed.
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Really?
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Yeah, they end up being much more realistic about themselves and how they re doing.
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And that sucks.
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They re clinically depressed and they can t get out of their clinical depression.
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So it s actually, once again, we were talking about what s evolutionarily adaptive.
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It s kind of nice to see this rosy glow, to think that you re better than average and everything.
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It s psychologically protective because if we actually saw where we ranked on all of these things, it would be pretty disturbing.
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and it would lead to emotionally negative consequences.
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Jeez, what does that say about humanity when the only people who have an accurate perception of themselves are depressed?
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And what does that mean that when you have an accurate perception of yourself, it immediately leads to unending, completely long-term enduring sadness?
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That in itself is actually kind of depressing.
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It certainly is.
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So Jordan, I just want to let you know that I m an above average everything.
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So in case you have any questions about my book, I ll just refer you to my brilliance.
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I can vouch for that.
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I can vouch for that.
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What type of people become con men though, going back to the adaptive thing?
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Look, if we re all sort of evolved to be trustworthy, aside from con men, what happened to those people?
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What sort of bug did they end up with?
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Yeah, it s a really interesting question.
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And the first thing I started investigating was, I think, something that a lot of people naturally think, which is, are all con men psychopaths?
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And it ends up that a good number of them are.
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Psychopaths are a really interesting subset of the population because they ve
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basically co-evolved to take advantage of the fact that everyone else isn t a psychopath.
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And so, they re pretty constant in the small single-digit percentages of the population, usually around 1%, although in some professions like law, business, politics, they re really overrepresented.
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So, you get into double digits pretty quickly.
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I won t speculate on what that means about humanity.
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But basically, as long as there are very few of them, they can take advantage and end up doing much better than everyone else.
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Because the idea is that if
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Everyone buys, cheats, steals, does all these terrible things.
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Society devolves.
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But if everyone follows the rules and you re the only person who does these things, then suddenly you re the king of the world because no one expects you to do it.
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So you actually end up getting away with it.
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And so what you find is that a number of psychopaths do end up becoming con artists.
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And the way that I try to think of it is kind of like a Venn diagram.
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So you have con artists in one circle and you have psychopaths in another and then you have the intersection of the two.
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And in that intersection, you also find a few other personality traits which exist in circles of their own as well, which is Machiavellianism and narcissism.
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And those are the so-called dark triad of traits.
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And Machiavellianism is exactly what it sounds like.
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It comes from Machiavelli, someone who s really good at kind of persuading and bending people to his own will, Machiavelli s ideal prince.
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That s basically what a con artist is.
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Right, right.
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For those who are unfamiliar with Machiavelli, the takeaway is it s better to be feared than loved, right?
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Where you can have the love of your people, but it s actually better if they re terrified of you because they will do whatever you want.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And the other famous quote from that is that the ends justify the means.
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So as long as you get what you want, it really doesn t matter how you get there.
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And con artists tell themselves this all the time because that makes them able to go to sleep at night and to wake up in the morning still thinking that they re pretty great human beings and that everyone, as you earlier said, deserved it.
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And finally, the narcissism, that s also pretty self-explanatory.
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It means they have a grandized sense of self that they really think that they deserve everything much more than anyone else.
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And I think it s at a much higher level than your normal, oh, sure, I m better than average and I have good things coming to me because they say, no, no, no.
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I deserve to take advantage of other people because I deserve to have
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whatever I want.
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That can be money, but it doesn t need to be.
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It can also be prestige.
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So one of the con artists I follow in the book loved to steal credentials.
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He became a doctor.
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He became a surgeon.
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He became a president of a university, a professor, a Texas prison warden.
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He did all of these different things and he didn t really get money for any of them.
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But what he did get was prestige and power and control over people.
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without having to earn it.
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He didn t even graduate high school.
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So I think all of them think that they re getting something that they absolutely deserve.
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Now, if this is hardwired, the psychopathy deal.
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So do all people with that psychopath wiring become con men then?
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I mean, I would assume they can t be.
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No, no, that s absolutely right.
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That s why it s kind of a Venn diagram with non-overlapping circles.
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So there s stuff outside the overlap.
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So there are psychopaths who don t become con artists.
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One of my favorite stories is about a neuroscientist who was studying Alzheimer s and was studying psychopathy on the side.
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And he suddenly found the brain of a psychopath because psychopaths have distinct brains.
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You can actually see what they look like.
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simply by looking at the brain structures.
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He saw the brain of a psychopath in his Alzheimer s study and he thought, huh, that s so strange.
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Someone must have mixed up the scans.
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And so he asked it to be de-anonymized to figure out who this person was so that he could set everything right.
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And it ended up that the scan was not mixed up.
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It was actually his own.
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He was using his brain and his family s as controls for the Alzheimer s.
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So he was using them as healthy brains to compare with the Alzheimer s patients.
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And he found out that he was a psychopath and that he d been a psychopath his whole life, but he became a famous neuroscientist.
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And so there s a saying among
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psychologists, whenever they re asked about nature versus nurture, which is that genes load the gun, but it s kind of nurture in society that pulls the trigger.
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So you can have a loaded gun, but it need not ever be pulled.
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That kind of depends on where life takes you.
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Okay, so what sort of factors influence the behavior?
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Obviously, childhood stuff, we ve all seen Dexter where he s crying in the pool of blood, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, childhood stuff, early trauma, developmental stuff actually.
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So it even starts before you re born.
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If your mother is stressed while you re in utero, especially during the first trimester, that can lead you to go in a certain direction.
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if you have a traumatic event when you re growing up, if you end up in a place that s really emotionally unsupportive, even if you re a little bit older.
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So it always has to do with kind of adverse life events that set you on the path towards being, for lack of a better term, I ll say negative psychopath rather than a neutral or a positive psychopath, because all of the business people, all of the lawyers, all of the politicians who are psychopaths,
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but most of them aren t conning anyone, and most of them are certainly not killing anyone, but you do have those people who life just dealt them a raw deal, and they ended up going in a completely different, very criminal direction.
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Interesting.
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That is really cool, and obviously, I would even think things like
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corporate culture and certain types of corporate company culture in general or competitive environments could trigger these genes as well.
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Oh, absolutely.
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And there are some people who would behave like totally normal human beings if they re in an environment that values honesty.
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But once you put them into a culture that doesn t actually have those values and that instead has kind of this competitive do anything to get ahead, all of a sudden they start acting on these instincts and it becomes really, really difficult to stop.
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I hate making a slippery slope argument because it s often so wrong, but it ends up that with things like Hans, it actually becomes much, much easier after you ve done the first one to just keep on going and keep on making all of these kind of moral compromises that you justify to yourself.
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Is this uniquely human?
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I mean, it seems like a really crummy thing that we own, but there were some interesting kind of counterexamples in your book.
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Yeah, it s pretty universal to the animal kingdom.
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There are snakes that can play dead, really play dead to get you to leave them alone.
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My favorite are ants who figured out how to play at queen bees.
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And so they invade colonies and basically the colonies think that they re queens.
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And so they feed them and they give them all of the resources even when they re starving.
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these imposters end up getting preferential treatment, which is kind of crazy because they ve just figured out a way to worm their way into a community by masquerading, by impostering as someone else.
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You have cuckoo finches who leave their eggs in other birds  nests, tons of eggs, so it becomes impossible to distinguish
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which eggs are actually theirs and which eggs are the birds.
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And so the mother ends up having to raise all this brood of parasites.
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It s really fascinating because you can look almost anywhere from insects to primates, obviously, and you see that we really have evolved to deceive.
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Yeah, no, excellent.
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I think it s funny that even animals can be con artists.
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Absolutely.
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I mean, do you have a pet?
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Do you have a dog or a cat?
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I have a cat, yeah.
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He s extremely manipulative with my emotions.
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Yep.
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So there you go.
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I mean, some of them, you know, there are all these arguments, does my animal feel emotion?
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Well, we don t know.
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We can t ask the animal, but they definitely know how to make you feel guilty.
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They definitely know how to manipulate you.
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Sometimes they re not being deceptive, but other times they just want you to give them something.
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So they ll look very, very sad because they want food.
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Is that a con?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, sort of, because they re not really sad, you re home, they re not hungry, everything s fine and dandy, but they want those extra resources.
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So I think a lot of us, especially pet owners, see it every single day.
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Or if you have kids, I mean, babies become manipulative little con artists from a very young age, you know, smiling, cooing, knowing exactly how to get the attention.
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Everybody knows what a sad meow or a doggy dinner bowl eyes looks like, and I feel like animals have just split-tested enough reactions or enough actions and emotions and things they can showcase, and some of them they know get food, so they just learned that.
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I don t think they re going, if I act sad, I ll get food.
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They re going, when I do this weird look, this human gives me food, it s amazing.
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Absolutely.
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I think that s exactly right.
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I think that s exactly right.
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And if you think about it, you don t really have to separate whether or not they really know what they re doing because they do know what they re doing at the end of the day is getting food.
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And that s what con artists do.
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They know their end goal.
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And some of them who are psychopaths, by the way,
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They don t experience emotion.
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They fake emotion.
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One of the things, one of the hallmarks of a psychopath is the inability to experience empathy and a lot of the emotions that we associate with being human.
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But they are really charming, really charismatic, really good at mimicking what they know they should be feeling in a way that s incredibly persuasive.
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That s probably a pretty handy skill for a con artist, because for me, I m kind of a crummy liar, right?
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Because I feel guilt and all these different things in the moment, but for somebody who s a con artist, they can go, okay, let s look at tons of examples of somebody feeling this exact emotion or being really in need, and let me just mimic all of those things with no baggage.
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And they always, always can justify what they re doing.
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I mean, I talked to a lot of con artists when I was researching this book, and not one of them was repentant.
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Some of them were just downright gleeful.
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There was one that I spoke with, Ken Perrini, who was an art forger.
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He was so proud of himself.
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He just said, Oh yeah, you know, they bought my paintings.
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It s totally their fault.
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They can t tell a real Butterworth from my Butterworth.
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SPEAKER_01
I was on the cover of a Sotheby s catalog.
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You know, I m the man.
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And you know what?
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If the FBI hadn t nabbed me, I would have kept right on going.
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So he doesn t care.
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I mean, not an ounce of remorse.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like I said it must be a pretty handy skill to have in the moment especially and we as humans that just in general Spotting lies is very hard.
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In fact.
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It s next to impossible even with the best training in the world even Interrogators and people I know that our body language experts who literally write the books on this stuff like Joe Navarro Even the science polygraphs are inaccurate.
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They re very flawed most of us
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can read a little bit of body language and it becomes very dangerous because since we re not really that good at it, we get a little bit of knowledge like, oh, their arms were crossed and they looked down.
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They re lying.
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So what we do is we fill in a ton of blanks with our own assumptions, but they re veiled, right?
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We don t think, oh, this person is cold.
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which is totally a valid reason for having your arms crossed.
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We don t think that.
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We look at all of this other data that only maybe we have in our own head, and we re like, this is what this person is feeling, and it s completely inaccurate, and we also oversimplify where we shouldn t as well.
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Absolutely.
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We are very, very strong folk mythologies about what a liar looks like, and they re remarkably universal because we want them to feel shame, we want them to feel all these things,
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So we think they ll avert their eyes, they ll be a little jittery.
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We have all of these ideas in our head and it s almost impossible no matter what evidence you present to convince us that we re wrong because we are really certain of what we know.
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And it s fascinating because you see in study after study that people are no better at chance basically in any situation at predicting whether or not someone
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is lying or not lying and at being able to read the cues of lying.
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And if you think about it, these are lab studies and so these aren t expert liars.
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These are people who were told, okay, convince me that you didn t actually steal $5 or whatever it is.
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Now, imagine if you re in the real world and these are people who lie their whole lives, whose livelihood depends on it, who don t feel uncomfortable at all.
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They re not experiencing any cognitive dissonance.
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They re not experiencing any discomfort.
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This is what they do.
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And on some level, they believe that what they re doing is good.
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That s how they get through life.
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we would fare so much worse in that situation than in any of these laboratory studies.
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And yet we all think that we re pretty good at spotting lies.
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SPEAKER_01
It s scary.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that part becomes the problem, and I think that s a big takeaway for this episode especially, is you are a terrible spotter of lies.
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And that goes for you, whether you re a police interrogator who s been doing this for 20 years, or you re somebody who s reading a book on body language and trying to figure out if your significant other is cheating.
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SPEAKER_00
You are a terrible spotter of lies, and judge of body language in general.
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SPEAKER_01
Absolutely, and in some ways I would say try to acknowledge that you don t know and that there are no signs because that way you re more likely to be skeptical because otherwise you might become overconfident and think, oh well I ve read this book, now I know how to spot lies.
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No, no you don t.
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SPEAKER_00
No you don t, exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
How can we avoid a little bit about getting scammed because it seems like
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SPEAKER_00
We re totally screwed.
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SPEAKER_00
We can t spot lies.
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SPEAKER_00
They like trusting people.
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SPEAKER_00
If we re overvigilant, we get scammed.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, are we just totally out of luck here?
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SPEAKER_01
You know, I think that being able to identify some of these techniques goes a long way because once you kind of know that there are all of these scams out there, once you know kind of how they work, then at least the most obvious ones you re not going to fall for.
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SPEAKER_01
So there s some evidence, for instance, that if you talk to elderly people and you explain what some scams are like, like for instance, there s a grandparent scam
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where you re called and you say, oh my God, your grandson s in the hospital, he s in surgery, we need money.
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SPEAKER_01
There are endless variations of this and they re very flustered and they end up sending money and sometimes someone will even impersonate their grandson and will have all this personal information
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about them.
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There s some evidence that shows that if you tell them about this scam, then they become less likely to fall for it.
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Unfortunately, it doesn t really generalize.
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So we really have to go through every single type of scam, which isn t possible.
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And in that sense, I think what we can do is try to understand ourselves a little better, try to understand the things that we most want to be true.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I want to be incredibly healthy and I want to find food that s very good for me, for instance.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I should be very wary of people who try to sell me the miracle fruit or something that s really going to make my health improve because that s exactly what I want to hear.
4
SPEAKER_00
And whenever someone tells you exactly what you want to hear or exactly what you think you should be hearing, your alarm bells should go off.
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we all over believe and we also believe things we just have no evidence for
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I think that s part of what makes us human.
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I think we all have this very deep-rooted need to believe that the world makes sense.
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We re really uncomfortable with ambiguity.
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We want black or white answers.
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SPEAKER_00
We do not like shades of gray.
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We really want to know that things happen for a reason, that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people.
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And if it doesn t, if it doesn t look like that right now, then eventually everything will work out.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that this desire is one of the reasons why con artists, they have their work cut out for them.
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SPEAKER_00
They can just pick and choose their victims because they re selling belief.
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They re selling hope.
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SPEAKER_00
They re selling a version of the world that makes sense, the exact world that we want.
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SPEAKER_00
Because the world as is, is messy and a lot of things aren t explainable and a lot of things are ambiguous.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s a world that we re not really comfortable with.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can you give us something that we can really sink our teeth into?
4
SPEAKER_01
For example, how do we know if we re the type who s going to get conned?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there a way we can sort of assess our victim profile?
4
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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SPEAKER_00
There are certain profiles of different types of victims that fall for different types of cons.
4
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So one of the things we can do is to realize that everyone becomes vulnerable at moments of emotional
4
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instability or emotional loss.
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SPEAKER_00
So it could be, you know, you could be going through a breakup or a divorce.
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SPEAKER_00
It could be that you ve lost a lot of money.
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SPEAKER_00
It could be that you ve lost your job.
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SPEAKER_00
It could be that you have to suddenly move apartments.
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SPEAKER_00
It could be that you ve lost a pet.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, it really could be anything, but suddenly you re just thrown off balance.
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SPEAKER_00
It could even be something like you just got a really bad grade on a test and you re a college student.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that is what makes you a victim, not who you are, but the
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fact that at that moment in your life, you re particularly vulnerable.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that way, we don t even have to identify con artists, we just have to basically up our defenses at moments when we re very vulnerable.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that sometimes means letting people that we trust, that we ve known a long time kind of take care of us and help protect us.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I know some people who give someone else access to their email, for instance, at really crappy moments in time, because they realize that
4
SPEAKER_00
that they might be apt to respond to something in a way that they don t want to.
4
SPEAKER_00
So someone was able to stop his father from falling victim to a scam because he ended up having access to his father s email.
4
SPEAKER_00
So things like that, I think, are really, really important to try to identify when we become a victim and to try to build defenses against those moments.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there anything that will tell us whether or not we re more likely or less likely to become a victim of this and maybe help us strategize a little bit, something very practical?
4
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s this wonderful test that was developed called the self-reflection test.
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SPEAKER_00
And what you have to do is draw the letter
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cue on your forehead and just do it kind of right now and see which way your cue is facing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it facing towards you as if you re looking at it or is it facing towards the other person as if they were seeing it?
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SPEAKER_00
Did you draw your cue?
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SPEAKER_01
I did.
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SPEAKER_01
Mine was so that I was looking at it, not so other people were looking at it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what that means
4
SPEAKER_01
Uh-oh.
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SPEAKER_01
I already regret doing this.
4
SPEAKER_00
So yours, your tail is to the right, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
That means you re actually good because if your tail is to the left, that means you re a high self monitor.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so you re very concerned with appearances, with perception and with how others see you.
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SPEAKER_00
And so you re much more likely to manipulate reality.
4
SPEAKER_00
to make a better impression.
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SPEAKER_00
So you re more likely to fib just a little bit so that you come off looking better.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so that would mean that you re much more likely to be a con artist.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what you did was you actually did it the other way so that you look at it, which means that you re kind of actually more self-reflective, more introspective.
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SPEAKER_00
You re more likely to kind of question things and to try to understand rather than
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SPEAKER_00
make reality a little bit different so that you will ingratiate yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you did well.
4
SPEAKER_00
You passed the test.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank God.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
Excellent.
4
SPEAKER_01
What have you learned from studying con men that we can actually use to be persuasive?
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, because we re all good people naturally listening to this.
4
SPEAKER_01
I want some black hat stuff here, man.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, look, why should it all be used against us?
4
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to use it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Not to con people, but there s got to be some sort of white lining to the dark hat stuff, the black hat stuff you ve been studying.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there totally is.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I learned a number of persuasive tactics that I m really excited to try out.
4
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So one of them is, imagine that you want someone to do you a favor.
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Don t ask them for that favor.
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Ask them for some other huge favor that they re probably going to say no to.
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So say you want someone to, I don t know, write you a recommendation letter.
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So first ask, hey, would you volunteer to spend a day with my students, give up a day of your time to kind of teach them about writing?
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And they ll probably say no because that s pretty ridiculous, right?
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But then what happens is they re gonna feel a little bit guilty because they ve said no to you.
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And so a week later, two weeks later, say, hey, by the way, would you mind writing me a recommendation?
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Boom, they say yes.
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And that happens all the time.
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There are study after study that shows that someone who s refused a big favor is much more likely to say yes to another big favor, but that looks relatively smaller compared to the whopper of a favor that you asked them before.
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Because people don t like feeling guilty.
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They like to feel like they re nice and generous people, not like they re crappy people who refuse to do you a simple favor.
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And that works incredibly well.
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So I would highly recommend doing that, the double email, rather than just one favor.
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How come you don t just do it right away?
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Like, hey, Maria, can you come and teach all of our students about writing?
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No, that s too much work.
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Hey, can you write me a letter of recommendation then?
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Is it just too transparent if they re back to back?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It s too transparent.
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And the guilt doesn t have time to sink in.
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You need to really let them feel guilty.
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Really let them feel bad.
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You know, let them think about how bad they were.
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Let them sleep on it.
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Let them reflect about what a terrible human being they are because they won t donate their time to the poor children who need to learn how to write.
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Just let them really stew in it.
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It actually that seems like it would have totally worked on me several years ago Because I always felt that and it took me years to be able to say no and know that it was actually okay Yeah, and it took literally thousands of people asking me for things for free and now it happens so many times every day Hey, I d love to be on your show.
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I just started this totally new
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off-topic business that has nothing to do with your audience, and I m trying to get PR for myself, and that kind of thing, that kind of pitch, this review my product, can I have free advertising, all of that stuff just, I mean, constantly bombarding you, and it takes a while, and it actually seems to be a finite resource.
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I find that it s just wearing me down, you know what I mean?
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It s tough, so if I say no enough times in a day, I might, towards the end of the day, say, oh, fine, okay, I ll do this, and then instantly regret doing it, and often have to cancel.
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Yep, but you say yes, because you feel bad.
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Yeah, I now route things, a lot of things, through my assistant, because her job is to say no, and if she gets worn down, it s okay, because then she can filter
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even things that are remotely reasonable through to me, so I use a lot less sort of finite willpower saying no.
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It sounds weird, but it s one of the reasons why busy people have assistants, not just because they have a ton of work to do, but you need a gatekeeper, otherwise you just end up overcommitting.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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And there are lots of little techniques like this.
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Another one is actually kind of the opposite where you ask someone for a really small and easy favor and they ll do it for you most usually.
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And then you just keep asking them for favors, not very often, but often enough.
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And because they ve already done a favor for you, they ll keep doing it to avoid cognitive dissonance because they ll think,
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Oh, I m a nice and generous person.
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And if I ve already done a favor for this person, that means that this person is deserving of favors.
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And so I should keep doing them favors.
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So it s kind of the opposite technique, but it also works really well.
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Sure.
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Backwards rationalization, right?
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So, well, if this person was so bad, why did I help them before?
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They must be a good person.
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Right, exactly.
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A fan favorite, if you will.
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I totally get that.
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What can we do as well to avoid getting scammed?
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You mentioned something creative called limit setting.
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What is that?
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So one of the things that I learned, and I learned this actually from people who were professional cult infiltrators.
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So they went into cults to try to extract people who had fallen for the cult leaders.
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And in a way, cults are kind of the ultimate con because they really prey on your deepest beliefs.
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And what they told me, one of the things that you always have to do before you go in is to go through an exercise where you try to visualize everything that could possibly happen in the encounter that would make you go beyond what you re comfortable doing.
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And when you do that, you have to figure out concretely how exactly am I going to respond to that so that you know in advance how you re going to say no so that you don t go beyond your limits.
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Otherwise, you ll find yourself saying yes.
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So if we get out of the world of the cults, we can think about a gambling table.
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And if you are someone who wants to make sure that you don t have a problem gambling, you can say in advance, I am only going to bring
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$10 and no credit cards and I m not going to do this.
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And if someone offers to stake me a chip, I m going to say no because I can t pay it back or whatever you want to say.
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And if someone offers this, then I m going to do that.
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So you actually go through every single scenario kind of crafting an if then, if this happens, then I will do this that will prevent you from going beyond your comfortable limit.
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And that s remarkable.
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effective at making sure that in the heat of the moment, you don t make a decision that you will end up regretting.
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Right, because through going through that event, not only do you have a plan, but more importantly, you ve taken some of the emotional charge out of it.
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Absolutely.
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Because everyone thinks, you know, this is a really big fallacy that we all make.
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We think that in the moment we ll still be able to make rational decisions.
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And that s not true.
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Our emotions really get in the way.
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And we also hate losing face.
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So a lot of times con artists work because they have you kind of up the ante because you don t want to look weak.
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You don t want to look silly.
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You ve already committed.
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So you want to just keep going.
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And
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if you in advance know how to extricate yourself and you ve played this through and you ve actually gone through this conversation and you said, well, if he asks me to give him more money or if he asks me to vouch for him at this club, then I m going to tell him that unfortunately, you know, today I simply can t do this because I have this other commitment or because, you know, I ve already promised my money to this cause or whatever it is, but you have a way that lets you save face and you don t have to think of it right then and there.
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So Maria, this is all amazing stuff.
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I could talk about this for a really long time.
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There s a lot of really interesting tidbits in the book, too.
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The Marc Anthony gambit, the chameleon effect, all these different persuasion techniques.
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I m a big fan of that.
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But I have to ask you before we wrap, have you ever been scammed?
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Well, I m going to answer very honestly, and that s to say I have no idea.
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As far as I know, I haven t, but I m actually not confident at all of that answer because most scams go under the radar.
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So how do I know that when I gave $2 to the girl who said that she needed a subway pass, I was actually giving her $2 for a subway pass and not for something else?
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I d like to believe that what she said was accurate and that she had lost her pass and just needed to get through the turnstile.
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I don t know.
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Maybe I was conned that time.
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So moments like that, I really don t know.
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I m assuming the answer is I probably have been.
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I d like to think that I haven t.
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I d like to think that everyone I encounter is just very, very nice.
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Maybe the case.
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Do you want to tell us about the time your date got scammed?
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That sounded pretty juicy.
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So I was on a first date with a guy who I had only just met and we were walking through Washington Square in Manhattan and this guy comes up to us and he just read the situation perfectly.
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You know, you can always tell when people are on first dates, the body language
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which is so incredibly telling.
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And so this guy said, oh my God, I m really, really sorry.
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I m from New Jersey and I lost my wallet and I need to get home.
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My family s waiting.
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I have children.
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I just need to get home for dinner.
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This is terrible.
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Could you spare $20 so that I could get a train ticket back to New Jersey?
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And I right away was like, don t give him money.
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He s scamming you.
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But the guy, my date,
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was a gentleman.
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He gave him $20 and this man said, �Oh, thank you so much.
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I�ll pay you back.
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Let me give you my information, my date.� The gentleman said, �No, no, don�t worry about it.
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Just go home to your wife and kids.� Obviously, he would have given him fake information and it was just a perfect reading of the fact that my date wouldn�t want to look like a cheapskate and that he would want to appear like a generous, good person
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who will of course help this man get back home to his family.
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And actually at the end of the date, I felt really bad.
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I thought that I was just the cynical human being and that maybe that guy really did need to get home to New Jersey.
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And so I lived a few blocks from Washington Square.
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I decided to do an experiment.
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So I went back to the park at about the same time the next night and I found the same man who was asking someone else.
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to give him money for that ticket back to New Jersey.
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So I felt very justified in that moment.
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Yeah, and of course he specifically targeted people on dates because he thought, look, these guys have a high success rate because they want to look generous and showcase all these kind qualities to this potential mate.
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Oh, absolutely.
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I mean, half the success, if not more than half the success, is in targeting the right person, the one who s going to be most receptive to what you want to say.
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And no one cares more about image than someone on a first date, or on any date, really.
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I mean, you really want your best foot forward.
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Maria, is there anything else that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you deliver?
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Don t be cocky.
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Don t be overconfident.
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Don t think that you can escape this.
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Don t think that you re above it.
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Don t think that you re too smart, because that s what s going to get you conned.
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The Confidence Game, out January 12th, so order it now.
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Thank you so much, Maria Konnikova.
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Thank you so much, Jordan.
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Super interesting episode.
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I could ve gone probably two hours on that one.
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That was super, super interesting.
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I love stuff like this.
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I ve read lots of books about old con games and things like that, because the nature of confidence, the nature of trust, the nature of belief, and the way that people hack this, this is kind of the original social engineering, it s the original hacker.
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Before there were computers, there were con men, and there still are, and frankly, there always will be.
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So I hope you enjoyed that, and if you
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And if you did enjoy that as much as me, don t forget to thank Maria on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as the other resources including, of course, the book mentioned on the show.
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You can tap the album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter at The Art of Charm.
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Bootcamp details, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re interested now, even a little, get in touch, get info, plan ahead.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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