Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Scientist and the Swindler

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Cautionary Conversation: Celebrated physicist Professor Paul Frampton was on his way to Brussels to meet the love of his life, swimwear model Denise Milani. Or so he thought. When he found himself in jail, he realized he’d fallen prey to a confidence trickster. Tim Harford is joined by Maria Konnikova - journalist, psychologist and best-selling author - to talk about swindlers: what motivates them; what they look for in their victims; and how to avoid being conned altogether. Listener questions Tim is taking your questions. Do you have any queries about one of the stories we've covered? Are you curious about how we make the show?  Send in your questions, however big or small, and Tim will do his best to answer them in a special Q&A episode. You can email your question to [e-mail] or leave a voice note at 914-984-7650. That's a US number, so please be aware that if you're calling from outside the US international rates will apply.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the last few decades we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies, ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations they return to the same questions, just because we can do something, does it mean we should, and who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. Pushkin Hello dear listeners.

Before we dive into another cautionary tale, I wanted to let you know that I'm taking your questions. Do you have any queries about one of the stories we've covered? Are you curious about how we make the show? Or is there anything else I can help with? I want to hear from you. So send any questions you might have, however big or small, and I'll do my best to answer them in a special Q&A episode. When you get in touch, it would be helpful if you left us a name or a pseudonym or at least a pronoun and please bear in mind that if you leave us a voice message you're giving us permission to play it. You can email me at tailsatpushkin.fm. That's T-A-L-E-S at pushkin.fm or you can leave a voice note at 914-984-76500. That's a US number, so if you're calling

from outside the US, international rates will apply. You can also find the email address and number in our show notes. And now on with the episode. The Nees Milani was a 32-year-old Czech swimwear model. Paul Frampton was a divorced particle physicist modern twice her age. What happened next was a tale as old as time. They met online, she sent messages by turns steamy and adoring. They arranged to meet in Bolivia where she was doing a photo shoot. Alas, when Professor Frampton arrived in La Paz to meet her face-to-face for the first time, she had to dash to another shoot in Europe. Could she meet him in Brussels instead? And would he mind terribly collecting an empty suitcase of hers from La Paz and bringing

it with him? I'm Tim Halford. You you're listening to caution retails. This is another of our cautionary conversations. I'll be discussing a story of disaster, or in this case a whole class of stories, and I'll attempt to learn some lessons with the help of an expert. And today I am beyond thrilled because I'm joined by Maria Connecova, one of the most exciting non-fiction writers working today. Maria studied at Harvard and Columbia, has a PhD in psychology, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, is a New York Times best-selling author, and by the way, she's also spent some time as a professional poker player. Maria's first book was mastermind, how to think like Sherlock Holmes, and her most recent

book is the brain-meltingly brilliant, the biggest bluff. But today, I think we may linger on her second book, The Confidence Game. Maria, welcome to Corsary Tales. Thanks so much for having me, Tim. It's always such a pleasure talking to you. Well, the pleasure is all mine. And well, gosh, Denise Melani and Paul Fountain, which probably make it clear early on,

the real Denise Melani did not in fact strike up a relationship with Professor Frampton. No, she did not. And she was shocked when she found out that she was in the middle of all of this and gave some very funny press conferences where she denied all knowledge of Paul Frampton. Because how often when you meet a supermodel online, is it really that supermodel?

I guess I've never met anybody even pretending to be a supermodel online, although I have met a few people pretending to be a crown prince of Nigeria. I haven't given people any detail about how this story unfolds, but from what I've said already, it's obvious from the outside. What is going to happen? But it was not obvious to Paul Frempton, and he was a very smart guy. He was a very smart guy, but he was very smart in a very different way. Right, physicist. Tenured professor has theories and has always been lauded for his brilliance from the time he's a little boy. And everyone clearly tells him how brilliant he is because he has tenure at UNC Chapel Hill and he is doing well in publishing papers and he's

admired and he's divorced. One of the reasons he's divorced is because as his ex-wife puts it, he's like a child and I think this is very crucial. He has a very, very high opinion of himself, which is something that we will come back to. You will not find a supermodel on a mere mortal's dating site. And if she's 40 years younger than you are, and you're not here some for it, then chances are that's probably not who you think it is. And yet, and yet, when you think so highly of yourself, when you think, oh, I'm this brilliant man, she must be attracted to my mind. And when you lack that common sense, that skepticism, that innate ability that I think a lot of people now have when they are online natives, but when you're over a certain age,

you're not an online native. This is something that's relatively new to you. I think a lot of that skepticism stops. You describe this story very vividly in the confidence game. What are the points you make is that con artists are quite good at making people feel special. So Paul Frampton, he's a tenured professor, he's a brilliant man, and he's an unusual character. But we all have that capacity to view ourselves as special in some way.

Absolutely. And that is, I think, the brilliant thing that the best con artists do, they figure out why you're special to yourself, right? What is it about you that you think is unique? And they mirror back to you and then some because we're the center of our own movie. We're our protagonist, but we also don't see the world objectively. We think we do. We think that we're all objective, but we see it through our own lens, through our own little pink colored glasses. And yes, I'm using the cliche of the rose colored glasses, but I'm doing that for a reason because what the psychological research shows is that the vast majority of people have this optimism bias about the world and about themselves. You think you're more intelligent than average. You think you're slightly better looking than average. You're nicer than average. And then on negative traits. You think that you're, oh, definitely you're not even close to average, you're much lower on all the negative traits, all of those things you lack completely.

And con-artists are really good at listening to you, at figuring out what your biases are, what your hopes are, how you see yourself, how you see your world, and then they mirror it back to you. And of course, you believe because it's your version of reality And so there are so many cases that are just if you tweak the details slightly it could happen to you and Online dating when people pull at your hard strings you don't necessarily stop to think wait is the sacan You say I've been looking for love for so long. I'm so glad that here's someone who finally sees the real me, who appreciates the real me, who understands the real me. This is what I deserve. This is what I've been working for.

And then the penny never drops. Yeah, I've been quite struck up, been interested in chat box. Chat box work very well, and sit environments, and one of the environments they work well in is online dating. Chat box are really good at flirting. they're really good at sexting. Yeah.

Because when you're in the middle of that, you're just not thinking clearly. Wishful thinking really, really takes over. It's emotional. This is like the most emotional thing that exists, right? It's love. It's praying on something that's no longer logical and the con artist's first thing they want to do is get at your emotions because those parts of our brain are at odds constantly. Yeah, and I mean, I've seen the photos of Denise Malani. She's a very

beautiful woman. That's yours. So we should take the story of Paul Frampton forward a bit. He's in La Paz. He gets this message from somebody he believes is Denise Malani, who is flirting with him and he's told to pick up this suitcase and he meets some guy outside the hotel, right? In a dark alley. And the guy hands him not a designer bag, not like this luxury suitcase that you would think someone like Denise Malani would travel with, but just a non-descript empty black duffel. This thing probably costs two dollars.

He takes this empty bag and he stuffs his dirty laundry into it and decides, okay, great, let's go to the airport. Great idea. But a friend of his is saying, Paul, there are drugs in the learning of this bag, but he can't accept that information that's coming in. Yeah, that's one of the things that over and over and over in all of these stories of Conor to send their victims that have looked out over the years, it's a really common refrain where people

point out the red flags. But when you're in it, when you're the one who's emotionally invested, you dismiss them. You say, no, no, no, no, that's not a red flag. And then you can coach these elaborate tales about why this is actually not a red flag. If Denise Mulani were a con artist, she would never be so stupid as to give me a bag full of drugs because obviously I'd suspect that and not do that because I'm not an idiot. That sounds very stupid what I'm saying it, but that's what goes on in people's minds. What's the moment when he starts to realize that things might be about to get difficult for him?

He successfully flies from Bolivia to Buenos Aires. So he's been in the airport at this point for I believe 36 hours, something like that. And Denise has been promising to send these tickets to Brussels and they just aren't coming. And so finally his friend, who's a very good friend, sends him a ticket home, not to Brussels. And Paul's like, okay, fine, I'll take this ticket because I'm sick of being in the airport, but I will meet the love of my life soon. And he sits waiting for his flight

and the announce his name. When they announce my name, my first reaction is oh shit, like what's wrong, right? What happened? His reaction is, oh, I'm getting upgraded to first class. That's what he thinks. Because that's how you treat professors. Because that's how you treat professors. So his reaction isn't there's something potentially wrong. His reaction is I deserve this and things always happen to the people who deserve them, which is why Denise is waiting for me and getting upgraded. And all these wonderful things are happening. It is not an upgrade. It is actually a detention with a lovely police escort because

as we all knew, there are drugs in the lining of the bag as his friend has told him. And even still, he thinks it's funny. He thinks it's a joke. Just the level of disconnect with reality is truly mind-boggling at that point. And it's not until he's actually in jail and in a cell and he realizes that there are very harsh penalties for drug smuggling when you're stuck in Argentina. That's when he says, oh, maybe something's wrong. And then Denise Mulani, the real Denise Mulani, appears on television saying, that ain't me.

And when he sees that it's one of those moments where he's a little bit heartbroken because probably even in jail, he still harbored the fantasy that at least he did this for Denise. There's a personal angle here for me because Paul Frampton is actually, well, was friends with my late father. They studied physics together, and they kept in touch. When I read this and talked to my father and found out this had happened to Paul

and that he was, he was in jail in Argentina. My natural reaction was, oh, old physicists are vulnerable people. I need to look out for my dad. But actually, then I think maybe that's the wrong reaction. Maybe the reaction should have been, I need to think about myself because it's not just elderly physicists

who get targeted by cons, who can all be targeted by cons. Yeah, I think that that is the wrong lesson because while Paul is a very unusual person, romance cons and catfishing scams and those types of things, they really happen to anyone. Someone I knew from childhood, an old friend of mine

who has since gone on to a very successful career, she met someone online and he was a medical student, brilliant, worked with all these Nobel Prize-winning people. He didn't seem to have any friends of his own. She never met his family, but all of her friends loved him at first, and everything seemed tongue-kidory, and then he became more and more. Controlling, anyway, long story short, because it's not about him. He was a con artist, and his name was not what he said he was. He didn't go to the school. He said he went to, he had forged IDs, he had forged everything.

She was living with a complete stranger. And she almost married him. And she's a very intelligent person who, as I say, is very successful at what she does. And if you look at her, she's not Paul Frampton. You'd say she's smart, she's savvy, and yet in this particular case, it didn't matter because she was in love. And that's the rub, right? You think? Hallelujah. Corsically tales will be back after the break. Over the last few decades we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies, ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations, they return to the same

questions. Just because we can do something, does it mean we should, and who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. You've got to laugh about Paul Frampton even though it's also very sad, but she the more I re-read the confidence game, the more I thought these

are not funny. These are tragedies. These are heart-rending betrayals. A very sad story. I agree. As a side to another story, also from the confidence game, that was also crazy, the no-dler art fraud, one of the biggest art frauds of the century, a fraudulent Jackson Pollock, and the woman who was in charge of the gallery and Friedman had this Pollock hanging in her apartment. And at some point, someone pointed out that, hey, Pollock's signature is misspelled. And you would think that that's a red flag, right?

And she said, no, no, it means it's authentic even more because this wasn't a misspelling. And she had this whole story about how he must have lifted the brush, the no-forger would be stupid enough to misspell Pollock, so this is clearly a real painting. And the fact that someone could have pointed this out to her and she concocted this whole explanation is just also crazy, but people do this over and over intelligent people. One of the things that really struck me reading that story is she managed to get herself in so deep over such an extended period of time.

Yeah, I mean, here we're talking over a decade and Friedman, she needs a fear of Rosales who brings a little painting from Mr. X, this anonymous collector, and they establish a relationship that lasts years and years and years. And these paintings are authenticated and they're purchased and they're exhibited. It's just this miracle. And so by the time that everything starts crumbling and crashing and we get a misspelled poll, which I still can't quite believe happened. By that time, everyone is in so deep and everyone's reputations are so embroiled in this,

it's not that they are incapable of seeing it on a logical level, but on an emotional level they no longer can. And they truly, truly convinced themselves that this is real. And she's ended up selling millions of dollars worth of work that she's received. She believes it's genuine. It's forged. She sells it on. And then as it all starts to unravel, she is this forged works staunchest defender.

It doesn't matter how much evidence, how many people tell her it's forged, she's the champion of this work. She is. And I think that also part of it is that it's become her reputation. This is what has established her as a force in the modern art scene. Abstract expressionism is such a hot selling point of 20th century art and she had unearthed all these treasures. That's what made Anne Friedman and Friedman. So if you're giving up the story, you're saying my reputation is built on a lie.

I wasn't able to see this. I was duped. What does that say about you? Your identity, your self-worth, everything is in there. There's this really amazing moment when everything's fallen apart and her lawyer phones her and says, Rosalas has confessed. Rosalas got this Chinese guy to paint all of these paintings. And when Friedman puts the phone down, her first instinct is, no, that's not right. I know the paintings are genuine. And she still can't accept even when the con artist is saying, yeah, yeah, I can't do. I mean, that just shows the power of belief. Most people who are victims of con artists

never get that moment of reckoning, never get the con artist has been caught, has confessed, you have the person, you have everything, you have all the evidence, and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is not real. Most people can still cling to that illusion that it was real, and that's the moment that that illusion was taken away from Anne Friedman. It reminds me of the very famous book when prophecy fails. We tell the story in one of our one of our first cautionary tales of the cult who believed that the UFO is good at calm and then they're going to take the true believers off to the planet Clarion and then they're going to

destroy the world. And Leon Festinger, this great psychologist, sent his grad students in to join this cult. And so they were there when the aliens did not show up. And then half the cult leave and the other half double down. We've actually saved the world. It even met and they start issuing press releases. It's crazy. I love that story so much because it just illustrates beautifully how Kant's work. And the moment that the red flags are no longer just like red flags, now it's like a fire. You say, no, there are no flames, there's no fire, everything's fine. And you double down and you believe even more.

One of the things that I was really surprised to find during my research is how often victims of con artists pay the legal fees of the con artists when the con artists go on trial. That just makes me so sad. It's so, it's sickening because they say no, no, it's a travesty of justice. You know, this person's getting railroaded. It's a government conspiracy. You have no idea how many mental hoops that they jump through to justify it.

And then those same people, they end up being the best targets for new con artists because they've already gone through all of this rationalization. So it ends up that the best victim is someone who's already been victimized because they're going to fall for it again, or rather than say, oh no, I messed up. Kind of the anchoring tale of the confidence game, which is the story of the great imposter, Ferdinand, Demara, this mythical but real figure who impersonated multiple people over decades. And Demara, we should say, has done things like

he's pretended to be a surgeon. He's actually performed surgery on real live humans. He dropped out of high school, right? This is not someone with any background to do this whatsoever. This is someone who just goes beyond just being a con artist. He plays literally with people's lives. His biographer, Robert Crichton actually captures a lot of this. So Crichton has been traveling all over the country with Demara.

And Crichton knows all of this about him. He's writing about him, right? He's his biographer. And he knows this is a con artist. He knows who Demara really is a high school dropout. And at the time, Criton's wife is pregnant at home. And Demara somehow convinces Criton that it would be a really good idea if they fired their doctor, their OBGYN, and heara, delivered his wife's baby. And Crichton from California calls his wife, and in all seriousness, proposes this, and

she's obviously saying, are you out of your mind? No way in hell, but has a happy ending. She tells him exactly what she thinks of this idea and a normal doctor delivers a baby and the baby is fine. But can you believe it? And then the baby is now a little older and there are two daughters at home. And Craig now and his wife, now his wife has met Demara. They let him babysit the kids. Which is just insane. The whole thing is that, is that utter mess? Yes. Yeah. What Demara was doing, it actually baffles me. It wasn't a straightforward fraud when he's trying to gain

financially or it didn't seem to be. He's just pretending to be all these people that he's not because, well, because I don't know why he was doing it. Well, what I have come to believe is that almost no cons are just for money because most con artists, even the ones who actually commit financial, cons, they are perpetually broke because they use the money for their other endeavors and for their cons.

And they could have made more money in simpler ways. If you're smart enough to perpetrate a lot of these cons, you typically are smart enough to get a job that would be a lot simpler where you could actually make more money. But I think that at the end of the day it's for power. It's for that feeling of control over other people's realities and other people's lives. I use the phrase playing God before. I think that's exactly what it is. It really is playing God. You get to craft a world for someone else to live in and they believe in it. And you get to manipulate what they're doing. I mean, what a rush of

control. And that's where I also think that what you and I do, we're obviously, we're not con artists, but you have to realize that kind of storytelling journalism, it has some of those same roots for creating worlds, worlds that are realistic and that people want to inhabit. And we do it because we want to, hopefully, clarify and make people's lives better, con artists, the motives are different. They do it because they want to manipulate and control and they do it for personal gain and their purposes are much more nefarious. It is absolutely extraordinary. There is a cautionary tale that has fascinated me

about a particular con, which is the Howard Hughes autobiography. I don't know how familiar you are with this con. Yeah. In a nutshell, a writer Clifford Irving proposes to ghost write the autobiography of Howard Hughes who's this famous recluse and convinces the publishers that Howard Hughes is in on this and is collaborating. And he just takes the bet that Howard Hughes is so reclusive that he will never show up and say, I don't know who this guy is and this project

has nothing to do with me. But what I think is interesting and feels unusual, maybe it's not unusual about this particular con, is that Clifford Irving doesn't seem to have thought through the exit. Yeah. Like, what's going to happen after he's taken the money from the publisher? What if Howard Hughes does say, I think this is nothing to do with me? He hasn't thought through, and most con artists do, I think, think very carefully about how to get out of the situation. Well, yes and no.

It seems to me that this was his first con, right? Before he was a middling author and nothing really successful, but it's not like he committed cons or fraud in the past. So because of that, he would have an exit strategy. Con artists, as you say often, they do have a very careful script for, okay, how do I get out of this? The last stages of the con. Now, if the con is good enough, you never get there. But there's always, here's what we do in the end, if the mark whysens up. Con artists, as they get more successful, as they get away with it and don't need that exit

strategy, the hubris gets the best of them. They think that they're going to keep getting away with it over and over and over. Let's once again use our profession. Think about the journalists who were fabulous or plagiarists who got caught eventually. They usually get caught with something so brazen that you think, oh my god, how does anyone possibly think that they could get away with this? You keep saying, oh, I got away with that. I got away with that. I'm never going to get caught. I'm God.

Clifford, he took Howard Hughes and he just starts there and says, oh, I think I can get away with this. It's not like he's had a successful career at this. And this is probably why because his first one, he did not have an exit strategy. So he, I think, saved to say, would never have made a successful con artist. But here, what's equally surprising to the fact that he had no exit strategy is how much money he was paid and how far he was able to take it before Howard Hughes stepped in. I mean, this guy made millions at the time and it got pretty far into the process

before it all unraveled. And how do you not see this coming? Well, I think you are a sense, believe your own lives and believe that you're that good. This guy's not hiding. He thinks he's going to get away with it. We've been talking about stories from the confidence game, but you have written two other rather wonderful books.

And I wanted to talk briefly about a story in Mastermind, which is your book about how to think like Sherlock Holmes. And that's the case of the Kottingley Ferris. We have a cautionary tale about the Kottingley Ferris. It's two little girls who persuades offer Conan Doyle, the creator of the most brilliantly rational figure in literary history that their affair is at the bottom of the garden by faking these photographs.

I mean, this one is funny. It's hilarious, yes. It also has its sad aspects to it. Yes. I wanted to ask, in mastermind, you talk about Conan Doyle at Conan Doyle's life outside Sherlock Holmes and I was I was a little puzzled because there's this other famous case where he intervened in a miscarriage of justice. Conan Doyle seems to be he's not just a guy who writes

to that a smart guy. He is a smart guy. He's a very rational man and yet he falls for this this fairy story literally this fairy story. So what was it about him that made him so rational in some circumstances and he just fell head over heels for this one? That's such a great question. You know, he wasn't just a writer, he was a doctor and the only reason he became a writer was because his practice actually wasn't going well and so he started the first Sherlock Holmes stories as he waited for patients who did not come. But he was the reason I mentioned this is he was part of the scientific community. He went to lectures in Germany to hear

about the latest discoveries of microbes. He was someone with a really keen scientific mind. Also, also, by the way, an expert photographer. Yes. One of his first work, I think his first work was published in the British Journal of Photography. Yes. He's someone who throughout most of his life was just this paragon of rationality. Of course, he saw a miscarriage of justice.

He created Sherlock Holmes, and then something seems to happen. We can't just look at it in a vacuum. The fairies didn't just magically appear. He had experienced a lot of personal misfortune, sundied in the war, wife incredibly sick, that made him very despondent, wanting to believe that he can somehow communicate with the other side that life doesn't end in death, which I think a lot of people feel when they lose people they love, And also context of the times. This is a moment in time where spiritualism is actually getting a little bit more

credibility in the mainstream. So William James, who we know as the father of modern psychology, happens to head up the spiritualist society and wants to run studies and psychological experiments on the other side and these unseen psychic powers and psychic forces because so many unknown forces are actually being discovered scientifically radio waves x-, all these things that we can't see. There's so much invisible in the world that we're now bringing science to bear on. That said, when two girls appear and show this evidence of fairies, even at the time, almost nobody believes them because if you look at the photographs, they're bad. These are not good fakes.

And as we know, what they did was they cut out fairies from a book. And they just tasted the, you know, into these landscapes. It's a very crude fortress. Beyond that, one of the girls is an apprentice at a photography studio. And as you said, Conan Doyle himself was a photographer. And yet, I think he just wants to believe. What I find really interesting is that even as he's being deceived by the fairies, he is still writing Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes doesn't believe in spiritualism. It's just hilarious because I think on some level, Conan Doyle must understand what's going on,

but it's subconscious and he's bringing it out in his fictional creation. He really wanted to believe and and Friedman. Yeah. Really wanted to believe that she had found these Rothko's and these Pollocks and Paul Frampton really wanted to believe there was a supermodel whicing for him in Brussels. Never underestimate our need to believe in our desire to believe in our hopefulness and our our eternal optimism.

That good things happened to us. Yeah. Your most recent book is the biggest bluff. It is an absolute classic. It's a wonderful book. Thank you. Everyone needs to read it. I feel like everyone has read it, but if you haven't read it, go and read it. All about your quest to try to become a championship level poker player. Given what we've been talking about, I wanted to ask, what are the similarities or differences between a bluff and a con?

The answer to that is the answer to why not all marketers or PR people or politicians or writers are all con artists either. Because it's so easy to say, well, it's all deception, why isn't everything a con calm and that's intention. So a con artist is someone who takes advantage of your confidence, your trust in them for their own personal gain and it is deception with an aferious edge with intent to do something harmful something that is good for the con artist and what they say is all in service of that. When you're talking about white lies or storytelling in, you know, journalistic sense or a bluff in poker, the intention is not nefarious. In the case of a writer, it's to make the the world clearer in the case of a politician who's not a con artist, it's to make the world a better place. In the case of a bluff, you're playing a game with rules, right? You're playing poker, bluffing as part of the game. And so you're just

engaging in deception that everyone is aware of. Everyone knows that within the rules of this game is to deceive other people so that you can win. It's a very different tone of deceiving someone for your own personal ends now. There are con artists in absolutely every profession. We talked very briefly about writers who are fabulous or plagiarists or who deceive their con artists. They're con artists in the poker world. People who pretend to be someone else, who steal your money, that's not within the rules, that's not part of the game, that's not bluffing. That is actual malicious intent. The way I always say, you know, how do you draw the line between con artists is take a snake oil snail's man.

And one of them knows he's selling snake oil, right? He knows that this is actually, you know, vegetable oil with fruit coloring and is probably not gonna kill you, but it's definitely not gonna do any of the things he says, but he can make a lot of money at fairs selling it, so he's going to do it. That's a con artist, right? He knows exactly what he's doing. Now imagine he convinces someone else to sell that with him and that person becomes a true believer. They actually think it cured them and they think they're selling this miracle snake well and they come up to you and they say, here by this, it's amazing. They're not a con artist. There might be a little gullible, but they're a victim. They're a true believer. They're someone who actually believes what they're selling. Exact same action, right? You're selling snake well. And yet one of the people

who's selling it as a con artist and the other person isn't. And I think that's the test. You'll always have to subject people to try to figure out, is this a con or not? Because otherwise the word loses all meaning. We do need to have that intention. Very clear. Of course, it's hard to get into other people's minds and know what their intention really is. You know, is this person a true believer or is this person a con artist? And can you give me an advice as to how not to be conned or is it just like the weather? It's just one of these things. You know, soon or later, it's going to rain, you're going to get wet, it's going to

relate to your be conned. Well, I think that has to be your attitude. When I finished writing the confidence game, my initial reaction was to lock myself in a room, throw away the key and never interact with the outside world again because people suck. I got past that. There was a reason that was my initial reaction because you realized that we're all susceptible to it. But that means you also don't get to live. So yes, you always just have to say, one day it might happen and that's okay. You still can protect yourself against the worst of it.

My best advice is whenever things are happening that are good, that's when you need to be the most skeptical. When things are too good to be true, they probably are, but nothing's too good for me. Really try to get past that and try to say, okay, things are really good. This is when I need to ask questions. Don't assume every single person's out to get you because they're not, but verify. And don't be afraid of looking like an asshole because one of the reasons we often don't verify is because we don not, but verify. And don't be afraid of looking like an asshole. Because one of the reasons we often don't verify is because we don't want to be, you know, I hate to be the guy who brings this up, but be the guy who brings it up. That's okay. At this stage, I would normally ask

my guest to tell me how the story ends. I'd ask you to tell me how the story ends for Paul Frampton, but actually, Maria, if it's okay, I'm going to tell you how the story ends. Yes. As I mentioned, he was friends with my father, and so he went to jail for a few years. He got back to the UK in the end, and I saw him in the spring of 2022. And the good news is he was in grade form. He was very happy, very cheerful, very charming. The bad news is it was at my father's funeral, and so perhaps being happy, cheerful, and charming

was not exactly how he should have behaved, but maybe it was in character. And the funny thing was, we only spoke briefly, but he told me that it had an argument with my father, a gentle argument with my father, over who was the most famous? Me, my father's son, or him, Professor Paul Frampton, who'd been profiled in New York Times for being the victim of one of the most famous scams in history, but there you go, he's flourishing, and I was glad to see it. Of course he is, so glad he's flourishing. Narcissism gets you very far in life. he is so glad he's flourishing. Narcissism gets you very far in life. Rhea Kallikova, thank you so much. Thank you so much to him. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Corsinary tales is written by me me Tim Haafed with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Ruslo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lethal Moulade, John Schnarrs, Kali Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratner. Corsionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons.

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