WEBVTT - Ep25 "Why are we so easy to fool?" 0:00:05.160 --> 0:00:09.720 Why are we humans so easy to deceive? What are 0:00:09.800 --> 0:00:12.520 the tricks of the trade, and how can we train 0:00:12.600 --> 0:00:16.640 ourselves to be more aware of these? And what does 0:00:16.680 --> 0:00:20.240 any of this have to do with fahnose or forging 0:00:20.320 --> 0:00:28.200 letters or the shell game. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with 0:00:28.320 --> 0:00:31.400 me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at 0:00:31.440 --> 0:00:36.159 Stanford and in these episodes, I examine the intersection between 0:00:36.240 --> 0:00:41.920 our brains and our lives, and today's episode is about deception. 0:00:49.800 --> 0:00:53.559 You presumably wouldn't do something to cheat a stranger out 0:00:53.600 --> 0:00:56.760 of twenty dollars, So why are there people who would 0:00:56.960 --> 0:00:57.279 do that? 0:00:57.720 --> 0:00:59.200 And what can we do. 0:00:59.560 --> 0:01:04.120 To be a little more thoughtful and aware and immune 0:01:04.440 --> 0:01:09.080 against deception? So in a previous episode I talked about 0:01:09.120 --> 0:01:13.000 a really impactful event when I was a neuroscience graduate 0:01:13.040 --> 0:01:16.480 student getting my PhD. I was a second year student 0:01:16.520 --> 0:01:19.480 in the department and this new young woman came in 0:01:19.520 --> 0:01:22.560 as a first year student. We'll call her Tanya, and 0:01:22.640 --> 0:01:26.720 everyone could see that Tanya was great. She had great grades, 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:31.480 top standardized test scores, terrific letters of recommendation, and in 0:01:31.520 --> 0:01:35.560 the interviews she even won over my graduate advisor, who 0:01:35.640 --> 0:01:39.440 was famously spiky towards people. And I tell her full 0:01:39.480 --> 0:01:42.920 story in episode sixteen, but the short version is that 0:01:43.000 --> 0:01:47.480 she faked everything on her graduate school application. She faked 0:01:47.720 --> 0:01:52.240 the school transcript and the GRE scores and the letters 0:01:52.240 --> 0:01:56.800 of recommendation, and she was only caught because an administrator 0:01:56.840 --> 0:01:59.520 at the school was so impressed with her that she 0:01:59.640 --> 0:02:03.040 decided to call the professors who had written the letters 0:02:03.080 --> 0:02:06.880 of recommendation to ask how they'd produced a student like Tanya. 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:11.360 And that's how the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Now, 0:02:11.400 --> 0:02:14.359 for those of you who listened to episode sixteen, you'll 0:02:14.400 --> 0:02:19.160 remember that Tanya's story then got much weirder because she 0:02:19.280 --> 0:02:22.200 went to Yale University and tried to pull exactly the 0:02:22.240 --> 0:02:25.079 same trick, and when she was caught there, they put 0:02:25.080 --> 0:02:28.320 her in jail. And then she and her mother got 0:02:28.360 --> 0:02:32.440 caught doing a drug deal with two undercover agents. And 0:02:32.480 --> 0:02:36.720 then Tanya decided to try murdering a girl who looked 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:40.480 vaguely like her to avoid going to prison. Now that 0:02:40.600 --> 0:02:43.800 plot failed, but only barely. So that's the quick recap 0:02:43.840 --> 0:02:46.079 of the story. But the part I want to concentrate 0:02:46.120 --> 0:02:50.400 on today is why did none of us see this coming? 0:02:50.919 --> 0:02:53.680 We all thought she was great. And this was a 0:02:53.840 --> 0:02:59.000 neuroscience graduate program full of people who were aspiring learners 0:02:59.040 --> 0:03:03.120 about the human brain and faculty who were presumably already 0:03:03.400 --> 0:03:06.320 experts in the brain. And yet every single one of 0:03:06.400 --> 0:03:09.639 us thought that Tanya was great. None of us even 0:03:09.680 --> 0:03:13.799 had the briefest glimpse of doubt or suspicion when she 0:03:13.919 --> 0:03:19.240 started school, And we were all maximally surprised when we 0:03:19.280 --> 0:03:22.200 saw how completely we had been fooled. 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:25.120 So why were we so blind? 0:03:26.200 --> 0:03:29.280 Well, first of all, none of us would have thought 0:03:29.360 --> 0:03:33.360 about faking our transcripts and writing fake letters and so on. 0:03:33.440 --> 0:03:34.160 That kind of. 0:03:34.720 --> 0:03:40.040 Deception didn't exist in our mental models, and so it 0:03:40.160 --> 0:03:42.600 was totally invisible to us when it was sitting there 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:45.440 right in front of us. And one of the themes 0:03:45.480 --> 0:03:48.040 of this podcast and of my next book is that 0:03:48.480 --> 0:03:52.280 we need to get better at seeing outside the garden 0:03:52.320 --> 0:03:56.640 walls of our own internal models. This is really what 0:03:56.760 --> 0:04:01.840 the passage into maturity is about, seeing the limitations of 0:04:01.880 --> 0:04:06.200 our own thinking and realizing that what's going on in 0:04:06.240 --> 0:04:09.960 someone else's head might be very different than what's going 0:04:10.000 --> 0:04:13.640 on inside hours even if we're not the kind of 0:04:13.720 --> 0:04:18.240 person to do something, even if it seems absolutely unimaginable 0:04:18.279 --> 0:04:20.200 to us, it doesn't mean that. 0:04:20.120 --> 0:04:21.560 It seems that way to someone else. 0:04:22.080 --> 0:04:24.560 And if you heard episodes twenty and twenty one, you'll 0:04:24.560 --> 0:04:27.159 know that we dove into some of the really awful 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:31.480 things that happened during wartime. And again, just because you 0:04:31.680 --> 0:04:35.880 can't imagine hacking your neighbors to death with a machete 0:04:35.960 --> 0:04:39.360 or shooting your neighbors or bayonetting them, it doesn't mean 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:44.880 that someone else can't imagine that and won't foment violence 0:04:44.960 --> 0:04:48.800 without having much compunction about it. So an understanding of 0:04:49.040 --> 0:04:55.440 history requires an expansion of our mental models, and that's 0:04:55.440 --> 0:04:59.520 what's required for navigating day to day life as well, 0:04:59.600 --> 0:05:03.719 because if not everyone is just like you on the inside. 0:05:03.800 --> 0:05:09.000 For example, psychopaths make up about one percent of the population, 0:05:09.520 --> 0:05:11.240 and by the way, they make up about twenty to 0:05:11.240 --> 0:05:15.880 thirty percent of the prison population. They don't care about you, 0:05:15.920 --> 0:05:18.960 they don't simulate what it is like to be you, 0:05:19.640 --> 0:05:22.320 and they can be violent towards you because they just 0:05:22.400 --> 0:05:25.320 see you as an obstacle to. 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:27.080 Flow around to get what they want. 0:05:27.520 --> 0:05:30.240 And I'm going to do an episode on psychopathy soon, 0:05:30.279 --> 0:05:31.839 but the point I want to make right now is 0:05:31.839 --> 0:05:35.520 that if you are not a psychopath, this is very 0:05:35.520 --> 0:05:39.120 difficult to imagine someone behaving that way. But you'll be 0:05:39.320 --> 0:05:43.040 smarter in your daily life if you understand how other 0:05:43.160 --> 0:05:47.160 people can be different from you. Now, sometimes people are 0:05:47.200 --> 0:05:50.279 different in wonderful ways, like when you see some situation 0:05:50.960 --> 0:05:53.960 in which someone is braver than you, or just more 0:05:54.080 --> 0:05:57.680 charitable with a higher percentage of their money, or more 0:05:57.800 --> 0:06:00.599 willing to do the right thing, like to climb the 0:06:00.680 --> 0:06:03.560 side of a building to save the toddler hanging off 0:06:03.600 --> 0:06:07.080 the balcony, even though you would be more scared. But 0:06:07.279 --> 0:06:11.160 sometimes we see people different from us in the other direction, 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:15.200 people who cheat and lie and steal, and it's hard 0:06:15.240 --> 0:06:17.640 to understand because we don't have a good model of that, 0:06:17.800 --> 0:06:21.920 and so we're often caught completely by surprise. I'll give 0:06:21.960 --> 0:06:24.640 you an example of this when I was young. When 0:06:24.680 --> 0:06:27.880 I was sixteen years old, I was traveling with my 0:06:28.000 --> 0:06:31.800 parents in Barcelona, and I was spending an afternoon walking 0:06:31.800 --> 0:06:34.880 around by myself, and I saw a crowd of people 0:06:34.920 --> 0:06:38.400 playing a shell game. You know, this is the game 0:06:38.440 --> 0:06:41.839 where a person puts a small ball under one of 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:45.120 three cups and then rotates the cups around and around 0:06:45.640 --> 0:06:48.360 and then you have to guess which cup the ball 0:06:48.440 --> 0:06:52.040 is under. So I stopped to watch because there was 0:06:52.080 --> 0:06:55.760 a small crowd and the dealer was moving the cups around, 0:06:55.839 --> 0:06:58.280 and there was this pedestrian like me who had put 0:06:58.320 --> 0:07:02.320 down some money. And pedestrian watched the cups go around 0:07:02.360 --> 0:07:04.919 and round, and when they stopped, he pointed to a 0:07:04.960 --> 0:07:06.160 cup and it was. 0:07:06.120 --> 0:07:06.960 The wrong cup. 0:07:07.600 --> 0:07:10.200 But I could see where the cups had moved, and 0:07:10.280 --> 0:07:12.240 I knew it was the cup on the left, but 0:07:12.280 --> 0:07:15.400 this pedestrian pointed to the middle. So the dealer uncovered 0:07:15.440 --> 0:07:18.400 the middle cup, and the whole crowd made a whooping sound, 0:07:18.800 --> 0:07:21.520 and so the pedestrian put down more money to play 0:07:21.560 --> 0:07:24.800 another round, and the dealer shows the ball under the 0:07:24.880 --> 0:07:27.680 left cup, and then he rotates the cups around faster 0:07:27.720 --> 0:07:30.800 and faster, but I kept my eyes locked on the 0:07:30.800 --> 0:07:34.520 correct cup, and again the pedestrian guessed wrong, but I 0:07:34.600 --> 0:07:37.160 knew where the ball was. So this happens a few 0:07:37.200 --> 0:07:40.760 more rounds, and the pedestrian gives up, and the dealer 0:07:40.840 --> 0:07:42.920 looks at me and motions for me to put up 0:07:42.960 --> 0:07:45.960 some money, so I did so he shows me the 0:07:45.960 --> 0:07:48.600 ball and rotates the cups around and around, and I 0:07:48.760 --> 0:07:50.560 keep my eye on it, and when he stops, I 0:07:50.680 --> 0:07:54.679 point to the correct cup and the cup was empty. 0:07:55.200 --> 0:07:57.960 I got it wrong, what was going on? 0:07:58.160 --> 0:08:00.240 So he motions for me to put down more money, 0:08:00.280 --> 0:08:02.840 and I want to win my lost money back, so 0:08:02.880 --> 0:08:05.520 I put down more and he runs the rotations again, 0:08:05.800 --> 0:08:08.200 and I point to the cup where the ball should be, 0:08:08.680 --> 0:08:12.440 and again it's empty. And before I know it, someone 0:08:12.440 --> 0:08:14.640 in the crowd makes a whoop sound, and suddenly the 0:08:14.680 --> 0:08:17.840 dealer folds up the board and the entire crowd disappears, 0:08:18.440 --> 0:08:21.280 and I'm standing there all by myself in the street, 0:08:21.360 --> 0:08:24.160 and I felt like such a fool because I had 0:08:24.200 --> 0:08:27.280 just been deceived. Now this is embarrassing for me to 0:08:27.320 --> 0:08:29.520 tell the story, and even all these years later, there 0:08:29.600 --> 0:08:31.400 is some pain in the remembrance. 0:08:31.720 --> 0:08:32.600 But my hope in. 0:08:32.520 --> 0:08:36.480 Relating the story is that at least one teenage listener 0:08:36.600 --> 0:08:39.840 gets an expansion of their mental model from this and 0:08:40.120 --> 0:08:42.600 doesn't have to play this game. Just in case you 0:08:42.600 --> 0:08:45.720 don't know, there is no honest version of the shell game. 0:08:45.760 --> 0:08:49.040 It's always performed by hucksters who use sleight of hand 0:08:49.080 --> 0:08:51.840 to move the ball from one cup to another, and 0:08:51.880 --> 0:08:55.760 the whole crowd is in on the deception. Now, when 0:08:55.800 --> 0:08:57.680 I did some research on this, I found the shell 0:08:57.720 --> 0:09:01.480 game is very old, so the game of people trying 0:09:01.520 --> 0:09:03.920 to deceive other people is ancient. 0:09:04.920 --> 0:09:05.160 Now. 0:09:05.240 --> 0:09:10.160 Sometimes deception is planned in advance like this, and sometimes 0:09:10.200 --> 0:09:12.400 people are just trying to get out of bad situation. 0:09:12.559 --> 0:09:15.800 They make it worse. Sometimes it's hard to tell. I mean, 0:09:15.800 --> 0:09:18.800 look at the company, Thearrhannos, which you've probably heard of. 0:09:18.840 --> 0:09:21.800 They were a health tech company founded by a young 0:09:21.840 --> 0:09:25.280 woman named Elizabeth Holmes, and they were out to develop 0:09:25.400 --> 0:09:29.720 a biological test that could measure a whole bunch of 0:09:29.760 --> 0:09:33.240 things using just a drop or two of blood. So 0:09:33.320 --> 0:09:37.240 they raised seven hundred and twenty four million dollars from investors, 0:09:37.760 --> 0:09:41.880 including the media mogul Robert Murdoch and former Secretary of 0:09:41.920 --> 0:09:45.560 State Henry Kissinger, and all kinds of big players were 0:09:45.679 --> 0:09:51.080 enthusiastic about this revolutionary technology. But this all came crashing 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:55.480 down in twenty fifteen when it surfaced that Sarahnos had 0:09:55.520 --> 0:09:59.680 been lying about what their technology could do. Holmes was 0:09:59.760 --> 0:10:03.760 charged with fraud and conspiracy, and she was found guilty 0:10:03.800 --> 0:10:06.960 in twenty twenty two. Now you probably know this story, 0:10:06.960 --> 0:10:10.560 but the interesting backside of this story is So many 0:10:10.600 --> 0:10:13.240 people here in Silicon Valley have said things to me 0:10:13.840 --> 0:10:18.959 suggesting that they would have never fallen for Farnos, like, oh, 0:10:19.000 --> 0:10:21.800 I would have known right away that couldn't work. But 0:10:21.920 --> 0:10:25.480 that's silly, and I generally don't believe them because it's 0:10:25.559 --> 0:10:28.960 easy to get douped. And if the other people who 0:10:28.960 --> 0:10:31.200 believe in it and invest in it and sit on 0:10:31.240 --> 0:10:35.079 the board are billionaires and big shots, what's to make 0:10:35.120 --> 0:10:38.800 you think that wouldn't have a great gravitational pull on you. 0:10:39.080 --> 0:10:41.400 Because the truth is, when we look at things that 0:10:41.760 --> 0:10:45.320 other people believe in, or even simply things that match 0:10:45.360 --> 0:10:51.120 our expectations, we often don't do any further looking into it. Now, 0:10:51.120 --> 0:10:53.959 this puts us in a tough spot because we have 0:10:54.080 --> 0:10:57.960 to trust other people. We really have no choice, because 0:10:58.000 --> 0:11:01.839 we can't disbelieve every thing or have time to check 0:11:01.880 --> 0:11:05.679 on everything. So how do we work around this bias? 0:11:06.080 --> 0:11:08.880 How can we take some of the tools of science, 0:11:09.320 --> 0:11:13.160 which are all about clear thinking and import these into 0:11:13.200 --> 0:11:17.040 our daily lives. Well, I'm no expert on this. I 0:11:17.080 --> 0:11:20.080 often err on the side of believing everyone, but I 0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:24.360 knew who to call. My colleagues Dan Simon's and Christopher 0:11:24.360 --> 0:11:27.959 Shubrie recently wrote a terrific book all about deception called 0:11:28.360 --> 0:11:30.760 Nobody's Fool. So I wrung them up. 0:11:31.559 --> 0:11:34.760 The most interesting thing we found about what all the 0:11:34.800 --> 0:11:38.679 cons and deceptions have in common is that the con artists, 0:11:38.760 --> 0:11:41.040 the scammers, the swindlers, whatever you want to call them, 0:11:41.559 --> 0:11:44.800 all seem to be taking advantage of sort of the 0:11:44.840 --> 0:11:50.920 same set of our cognitive proclivities and our attentional biases. 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:53.560 What we like to pay attention to, what attracts us, 0:11:54.160 --> 0:11:58.520 and what mistakes we tend to make, and decision making 0:11:58.559 --> 0:12:00.400 that we may not be aware of. 0:12:01.080 --> 0:12:05.240 That's Christopher Shabri, a professor of psychology and director of 0:12:05.320 --> 0:12:08.720 Decision Sciences at Geisinger Research Institute. 0:12:08.760 --> 0:12:10.800 They may not be consciously aware of, but somehow they 0:12:10.840 --> 0:12:13.840 have sort of learned that adapted their schemes to things 0:12:13.920 --> 0:12:16.800 that tend to exploit these loopholes in our thinking. Not 0:12:16.920 --> 0:12:21.959 loopholes that are sort of design flaws necessarily, they're actually usually, 0:12:22.040 --> 0:12:24.440 you know, good things about how we think. But when 0:12:24.440 --> 0:12:26.320 someone is really trying to take advantage of us, they 0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:28.920 can cleverly exploit those and gain the advantage. 0:12:29.360 --> 0:12:33.600 So what are the important lessons for all of us 0:12:33.720 --> 0:12:36.760 to think about? Given that I'd say there are a few, 0:12:37.840 --> 0:12:41.480 and that's Dan Simons, a professor of psychology at the 0:12:41.600 --> 0:12:48.120 University of Illinois. One is that we have a tendency 0:12:48.160 --> 0:12:52.400 to assume that only the most gullible or naive or 0:12:52.800 --> 0:12:57.080 uneducated people fall for scams. And that's partly because we 0:12:57.200 --> 0:13:00.959 generally only see the results of cons and scams after 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:03.000 they're over right, So it's easy to see what the 0:13:03.000 --> 0:13:05.800 red flags were when you knew it was a scam, 0:13:05.880 --> 0:13:08.240 you found out it was a scam in the same 0:13:08.280 --> 0:13:12.160 way that we can easily spot, you know, the obvious 0:13:12.200 --> 0:13:15.160 ones in advance, things like the Nigerian prints email scam 0:13:15.160 --> 0:13:17.640 that we know about. We can spot those red flags 0:13:17.679 --> 0:13:20.880 because we've seen them before. But we tend to assume 0:13:20.880 --> 0:13:23.560 that all scams prey on the people who are gullible. 0:13:23.840 --> 0:13:26.560 And one of the key insights we've across all of 0:13:26.559 --> 0:13:29.320 the sorts of scams that we've encountered is that scams 0:13:29.320 --> 0:13:32.800 can affect anybody. Cons can affect anybody if they're targeted 0:13:33.080 --> 0:13:37.240 in the right way to our wants and desires and needs. Yeah, 0:13:37.240 --> 0:13:39.880 you know, I thought about this a lot with Sarahnos 0:13:40.160 --> 0:13:45.320 here in Silicon Valley retrospectively, everyone acted like I would 0:13:45.320 --> 0:13:47.960 have never fallen for that. But it's obvious that a 0:13:48.000 --> 0:13:51.560 lot of good and smart people got sucked up into that, 0:13:52.120 --> 0:13:55.160 And so how do you how do you interpret that? Well? 0:13:55.200 --> 0:13:58.119 I think it's the way we see something like Sarahnose 0:13:58.600 --> 0:14:01.120 is in hindsight, after the fact, in the same way 0:14:01.160 --> 0:14:03.040 that we might watch a heist movie or a who 0:14:03.120 --> 0:14:05.839 Done It movie, where we know there's a heist, right, 0:14:05.880 --> 0:14:08.520 we know there's a con artist, we know that. In 0:14:09.760 --> 0:14:11.520 the context of the movie, we know to look for 0:14:11.559 --> 0:14:14.120 those red flags. We're trying to figure it out, and 0:14:14.280 --> 0:14:17.000 the characters in the movie aren't. But when it's viewed 0:14:17.000 --> 0:14:20.360 from the outside, it's kind of obvious, right, So Pharaohnose 0:14:20.480 --> 0:14:22.760 after the fact, Yeah, there are lots of red flags 0:14:22.760 --> 0:14:24.880 along the way, and they've been reported thoroughly, and it's 0:14:25.000 --> 0:14:28.040 great narrative. But when you're immersed in it and you're 0:14:28.040 --> 0:14:30.360 trying to figure out what's the next best investment or 0:14:30.400 --> 0:14:31.920 what do I want to get in on really quick? 0:14:31.920 --> 0:14:34.520 If you're a venture capitalist trying to kind of get 0:14:34.600 --> 0:14:37.320 in on the next big thing, spotting all those red 0:14:37.320 --> 0:14:40.960 flags is more difficult because you're incentivized to act with 0:14:41.040 --> 0:14:43.560 efficiency and to try and catch things before they take 0:14:43.600 --> 0:14:46.480 off and before people know about them. So those are 0:14:46.520 --> 0:14:49.440 the contexts in which they're the marks, rather than watching 0:14:49.520 --> 0:14:51.520 some interesting, engaging movie. 0:14:51.560 --> 0:14:54.320 In the case of Pharaohose. Also, you know, there were 0:14:54.360 --> 0:14:57.200 people who didn't invest and who didn't join the board 0:14:57.200 --> 0:14:59.040 of directors and so on. They don't get as much 0:14:59.080 --> 0:15:02.800 publicity as the unfortunate ones who did and look like 0:15:02.880 --> 0:15:05.800 marks and suckers and so on in retrospect. But some 0:15:05.840 --> 0:15:09.760 professional investors who specialized in biotech and healthcare investing, they 0:15:09.760 --> 0:15:13.200 asked a lot more questions about the product, about the technology, 0:15:13.240 --> 0:15:15.640 about clinical data, about all of that stuff, and then 0:15:16.080 --> 0:15:20.480 they walked away. And I think one other important point 0:15:20.520 --> 0:15:22.480 about their nose is I think, although I don't know, 0:15:22.480 --> 0:15:24.240 because I'm not inside the heads of all those people, 0:15:24.280 --> 0:15:27.239 but I think a lot of people didn't even consciously 0:15:27.400 --> 0:15:29.640 consider the idea that there might have been a scam 0:15:29.720 --> 0:15:33.680 or a fraud going on. Everything seemed good, everybody was optimistic, 0:15:33.760 --> 0:15:36.480 there was a great vision. Little things that seem kind 0:15:36.480 --> 0:15:38.280 of odd. Maybe you can explain away, this is just 0:15:38.320 --> 0:15:42.080 a quirky company. The CEO is a little odd. You know, Well, 0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:43.840 they've got all these famous people on the board. That 0:15:43.920 --> 0:15:47.240 must be a good thing. Simply considering the possibility in 0:15:47.280 --> 0:15:49.760 a big decision making situation that you maybe are being 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:52.600 scammed or there's something going on that you're not aware of, 0:15:53.080 --> 0:15:55.280 you know, could be the first step towards like starting 0:15:55.280 --> 0:15:57.960 to see those red flags or look for those red flags, 0:15:57.960 --> 0:16:00.280 and maybe you can actually find some of them if 0:16:00.320 --> 0:16:02.480 you were even thinking about the possibility that they might 0:16:02.520 --> 0:16:06.440 be out there somewhere. We require a lot of trust 0:16:06.840 --> 0:16:09.440 just to get by in life. And so how do 0:16:09.560 --> 0:16:13.120 you guys think about striking a balance of trust and 0:16:13.160 --> 0:16:14.200 a little bit of suspicion. 0:16:15.240 --> 0:16:17.760 Well, trust is essential, right. In fact, we tend to 0:16:17.840 --> 0:16:21.560 assume that when we hear something from somebody it's true 0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:23.960 and until we take time to think about it otherwise. 0:16:24.000 --> 0:16:26.320 And most of the time that's a great thing because 0:16:26.320 --> 0:16:29.120 in most conversations, nobody's trying to lie to you. In 0:16:29.280 --> 0:16:31.840 most interactions, nobody's trying to con you. I mean, the 0:16:31.880 --> 0:16:34.400 odds of any of us being a victim of a 0:16:34.440 --> 0:16:37.200 bernie made off or a their noose is pretty low. 0:16:37.680 --> 0:16:40.520 The odds of any of us receiving fake information on 0:16:40.560 --> 0:16:43.240 social media is pretty high. But we tend to be 0:16:43.280 --> 0:16:46.440 trusting of the information we get, and it's a good 0:16:46.480 --> 0:16:47.000 thing that we are. 0:16:47.120 --> 0:16:47.240 Right. 0:16:47.240 --> 0:16:50.080 If we were constantly skeptical of everything we encountered, we 0:16:50.080 --> 0:16:52.840 could just never do anything. We could never have a conversation. 0:16:53.240 --> 0:16:56.440 You can't check everything. You can't be a perpetual skeptic 0:16:56.520 --> 0:16:59.880 or cynic about everything. You're not going to go check 0:17:00.720 --> 0:17:04.520 in the grocery store if you buy an organic apple, right, 0:17:04.560 --> 0:17:05.840 You're not going to go out to the farm and 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:09.080 make sure they didn't use any pesticides. Right, It's too much. 0:17:09.760 --> 0:17:12.120 We can't really check that. We have to accept that 0:17:12.320 --> 0:17:13.960 some of the time we're going to have to be trusting. 0:17:14.560 --> 0:17:16.240 And the key is to kind of figure out when 0:17:16.280 --> 0:17:18.840 are those times when we're at the greatest risk, When 0:17:18.880 --> 0:17:22.880 are those times when the consequences could be bad enough 0:17:22.920 --> 0:17:24.520 that we really would want to check and see if 0:17:24.520 --> 0:17:25.160 we're being scammed. 0:17:25.840 --> 0:17:28.280 So before we go on to some other topics, just 0:17:28.560 --> 0:17:31.719 can you give a few examples of hoaxes or swindles 0:17:31.800 --> 0:17:35.720 or scams so that our listeners can understand what we're 0:17:35.720 --> 0:17:36.240 talking about. 0:17:37.480 --> 0:17:39.439 I have a good one that I think a lot 0:17:39.440 --> 0:17:41.679 of people probably haven't heard of, but they really should have, 0:17:42.200 --> 0:17:45.800 which is called sometimes the president scam or the CEO scam, 0:17:46.000 --> 0:17:48.840 and I didn't discover it. It's been it was going 0:17:48.880 --> 0:17:50.960 on for a while and it was documented elsewhere. But 0:17:51.280 --> 0:17:53.560 I think it's a great example of some of some 0:17:53.640 --> 0:17:59.000 of the key ideas. So this French Israeli fraudster named 0:17:59.080 --> 0:18:03.920 Jilbert Shickley developed a scam in which he would call 0:18:04.040 --> 0:18:08.040 up sort of mid level employees of French companies, pretending 0:18:08.080 --> 0:18:11.760 to be the CEO of the company, reaching down through 0:18:11.800 --> 0:18:13.880 the ranks and calling up some middle manager and giving 0:18:13.920 --> 0:18:17.720 them a task to do directly for him. And the 0:18:17.800 --> 0:18:21.359 task always wound up in money being transferred directly to 0:18:21.440 --> 0:18:26.160 some bank account or person or something like that, where 0:18:26.240 --> 0:18:28.280 of course it wound up with Shickley and whoever his 0:18:28.359 --> 0:18:32.240 associates were in their bank account somehow. And I think 0:18:32.240 --> 0:18:35.880 it's kind of an audacious con because it's one guy 0:18:35.960 --> 0:18:38.360 with a telephone calling people up who he's never met 0:18:38.400 --> 0:18:43.359 before and talking them into essentially giving him a lot 0:18:43.400 --> 0:18:47.160 of money. But it does illustrate sort of the idea 0:18:47.160 --> 0:18:49.280 of truth bias that Dan was just talking about, that 0:18:49.720 --> 0:18:51.879 if you don't believe that the person on the phone 0:18:51.920 --> 0:18:54.760 is the CEO calling you, the whole thing goes nowhere. 0:18:55.200 --> 0:18:57.280 But once you believe that, then the scam has a 0:18:57.359 --> 0:18:59.720 chance to get through. And it also illustrates sort of 0:18:59.720 --> 0:19:02.640 some of selection, sort of someone selection bias we see 0:19:02.640 --> 0:19:04.720 in cons Like we hear about the ones that worked, 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:06.399 but we don't know about all the people who just 0:19:06.400 --> 0:19:08.560 like hung up the phone or deleted the email when 0:19:08.600 --> 0:19:10.480 he tried to talk to you know, to start talking 0:19:10.520 --> 0:19:12.680 to them into it. Just like the millions and millions 0:19:12.720 --> 0:19:15.320 of people who delete the Nigerian prints emails never get 0:19:15.320 --> 0:19:17.280 it mentioned anywhere. You know, it's just a few people 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:20.680 who actually wind up going through with it. That CEO 0:19:20.800 --> 0:19:24.120 scam or President scam went along for quite a long 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:26.560 time and sort of morphed and changed into different versions 0:19:26.600 --> 0:19:29.240 where eventually people were pretending to be the Defense Minister 0:19:29.320 --> 0:19:34.520 of France calling, you know, contacting wealthy individuals, especially with 0:19:34.600 --> 0:19:37.560 French ties, and saying that the government of France needed 0:19:37.560 --> 0:19:41.919 their help getting hostages, secret hostages out of Syria and 0:19:41.960 --> 0:19:44.720 Pharmisis and so on, and wound up taking i think 0:19:44.760 --> 0:19:47.359 something like eighty million dollars or eighty million euros in 0:19:47.400 --> 0:19:50.520 total from a number of you know, French companies and 0:19:50.560 --> 0:19:53.240 wealthy wealthy individuals by sort of similar tactics. 0:19:53.760 --> 0:19:55.719 There's a new modern version of this which is much 0:19:55.800 --> 0:19:58.080 dumber and much simpler. It doesn't require any sort of 0:19:58.080 --> 0:20:02.439 sophisticated persuasion. People just send an email purportedly from the 0:20:02.440 --> 0:20:04.520 boss of a company and saying, Hey, I'm in a 0:20:04.560 --> 0:20:06.480 meeting right now, but I need to transfer these funds 0:20:06.520 --> 0:20:08.720 right away or I need to close this sale. Can 0:20:08.760 --> 0:20:10.960 you just go ahead and make this transfer for me? 0:20:11.680 --> 0:20:14.919 And if the email happens to reach somebody who is 0:20:15.000 --> 0:20:18.159 responsible for doing that, then they might go ahead and 0:20:18.200 --> 0:20:20.560 do it without even double checking, when in reality the 0:20:20.560 --> 0:20:23.320 money would just get paid to some other count of 0:20:23.320 --> 0:20:27.119 the scammers. And this is so pervasive that I have 0:20:27.160 --> 0:20:29.560 a cousin who teaches tennis. She runs a tennis club 0:20:29.600 --> 0:20:34.440 and regularly gets her underlings. The other people teaching there 0:20:34.600 --> 0:20:37.879 regularly get emails from her, not really from her, but 0:20:37.920 --> 0:20:40.119 from her saying hey, I'm in a meeting, can you 0:20:40.200 --> 0:20:44.280 run this? Can you make this payment? And her employees 0:20:44.520 --> 0:20:47.239 and coworkers know that that's not true. She's pretty much 0:20:47.240 --> 0:20:49.720 never in meetings, and they're not the sorts of people 0:20:49.720 --> 0:20:52.520 who make purchases. But again, if you send it out 0:20:52.520 --> 0:20:55.119 to enough people, you're going to happen to hit. Some 0:20:55.200 --> 0:20:57.359 who in that moment are busy doing things are used 0:20:57.359 --> 0:20:59.119 to getting emails from their boss asking them to do 0:20:59.160 --> 0:21:01.800 something really quickly, and we'll go along with it without 0:21:01.880 --> 0:21:05.240 questioning it. And this is a major source of business. 0:21:05.320 --> 0:21:05.560 Run. 0:21:06.200 --> 0:21:09.000 Do you guys have any other examples, just something that 0:21:09.240 --> 0:21:12.480 some hoax or swinger or something that you came across 0:21:12.920 --> 0:21:15.160 that you think is really illustrative. 0:21:15.600 --> 0:21:19.000 I can give another example from the world of chess. 0:21:19.160 --> 0:21:21.240 So I'm a chess player. Well, Dan is also a 0:21:21.320 --> 0:21:21.840 chess player. 0:21:22.119 --> 0:21:24.560 I'm probably a more serious player than Dan is, and 0:21:25.320 --> 0:21:29.159 I'm a funnier player. Dan's a funny player. I'm a 0:21:29.160 --> 0:21:33.399 serious player. I'll try to be funnier though. When you 0:21:33.440 --> 0:21:36.560 play chess online, you don't see the person you're playing. 0:21:36.880 --> 0:21:39.879 It's just a screen name and all you see is 0:21:39.920 --> 0:21:42.479 the moves they play on an animated chess board, kind 0:21:42.520 --> 0:21:43.920 of like you're playing a video game, right, You just 0:21:43.960 --> 0:21:47.080 see the moose being made. And So I was playing 0:21:47.080 --> 0:21:49.120