The Jordan Harbinger Show - 728: Maria Konnikova | The Confidence Game

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Maria Konnikova (@mkonnikova) shows us how we can defend ourselves against would-be con artists and use the same principles for more benign purposes in her book The Confidence Game. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh pass through your earholes!] What We Discuss with Maria Konnikova: As it turns out, you can fool an honest man. But cynics — by their own overconfidence in being savvy and “scamproof” — are just as susceptible to deception. Technology and the abundance of information most of us freely surrender to the Internet makes the con artist’s job easier than ever before. What type of person becomes a con artist? How can we avoid getting scammed? How belief works, why we over-believe in some things (even when we have no evidence for them), and how this plays into our susceptibility to deception. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/728 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the two-parter we did with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom? Get caught up by starting at episode 335: Kevin Systrom | Life Lessons from an Instagram Founder Part One! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. What you see is that for a lot of cons, the typical victim profile is actually incredibly sophisticated, incredibly savvy, not at all greedy. I think greed has very little to do with it. And that old saying, you can't fool an honest man, totally, totally wrong. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Emmy-nominated comedian, National Security Advisor, Music, or Tech Mogul, or Gold Smuggler. And each episode turns our

guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, and I love it when you do that, our episode's starter packs are a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topics that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Topics like persuasion, influence, disinformation, cyber warfare, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get

started. Today, one from the vault with my friend Maria Konnikova. She always makes for an interesting episode. And this scam and con psychology stuff just activates the kid in me in some way. We're talking about con games and influence. We'll explore our innate vulnerability to deception and persuasion and how all of us are actually vulnerable to deception and persuasion, whether we are aware of it, whether we agree with that or not. And hey, if you haven't been conned already, chances are pretty darn good at some point you will. We'll also dive into not only our own inability to spot deception, but how to avoid getting scammed, how systems of belief work, how the nature of trust actually functions inside our mind,

and we'll even reverse engineer some con strategies so that we can defend ourselves from scams and cons and be even more persuasive at home and at work. So enjoy this episode from the vault with Maria Konnikova. 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. Tell us what you do in one sentence, if you can. 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. Great. And have you done that before? I hope so. Yes. You have certainly tried. I think talking about your first book, which is mastermind how to think like Sherlock Holmes,

which is actually, it sounds super fascinating. I haven't gotten to that yet, but it's definitely on the short list. It's a little scary because when you read it, you're thinking, I'm not going to fall for this stupid crap. And meanwhile, that's the entire point is that we are actually all vulnerable to deception and persuasion. That's absolutely right. And, you know, as I was researching the book, the deeper I got into it, the more just disgusted with humanity I became. I realized it just turned me into such a cynic. By the end, I just thought, you know, oh, yep, people suck. Everyone's out to get you. I basically shouldn't believe or trust anyone because I am just going to be totally gullible. and after just talking to con artist after con artist

and looking through the techniques of persuasion and why they're so effective, it just really made me realize that I am so vulnerable. We all are so vulnerable that it's scary. It's a little bit borderline terrifying because if you haven't been conned already, chances are you will be. In fact, a lot of the cons are so effective,

even in the examples that you give in the book, are so effective. There was one example where a guy got conned of some sort of betting thing, and the con artist 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. And he goes, hey, can I bet with you guys again and try that thing again? And they're like, are you kidding me? We ripped you off.

You want to do it again because he still don't even know? And these are educated people who are falling for this stuff. These are not low lives who will fall for anything. These are normal people, a lot of people that you can identify with when you read. Absolutely. 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? People who want a lot of money. And that's just absolutely not true. What you see is that for a lot of cons, the typical victim

profile is actually incredibly sophisticated, incredibly savvy, not at all greedy. I think greed has very little to do with it. And that old saying, you can't fool an honest man. Totally, totally wrong. honest men are really easy to fool. 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. Why is it that honest men are easy to cheat? It seems like it would be the other way around because when you think about greedy people, it's like, oh, look, this prince in Nigeria mistakenly left me money. And a lot of conmen use other people's greed as a rationale for their behavior. They go, look, only greedy people fall for this.

I'm only scamming greedy people. And I heard that actually from surprise, surprise, this Nigerian guy at the airport, I said, what do you think about all these scams? And he goes, you know what, those people deserve it? And I was like, oh my God, I did not expect that answer at all. And I'm not saying surprise, surprise, because Nigerian people are scammy. I just mean the ones you see in your email inbox are always like Nigerian prints this bank of that. They're so commonly known as 419 scams. But I was shocked at the rationalization that that was proffered for this. And I think a lot of con men truly believe that they're doing something that's fine because their victims are somehow deserving. Yeah. And I think that that makes a lot of them able to live with themselves, even though that's absolutely not true.

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. So you get usually women, sometimes men, on websites. And they, you know, fall for some profile of some handsome man or woman. And they develop a really strong emotional rapport. And then the person starts asking for money. Before you know it, they've lost their entire life savings. This happens over and over again. Greed is the last thing that's motivating them, even though oftentimes they'll give more and more money to this person. They have an emotional need. They have kind of an emotional vacuum that these often Nigerian con artists are totally exploiting. 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. Right. And honest people are actually probably easier to cheat because of the phenomenon that we often believe other people think just like us. Yes. And we do this as humans in general. That's why men think that women really base their value judgments based on looks, because we do that. And that's one of the reasons why people are having miscommunication issues inside relationships. And it's also why you might think that if you're super honest to the point of almost naivity, you don't even need to actually be naive. You would just think, well, geez, that's very unlikely.

I remember a time I was going to save this for later, but I've been scam before as well. And I remember joking weeks and weeks later, wouldn't it be weird? if this whole thing was just like a scam and like we never got our stuff back because that company wasn't real and we started laughing. And that was actually what happened. But it was something that never occurred to us at all. Yeah. And it could be a scam. Not once. So what you're saying is absolutely true. And what you find is that people who are more trusting, they actually end up doing better in life. There's a lot of work that shows that trusting societies end up prospering people who have higher levels of trust end up being smarter. They do better.

on a lot of tests of creativity, of intelligence. So this is a good thing most of the time. And what has happened is we have the small number of people who've basically co-evolved with the nice ones to take advantage of it. And because there aren't that many of them, we are usually okay. You know, usually you'll get your stuff back. And so you don't really think twice about doing something like that. And then all of a sudden you don't get back because who saw it coming. And then you have the other end of the spectrum, where if you're very cynical, you are also a very, very easy mark. 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.

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 because it's not an evolutionary advantage. It's actually more adaptive or positively adaptive to be more trusting. That's absolutely right. So we don't spot deception very well because it's actually really beneficial not to spot it. And I can give you a silly example, but one that illustrates it quite nicely from everyday life. What if I told you you came in, you're like, hey, Maria, so nice to see you. And I was like, oh, Jordan, you know, it's really nice to see you. You look really tired. Did you have a rough night last night? Oh, that shirt doesn't really look good on you. Or if I said, oh, you look wonderful and you know that I'm lying.

So those types of not really cons, but small lies are really useful for the ego if you can actually believe that you look good. 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. And that doesn't feel very good. Right. So we actually want to believe certain cons and certain lives. Absolutely, because cons, I think the reason they work so well is that they're all to our advantage.

They all make us come off seeming better. So, you know, someone like Bernie Madoff, he would make you feel like you're a very savvy investor. He would make you feel smart. 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. He made you feel really good. And that's all con artists,

even if it has nothing to do with money. what they do is make you feel good about yourself. You know, this makes a lot of sense. And the over-vigilant individual, the fact that they fall for this makes even more sense. 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. Absolutely. You know, one of my favorite quotes in this, 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. And a con artist once told him, a New Yorker is the best sucker that ever was born. He is made to order for anything. You can't knock him. He loves to be taken because he's wise. So New Yorkers are so sophisticated. They fancied themselves

so ridiculously savvy that they're the best marks in the world because they say, oh, I'm a New Yorker. You know, no one can con me. I've been there, done that, seen that, and they're, you know, just pick one. You know, that's funny. So basically, the more we fancy ourselves fraud proof, the more likely we are to become a victim. Absolutely. Because overconfidence blinds us. It makes us think that we are very good at spotting liars. How many people would tell you, honestly, that, hey, oh, you know, no, I don't really know when people are lying to me. 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. No one wants to say, no, I suck. I basically have no idea if someone's telling the truth or not. But we don't know.

Most of the time we do suck. Fraud is way up because of the internet. 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 billion people from some list that you bought online or stole and hope for a return on that. 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. Absolutely. And that's something that's totally

shocking to people. 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. And yet you have these huge lapses. I mean, I don't know if you remember last year there was a big scandal where it ended up that the company that does a lot of the security clearances for the government was faking the clearances. Oh my gosh. 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. And this just went completely under the radar because no one thinks it can ever happen. And we all give up so much information on things

like Facebook and Twitter. 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. You're just leaving a blazing trail saying, hey, here I am. This is what I'm doing. Please come and steal my personal information or please come and pretend that you're a friend who knows me. Oh, remember we met at that bar that night. And no one wants to say, oh, no, I don't remember. And as soon as you have that one connection, you're in and you've suddenly hacked an entire network. Imagine if that person works at a security company.

Oh, my goodness. 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. That's awesome. And then they're just working in this job, right? I wonder how many people they have to rescreen 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.

Absolutely. And all it takes, I mean, for a con to succeed is one point of vulnerability. 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. Yeah, it's just gotten so much easier, as Frank Abingnail 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 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 conmen are relying upon. Absolutely. I mean, we all think that we're exceptional. You know, you are the protagonist of your life. I'm the protagonist of mine. We always think that we're the most important person in the room. You know, there's a lot of people worry about leaving parties without saying goodbye. They say, oh, am I being rude? You know, should I go and

say goodbye to the host. And at some point I realized, I said, no, you're not being rude because nobody cares. You're the only one who realizes that you're leaving early unless, you know, you're the bridesmaid and it's a wedding. But otherwise, no one else cares. You are always more important to yourself than you are to anyone else in a room. And that comes with kind of thinking that you really are exceptional in everything. One of my favorite studies that I learned about when I was researching this book was about drivers, and people interviewed drivers who had gotten into accidents while they were in the hospital and asked them to rate their driving. And almost all of them rated themselves as above average, even when they had caused the accident that had put them in the hospital. And that to me is just

crazy. Oh my gosh, that's so insane. So basically that cognitive dissonance is so great that we can never really overcome it. Absolutely. I mean, we really want to believe that we are good at basically everything that's good. And that when it comes to bad things, that we have less of it. So if I ask you, are you honest? You'll be like, yes. Oh, I'm definitely more honest than average. If I say, no, no, no, no, I'm definitely much, much less greedy than average. And whenever you have evidence to the contrary, so if you just happen to get into a car accident, you just dismiss it. 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, there was fog, you'll just have a million things that

can dismiss your role and still keep that pristine image of yourself in your mind. Yeah, this is something that isn't unique to cons or traffic accidents, I would assume. This is something that I think is pretty ubiquitous. I don't think it's unique to anything. I think almost every single human being experiences it. With one exception, actually, the one exception is people who are clinically depressed. Really? Yeah, they end up being much more realistic about themselves and how they're doing. And that sucks. They're clinically depressed and they can't get out of their clinical depression. So it's actually, once again, we were talking about what's evolutionarily adaptive. It's kind of nice to see this rosy glow to think that you're better than

average and everything. It's psychologically protective. Because if we actually saw where we ranked on all of these things, it would be pretty disturbing. And it would lead to emotionally negative consequences. Jeez, what does that say about humanity when the only people who have an accurate perception of themselves are depressed? And what does that mean that when you have an accurate perception of yourself, it immediately leads to unending completely long-term enduring sadness? That in itself is actually kind of depressing.

It certainly is. So, Jordan, I just want to let you know that I'm an above-average everything. So in case you have any questions about my book, I'll just refer you to you to. my brilliance. I can vouch for that. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Maria Konnikova. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way.

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how I get so lucky all the time, and that's a fair question. Honestly, it has to do with my network. I am not schmoozy, not gross with it, but I do maintain relationships with lots of people over time. I take just a few minutes every day to do it. I'm teaching you the same skills that I use and showing you the software and the systems

and everything that I use every single day over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your networking and connection skills, but also inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and most importantly, it'll make you a better thinker. That's jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, many of the guests on the show, subscribe and or contribute to this course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Oh, and naturally, this course is free. Now, back to Maria Konnikova.

What type of people become conmen, though, going back to the adaptive thing, look, if we're all sort of evolved to be trustworthy aside from conmen, what happened to those people? What sort of bug do they end up with? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And the first thing I started investigating was, I think, something that a lot of people naturally think, which is are all conmen psychopaths. And it ends up that a good number of them are. Psychopaths are a really interesting subset of the population because they, basically co-evolved to take advantage of the fact that everyone else isn't a psychopath. 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. So you get into double digits pretty quickly. I won't speculate on what that means about humanity. Basically, as long as there are very few of them, they can take advantage and end up doing much better than everyone else. Because the idea is that if everyone buys, cheats, steals, does all these terrible things, society devolves. 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. So you actually end up getting away with it. And so what you find is that a number of psychopaths do end up becoming con artists. And the way that I try to think of it is kind of like a Venn diagram. So you have con artist in one circle and you have psychopaths in another and then you have the intersection of the two. 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. And those are the so-called dark triad of traits. And Machiavellianism is exactly what it sounds like. It comes from Machiavelli, someone who's really good at kind of persuading and bending people to his

own will, Machiavelli's ideal prints. That's basically what a con artist is. Right, right. For those who are unfamiliar with Machiavelli, the takeaway is it's better to be feared than loved, right? 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. Absolutely. And the other famous quote from that is that the ends justify the means. So as long as, you know, you get what you want, it really doesn't matter how you get there. 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. And finally, the narcissism, that's also pretty self-explanatory.

It means they have a grandized sense of self that they really think that they deserve everything much more than anyone else. And I think it's at a much higher level that you're normal, oh, sure, I'm better than average and I have good things coming to me because they say, no, no, no, I deserve to take advantage of other people because I deserve to have whatever I want. That can be money, but it doesn't need to be. It can also be prestige. So one of the con artists I follow in the book loved to steal credentials. He became a doctor. He became a surgeon. He became a president of a university, a professor, a Texas prison warden. He did all of these different things. And he didn't really get money for any of them, but what he did get was prestige.

and power and control over people without having to earn it. He didn't even graduate high school. So I think all of them think that they're getting something that they absolutely deserve. If this is hardwired, the psychopathy deal, so do all people with that psychopath wiring become con men then? I mean, I would assume they can't be. No, no, that's absolutely right. That's why it's kind of a Venn diagram with non-overlapping circles.

So there's stuff outside the overlap. So there are psychopaths who don't become con artists. One of my favorite stories is about a neuroscientist who was studying Alzheimer's and was studying psychopathy on the side. And he suddenly found the brain of a psychopath because psychopaths have distinct brains. You can actually see what they look like simply by looking at the brain structures. He saw the brain of a psychopath in his Alzheimer's study. And he thought, huh, that's so strange. Someone must have mixed up the scans. And so he asked it to be. be de-anonomized to figure out who this person was so that he could set everything right. And it ended up that the scan was not mixed up. It was actually his own. He was using his brain and his families as controls for the Alzheimer's. So he was using them as healthy brains to compare with the Alzheimer's patients. 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. And so there's a saying among 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. So you can have a loaded gun, but it need not ever be pulled. That kind of depends on where life takes you. Okay. So what sort of factors influence for the behavior? Obviously childhood stuff, we've all seen Dexter where he's crying in the pool of blood, right? Yeah. Childhood stuff, early trauma, developmental stuff, actually. So it even starts before you're born. 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. 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. 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 a 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, 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. Interesting. That is really cool. And obviously, I would even think things like corporate culture and certain types of corporates company, culture in general, or competitive environments could trigger these genes as well.

Oh, absolutely. And there are some people who would behave like totally normal human beings if they're in an environment that values honesty. 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. 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. Is this uniquely human? I mean, it seems like a really crummy thing that we own,

but there were some interesting kind of counter examples in your book. Yeah, it's pretty universal to the animal kingdom. There are snakes that can play dead, really play dead, to get you to leave them alone. My favorite are ants who figured out how to play at queen bees. And so they invade colonies. And basically the colonies think that they're queens. And so they feed them and they give them all of the resources,

even when they're starving, these impostors 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. You have cuckoo finches who leave their eggs in other birds' nests, tons of eggs. So it becomes impossible to distinguish which eggs are actually theirs and which eggs are the birds. And so the mother ends up having to raise all this brood of parasites. 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. Yeah. No, excellent. I think it's funny that even animals can be con

con artists. Absolutely. Some of, I mean, do you have a pet? Do you have a dog or a cat? Yeah. He's extremely manipulative with my emotions. So there you go. I mean, some of them, You know, there are all these arguments, just my animal feel emotion? Well, we don't know we can't ask the animal, but they definitely know how to make you feel guilty. They definitely know how to manipulate you. Sometimes they're not being deceptive, but other times they just want you to give them something. So they'll look very, very sad because they want food. Is that a con? 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. So I think a lot of us, especially pet owners, see it every single day. 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. 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 learn bad. I don't think they're going, if I act sad, I'll get food. They're going, when I do this weird look, this human gives me food. It's amazing. Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. 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. And that's what con artists do. They know their end goal. And some of them who are psychopaths, by the way, they don't experience emotion. They fake emotion. 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. 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. That's probably a pretty handy skill for a con artist because for me, I'm kind of a crummy liar, right? 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. And they always, always can justify what they're doing. I mean, I talk to a lot of con artists when I was researching this book. And not one of them was repentant. Some of them were just downright gleeful. There was one that I spoke with Ken Perrefer. Reni, who was an art forger, he was so proud of himself. He just said, oh yeah, you know, they bought my

paintings. It's totally their fault. They can't tell a real Butterworth from my Butterworth. I was on the cover of a Sotheby's catalog. You know, I'm the man. And you know what? If the FBI hadn't nabbed me, I would have kept right on going. So he doesn't care. I mean, not an ounce of remorse. 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. In fact, it's next to impossible, even with the best training in the world. Even interrogators and people I know that are body language experts who literally write the books on this stuff, like Joe Navarro, even the science, polygraphs are inaccurate, they're very flawed. Most of us 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 look down, they're lying. So what we do is we fill, in a ton of blanks with our own assumptions, but they're veiled, right? We don't think, oh, this person is cold, which is totally a valid option for a reason for having your arms crossed. We don't think that. 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. Absolutely. We are very, very strong folk mythologies about what a liar looks like. And they're remarkably universal because we we want them to feel shame. We want

them to feel all these things. So we think, you know, they'll avert their eyes. They'll be a little jittery. We have all of these kind of 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. 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 is lying or not lying and at being able to read the cues of lying. And if you think about it, these are lab studies. And so these aren't expert liars. These are people who were told, okay, convince me that you didn't actually steal $5 or whatever it is. 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.

They're not experiencing any cognitive dissonance. They're not experiencing any discomfort. This is what they do. And on some level, they believe that what they're doing is good. That's how they get through life. We would fare so much worse in that situation than in any of these laboratory studies. And yet we all think that we're pretty good at spotting lies. It's scary. 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. 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. You are a terrible

spotter of lies and judge of body language in general. 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. No, no, you don't. No, you don't. Exactly. How can we avoid a little bit about getting scammed? Because it seems like we're totally screwed. We can't spot lies. They like trusting people. If we're over vigilant, we get scammed. I mean, are we just totally out of luck here? 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. 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 where you're called and you say, oh my God, your grandson's in the hospital, he's in surgery, we need money. 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 about them. There's some evidence that shows that if you tell them about this scam, then they become less likely to fall for it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really generalize. So we really have to go through every

single type of scam, which isn't possible. 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. So, you know, I want to be incredibly healthy and I want to find food that's very good for me, for instance. 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. And whenever someone tells you exactly what you want to hear or exactly what you think should be hearing, your alarm bells should go off. We all over believe, and we also believe things we just have no evidence for.

Mm-hmm. I think that's part of what makes us human. I think we all have this very deep-rooted need to believe that the world makes sense. We're really uncomfortable with ambiguity. We want, you know, black or white answers. We do not like shades of gray. We really want to know that things happen for a reason, that, you know, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. And if it doesn't look like that right now, then eventually

everything will work out. And I think that this desire is one of the reasons why con artists, they have their work cut out for them. They can just pick and choose their victims because they're selling belief, they're selling hope. They're selling a version of the world that makes sense, the exact world that we want, because the world as is, is messy. And a lot of things aren't explainable and a lot of things are ambiguous. So it's a world that we're not really comfortable with. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. All of our advertisers, all of our sponsors, they're all on one page, very searchable, easy to find page. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find all of those codes, all of those URLs. You can also search for the sponsors using the search box

right there on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Maria Conoco. Can you give us something that we can really sink our teeth into? For example, how do we know if we're the type who's going to get con? Is there a way we can sort of assess our victim profile? Sure. There are certain profiles of different types of victims that fall for different types of cons. So one of the things we can do is to realize that everyone becomes vulnerable at moments of emotional instability or emotional loss. So it could be, you know, you could be going through a breakup or a divorce. It could be that you've lost. a lot of money. It could be that you've lost your job. It could be that you have to suddenly move apartments. It could be that you've lost a pet. You know, it really could be anything, but suddenly you're just thrown off balance. It could even be something like you just got a really bad grade on a test and you're a college student. So that is what makes you a victim, not who you are, but the fact that at that

moment in your life, you're particularly vulnerable. 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. 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. 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 they might be apt to respond to something in a way that they don't want to. 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. 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. 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? Absolutely. So there's this wonderful test that was developed called the self-reflection test. And what you have to do is draw the letter cue on your forehead and just do it kind of right now and see which way your cue is facing. 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? Did you draw your cue?

I did. Mine was so that I was looking at it, not so other people were looking at it. Okay. So what that means... Uh-oh. No, no. I already regret doing this. Go ahead. So your tail is to the right, right? Yes. So that means you're actually good because if your tail is to the left, that means you're a high self-monitor. And so you're very concerned with appearances, with perception, and with how others see you.

And so you're much more likely to manipulate reality to make a better impression. So you're more likely to fib just a little bit so that you come off looking better. And so that would mean that you're much more likely to be a con artist. And what you, 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. You're more likely to kind of question things and to try to understand, rather than make reality a little bit different so that you will ingratiate yourself.

So you did well. You passed the test. Thank God. Okay. Excellent. What have you learned from studying conmen that we can actually use to be persuasive? You know,

because we're all good people naturally listening to this. I want some black hat stuff here, man. Like, look, why should it all be used against us? I want to be able to use it. Yeah. 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. Yeah, they're totally. is and I learned a number of persuasive tactics that I'm really excited to try out. So one of them is, imagine that you want someone to do you a favor. Don't ask them for that favor. Ask them for some other huge favor that they're probably going to say no to. So say you want someone to, I don't know, write you a recommendation letter. 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. And they'll probably say no, because that's pretty ridiculous, right? Right. But then what happens is they're going to feel a little

bit guilty because they've said no to you. And so a week later, two weeks later, say, hey, by the way, would you mind writing me a recommendation? Boom, they say yes. And that happens all the time. 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. Because people don't like feeling guilty. 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. And that works incredibly well. So I would highly recommend doing that the double email rather than just. one favor. How come you don't just do it right away? Like, hey, Maria, can you come and teach all of our students about writing? No, that's too much work. Hey, can you write me a letter of recommendation then? Is it just too transparent if they're back to back? Yeah, yeah, it's too transparent. And the guilt doesn't have time to sink in. You need to really let them feel guilty.

You know, let them think about how bad they were, let them sleep on it, 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. Just let them really stew in it. 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. I just started this totally 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? Like all of that stuff just, I mean, constantly bombarding you. And it takes a while. And it actually seems to be a finite resource.

Like I find that it's just wearing me down. 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. Yep, but you say yes because you feel bad. Yeah, I now route things, a lot of things through my system because her job is to say no.

And if she gets worn down, it's okay. because then she can filter even things that are remotely reasonable through to me. So I use a lot less sort of finite willpower saying no. It's one of the reasons why busy people have assistance, not just because they have a ton of work to do, but you need a gatekeeper or otherwise you just end up overcommitting. Absolutely. And there are lots of little techniques like this.

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. And then you just keep asking them for favors, not very often, but often. enough and because they've already done a favor for you, they'll keep doing it to avoid cognitive dissonance because they'll think, oh, I'm a nice and generous person. And if I've already done a favor for this person, that means that this person is deserving of favors. And so I should keep

doing them favors. So it's kind of the opposite technique, but it also works really well. Sure, backwards rationalization, right? So, well, if this person was so bad, why did I help them before? They must be a good person. What can we do as well to avoid getting scamping? you mentioned something creative called limit setting. What is that? So one of the things that I learned, and I learned this actually from people who were professional cult infiltrators. So they went into cults to try to extract people who had fallen for the cult leaders. And in a way, cults are kind of the ultimate con because they really prey on your deepest beliefs. 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. 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. Otherwise, you'll find yourself saying yes. So if we get out of the world of the cults, we can think about, you know, a gambling table. 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 $10 and no credit cards and I'm not going to do this. 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. And if someone offers this, then I am going to do that.

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. And that's remarkably effective at making sure that in the heat of the moment you don't make a decision that you will end up regretting. Right, because through going through that, if then, not only do you have a plan, but more importantly, you've taken some of the emotional charge out of it. Absolutely. Because everyone thinks, you know, this is a really big fallacy that we all make. We think that in the moment we'll still be able to make rational decisions. And that's not true. Our emotions really get in the way. And we also hate losing face. 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. You don't want to look silly. You've already committed. So you want to just keep going. And 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.

So, Maria, this is all amazing stuff. I could talk about this for a really long time. There's a lot of really interesting tidbits in the book, too, the Mark Anthony Gambit, the Chameleon effect, all these different persuasion techniques. I'm a big fan of that. but I have to ask you before we wrap, have you ever been scammed? Well, I'm going to answer very honestly, and that's to say I have no idea. 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. So how do I know that when I gave, you know, $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? 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. I don't know. Maybe I was con that time. So moments like that, I really don't know. I'm assuming the answer is I probably have been. I'd like to think that I haven't. I'd like to think that everyone I encounter is just very, very nice.

Maybe the case. Do you want to tell us about the time your date got scammed? That sounded pretty juicy. 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. You know, you can always tell when people are on first dates. The body language is so incredibly telling. And so this guy said, oh my God, you know, I'm really, really sorry.

I'm from New Jersey and I lost my wallet and I need to get home. You know, my family's waiting. I have children. I just need to get home for dinner. This is terrible. Could you spare $20 so that I could get a train ticket back to New Jersey. And I right away, I was like, don't give him money. He's scamming you. But the guy, my date, was a gentleman. He gave him $20. And this man said, oh, thank you so much. You know, I'll pay you back. Let me give you my information, my date ever. The gentleman said, no, no, don't worry about it. You know, just go home to your wife and kids. And 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 cheap skate and that he would want to appear like a generous good person who will

of course help this man get back home to his family. And actually at the end of the date, I felt really bad. I thought that I was just this cynical human being and that maybe that guy really did need to get home to New Jersey. And so I lived a few blocks from Washington Square. I decided to do an experiment. 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 to give him money for that ticket back to New Jersey. So I felt very justified in that moment. 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.

Oh, absolutely. 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, and no one cares more about image than someone on a first date or on any date, really. I mean, you really want your best foot forward. Maria, is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure you deliver? Don't be cocky. Don't be overconfident. Don't think that you can escape this. Don't think that you're above it. Don't think that you're too smart because that's what's going to get you conned. Thank you so much, Maria Konnikova. Thank you so much, Jordan.

If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to sink your teeth into, we've got a trailer of our interview with Kevin Sistram, founder of Instagram. Kevin talks about why starting a billion dollar company is actually easier now than ever before, how to pivot your business or your career, and whether or not billionaires get FOMO. I think I did it in a way that most people don't. I just wanted to work on my own. I wanted the chance to build something from scratch, quote, quote, quote, my way. I didn't know it was going to be a startup.

It was just me. I was fuzzling around with ideas. I just need space, a table, and my old laptop, and a few ideas. It took more than a few to get to Instagram. But that was the way I did it back then. We think there's a reason why startups started by like 20-year-olds. You can go hard to 4 a.m. every single day or maybe even longer. Yeah.

You don't get sick. Like, you don't really have kids. And that's part of the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is that you can make a lot happen with a few people highly leveraged. And if you stay healthy, everything goes well. We talked a lot about having like one tap magic. All Instagram was was like that hour and a half in Photoshop in 0.5 seconds at the beginning, going down to what, five milliseconds towards the end?

Rarely does your plan A workout. So you have to be able to be quick to move to where the fire starts. You can't wheel lightning is what I'm saying. YouTube was a dating site. It's crazy. That's wild to think about it. But you can go back and you can actually see in the way back machine, like, what it looked like way back in the day. And it's striking, actually.

I hope in startups, there will be this moment where retro is cool again. We're like, people are like, we don't have an app. We're just on the web. For more from Kevin Sistram, including how to get honest feedback from others and when you should and should not listen to it, check out episode 335 right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Super interesting episode, as always. I probably could have gone two hours on that one. The stuff with Maria and con artists and scams, it's always so fascinating.

I just love stuff like this. I've read lots of books about old con games and things of that nature. Because of the nature of confidence, the nature of trust, the nature of belief in the way that people hack this. This is kind of the original social engineering, the original hacking. Before there were computers, there were conmen, there were still conmen, there always will be conmen. So I love exploring these topics. Links to all things Maria Konnikova will be on our website in the show. notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. All of our advertisers, deals, and discount codes are at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash deals. And I know I've said it, but I got to keep saying it. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Transcripts and the show notes videos on YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. We're connecting me right there on LinkedIn. I'm also teaching you how to connect with amazing people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. Digging that well before you get thirsty. That's our six-minute networking course and that course is free. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. And frankly, if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you. Come on. Come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into scams, con, psychology of the mind, human hacking, social engineering, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored

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