 It's Sunday, April 18th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grofie. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, the supernatural, and pseudoscience. I'm happy that my guest this week is Victor Stenger. He's Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He's also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He's held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and at Oxford in the United Kingdom. He's been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and also the University of Florence. His research career has spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model in physics. He participated in the experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos, and he also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring he collaborated on the experiment in Japan which showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. So the point is he's a physicist, but not just a physicist, also an author about the intersection of physics and science with belief in society. He's the author of Comprehensible Cosmos, The Unconscious Quantum, Not by Design, as Science Found God, The New York Times Best Seller, God the Failed Hypothesis, and The New Atheists Standing Up for Science and Reason. He joins me on For Good Reason to talk about his book, Quantum Gods, Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness. Welcome to For Good Reason, Vic Stanger. Well thanks, DJ. So it's a pleasure to be on. I've enjoyed the few programs you've had already. Yeah, well with this show, and of course you were on Point of Inquiry just a number of times. Love having you on. Good conversations we have. Had you on today to talk about Quantum Gods, Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, one of your many books. But before we get into that, really all of your books are on the general topic of kind of keeping religion and pop spirituality out of science. Yes, and also pseudoscience, alternative medicine comes in at times, at least the parts of it that relate to physics. I mean, you know, basically I'm trained as a physicist, I work 40 years in research and elementary particle physics, and that's the approach I take to everything I write about. So it's the scientific approach, the science and reason versus anti-science nonsense. What I find challenging about, well what organizes all of your writing, is that you make religion and this pop spirituality stuff, you kind of make it a scientific claim and therefore within the bounds of science to talk about. So you say that God claim is a scientific claim because if God actually existed, it would have all these implications for science, for doing science. So some people, Vic, think that religion is supposed to stay out of science and vice versa. You know, religion is supposed to stay out of science as turf, but science is supposed to stay out of religion's turf as well. You don't see it that way. Well, it would be lovely if religion did stay out of not only science but politics and everything else. It was just conducted in churches and at homes, private homes, there could possibly be no objection to that. But the problem all along is that it doesn't stay there, that especially Christianity has this compulsion to go out and try to convince everybody that they have the truth and that includes even scientists. So what I'm getting at though is you reject the notion that religion has a turf over here. And never the twain shall meet. Instead, you say religion is actually making scientific claims that are well within the bounds of science to explore. Yes, that's right. I mean, Stephen Jay Gould introduced that notion of not overlapping magisteria. And believe me, a lot of scientists are very happy with that. Believers and non-believers, they like the idea that the two should stay clear of one another. The fact is that they don't. And friend of mine, I think that it's not only a matter of religion making statements that science has a lot to say about, I mean, creation of humanity and so on. But it works the other way around as well. I mean, religion can't claim, as it often does, the right to tell us how to behave. That's also a place for science to be found in the study of morality, because morality involves the observation of human behavior. And anything that has to do with observations, science has something to say about. So let's get into quantum gods rather than taking on traditional religion in this book, you know, the God of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and quantum gods. Instead, you attack the beliefs of the new ageers who try to use physics, actually try to use science to support their spirituality. Yes, that's right. There's actually two parts of the book when it comes down to it. There is the there is the new spirituality that's associated with new age, not so new anymore. It's been around since Richard Capra wrote the right. The Tao of physics, the kind of the first attempt to use quantum physics or physics to shore up this faith in the new age, right? No, I may not have the history exactly right, but I think he actually triggered the new age with with that book, because everything that seemed to come out after that referred to the whole idea that modern physics is affirming these beliefs that were usually previously associated with Eastern mysticism. The idea that there's just one hole that we're all an integrated part of that hole, that we can't reduce things to their parts, and that he had made that argument based on quantum mechanics. Right. It's the mysticism of the guy who orders a hot dog from a street vendor. You know, make me one with everything. It's the mysticism that is, in fact, set opposed to traditional religion. So that's what you're taking on in this book. That was my previous question. It's not the God most people believe in. It's this, you know, new age or quantum spiritualism God, right? Yes, it came. It came up the Deepak Chopra, of course, has been promoting this for 30 years now and then he's made a nice tidy living out of that, going back into the 80s with books, titles like Quantum Healing and the Quantum Alternative to Growing Old, and I notice he seems to be aging along with the rest of us. Yeah, but all of them love this word quantum, quantum everything. It's it's almost a word that's no longer useful for scientists, because even anytime a physicist talks anything quantum, audience members think, ooh, you know, he's talking about something mystical. Well, what Chopra jumped on, Capra really didn't make a big point of this. But what Chopra jumped on that became the real story of much of new age spirituality was the idea that quantum mechanics says that we make our own reality. This is what you get in the secret or what the bleep. Do we know you can't get some of that was what happened? Why kind of a lot of attention was in the last couple of years with those two books and well, I guess they were they were documentary films. The secret also became a very big summer and they were all based on that idea. And it's really coming from a kind of a misunderstanding of physics. So in physics, there's this notion of wave particle duality. And that notion in quantum spirituality, call it, becomes somehow proof that we make our own reality, that the way we look at things determines what we're looking at, right? Yes. That was a gross misunderstanding of quantum mechanics that goes back to some of the things that Neil's board talked about in the thirties. And unfortunately, I think he and some of the other physicists who were philosophizing about it were kind of careless with their language, which is a bad thing to me when you're philosophizing. The last thing you want to do is that's my first way. I kind of admire them because they are so such clear as on them on making sure they define every word that they use. Well, physicists are not used to doing that. And so it got kind of out of hand. So if they're taking physics and turning it into a spirituality, well, that's one of the things you take on in the book. But you also take on something you call quantum theology. So not just quantum spirituality, but quantum theology. What's the difference to you? Yes, although I would I hope we get back to giving me a chance to show why the quantum spirituality make your own reality is. It's actually a really vile of reprehensible way of seeing the world. It's basically the belief that if you have cancer or you're homeless or whatever horrible thing happens to you that's beyond your control, it's actually your fault because you brought it into your life through your wrong thinking. Right. That's what the secret was trying to do is saying, saying that you can claim it works every time. All you have to do is you can be anything you want to be. You can be rich. You can be beautiful. You can be healthy if you just think about it. And if you're not, well, you're not thinking the right thoughts. So people think the new age is kind of more affirmative than, say, fundamentalist Christianity, as an example. But in fact, I think in this way, it's even more destructive than some of the most fundamentalist monotheisms. Yes. And I should add before I forget that, you know, there has been this. And we'll get to the theology in a moment. But that is the other thing that's worth mentioning is that if you look at recent surveys, there has been a strong tendency among all groups to move away from traditional churches. But it's biggest among young people. And when you look at what these people are doing, they're not all becoming atheists, maybe half of them. If you take younger people, I think it's 26 percent of them have have do not belong to any any organized religion. But then maybe half of them will tell you they're atheists and agnostics. And the other half will say, well, I still think there has to be something out there and say they call it spirituality. They use the term spirituality. And they say, I'm still a spiritual person. I still believe there's there's something, even if it's not the traditional God. So that's becoming, again, more and more interesting for that reason that people are thinking along those terms more than they did, say, five years ago when when the New Age seemed to be dying out. And you don't think the New Age is dying out anymore. In fact, it it's growing even within the churches. So a lot of traditional religious traditions have call it New Age elements. You know, people who believe, you know, they're a little eclectic. It's the smorgasbord approach to religion. They take a little of this and a little of that. And so you might even be a church going, you know, every Sunday to your your your favorite holiness church or something and still somehow believe in the power of thought to manifest, you know, a reality in your life or something. You know, in fact, one of the things that that motivated me to write this book was, you know, I'd written the previous book I'd written was was God, the failed hypothesis, which attempted to argue that that we can now make a good scientific case against the existence of God. But it was this God that I'd interpreted as the Judeo-Christian Islamic God, the God who's all powerful, God who participates in everything. And there's such a pretty such an important role in the universe. Right. Not any conceivable God, just the God that most people believe in. And then I then I started reading surveys that said that there was a Baylor survey in particular and Baylor is a Baptist university. But it made a survey where they actually asked what people believe. And that turned out that 40 percent of the people who say they're Christians don't really believe in a God that plays an active role in the universe. Isn't that interesting? And they really sound much more like deists. Now, most of them would never even know what the word deist meant. So if you ask them, are you a deist? Of course, I'm a Christian, but that doesn't seem to be a common belief anymore, at least among Americans, they're falling more and more away from at least a significant element, of course, not everybody is falling away from that, that ancient concept. And so you have, and I think you're right, this brings us also to the theology end of things that Christian theology is also moving that way away from again, they won't admit it. They still are trying to find a way to make God consistent with science. And that's not to be criticized. That's that's a reasonable thing for them to be doing. And they are not just limiting themselves to traditional Christianity anymore, but are also turning toward quantum mechanics as a possible way to explain how God can act in the universe and not break any any physical laws, not be detected, in other words, by the breaking of a physical law. In other words, it's not miraculous. It's consistent with what the best physicists are thinking about the universe. It's mysterious at the quantum level, and there's the spiritual dimension. So hence you get Bible-believing Christians also reading Deepak Chopra. Yeah, that's I think and Deepak Chopra tries very hard to reach out to two Christians in his writings. It is even though he's the column now and how they compose. But he's coming from Hinduism and also quantum spirituality and all that stuff. Talk about Smorgasbord. He's he's the original picker and chooser when it comes to belief. Yeah, but you could be sure that a lot of Christians do read his stuff. They would have to. I remember when I was in New York in 2007 at their big annual book show there. And I was down in the basement where they were having some TV interviews. I was being interviewed and and there's this big long line of people reading to sign books. I was wondering who they were waiting for and they were waiting for Deepak Chopra. So he's he's on to something. But it's the trouble is what he's on to his complete nonsense. I'd like to let our listeners know that you can get a copy of quantum gods, creation, chaos and the search for cosmic consciousness through our website for good reason dot org. Vic, tell me the connection of Ramtha to all of this Jay Z. Knight, you know, the like the cult leader Jay Z. Knight, we all love to learn about. Didn't didn't she close shopped decades ago when she was pilloried for all her goofy channeling, you know, stomping at the on the ground. And as these psychics and so on have been debunked so many times that doesn't stop them. Well, she had a lot to do with the publication of of the other book. The what the bleep do we know, I guess. Right. Some people from our organization actually produce them their movies. But that's that's all I really know about her role. But she's she's one of the players in this. You said Deepak Chopra and also Fritjaf Capra, the Tao of physics. On one level, all the stuff basically says something kind of sensible that physics shows us that literally everything is interconnected. I mentioned the hot dog vendor spirituality, you know, make me one with everything. But isn't it actually true that everything is connected? So they do have a point there, right? Yes, but here's the difference. Let me give some examples of how this works. Say you say when when your car, the oil pump in your car breaks down. So what do you do? You replace the oil pump. You don't also change the tires and new brakes and so on. And that's that's what's called the reductionist view of things where you everything is broken down into parts and you can handle parts individually in medical science the same way. You know, they they like to pay a lot of the service to treating the whole patient and so on, but they don't. I mean, the doctor goes in there and you have your kidney probably me fixes your kidneys and so on. And then what happened interestingly enough with with Capra Capra had been involved in experiments that will in a series actually theoretical work in Berkeley that was seemed to confirm the ideas that he was writing about in the book. But the very year that he published the book 1975 was the year that those those ideas were rebutted. What were the ideas exactly? I mean, so his claim was that on the working at Berkeley at the physics problem, it was a very prominent professor named Jeffrey Chiu who had this idea that you couldn't break matter down into elementary particles, but that you had to treat all the particles the same way. He called it nuclear democracy. And I remember that very well, because that was about the time I was I just started working on doing my research. And I was working in that area myself. I was very familiar with it. And then what happened at the very year that Capra wrote this book, which he made a big point of this research it was also called S matrix theory. I think in the book you'll see it referred to that way. The new standard model of particles came along, which showed once again that everything breaks down very nicely into individual parts. That was when the quarks were discovered and and and was realized that that nuclei and neutrons and protons were not elementary, but they were made up of more fundamental objects. And now we've had for 30 years now we've had this this totally reductionist theory of matter called the standard model that has been consistent with every observation that anybody is made in any field of science. There's nothing that anybody has done that shows any inconsistency with a totally reductionist view of reality. But Vic, these quantum spiritualists, these quantum theologians use that evidence, even of the last 30 years to say, aha, it proves my point that at the most basic levels of physics, everything is connected. And, you know, so you hear things about like quantum indeterminacy or something somehow allowing for communication between locations that are light years apart or something because the electrons, you know, the electron can move here, but also cause and effect light years away or something. Do you follow what I'm saying? Let me go back to the something you mentioned earlier because it is the key behind all of this. And that is what was called the wave particle duality. Yeah. And that was that again, early in the 20th century, it was discovered that light was made up of particles called photons, we call the photons. And it was also discovered that it was so light would previously thought to be a wave phenomenon also turned out to be a particle phenomenon. And then it turned out that particles, things that we were accustomed to thinking of particles, electrons, for example, behave like waves. And so it had seemed like it behaved one way or the other, depending on what you decide to measure. If you decided to measure a particle property like position, then it was interpreted as a particle. And if you decided to measure a wave type property, such as a wavelength frequency, then you said the thing was a wave. And that was where that duality came in and that seemed like consciousness. We were consciously deciding whether something was a particle, whether it was a wave. In fact, the famous physicist John Wheeler pointed out that you could do an experiment on a photon from some distant galaxy, 13 billion light years away, that left there 13 billion years ago. And you can decide in the laboratory today whether you're gonna measure one thing or another. So this idea that your consciousness is affecting reality, not only refers to now, currently in the laboratory, but 13 billion years in the past, 13 billion light years away all over the universe. So here it is, your consciousness is supposed to affect everything throughout the universe. And that's exactly what these people are teaching. If you read what Chopra and other people that write with him are saying, that's what they're saying, that we're tuned into this cosmic consciousness that is all over the universe and we're part of that. And the whole point is that this wave particle duality thing was a total misunderstanding. Well, Vic, you don't deny wave particle dualism. No, but it's just two ways of describing the same reality. And I like, I use the example of, the engineer is very familiar with, and that is, if you have some electronic signal, electromagnetic signal, which, you know, for radio, TV, cell phone, it has a variation with time. And that's where the information comes from, from way it varies with time. It can be a series of pulses and so on. But what they can do is they, is as a mathematical procedure called the Fourier transform, in which you change that time series to a frequency spectrum. And that often turns out to be a more useful representation of the signal because it can tell you what bandwidth you need and your detectors and so on. Anyway, anybody who's had any familiarity with electromagnetic signals will see that. And all you're doing is you're changing your description of it. In one case, it's a particle-like description, your time series of pulses, let's say. In the other case, it's a wave-like description when you're looking at a frequency spectrum. But the description doesn't change the thing being described. Exactly. It's just more called a complementarity. It's two complementary ways you can describe phenomena, either as a particle or as a wave. That doesn't mean it's a particle in one case and a wave in the other case. In fact, there are experiments now that you can do, well, like the double-slit experiment that is supposed to be something that you use to measure wave property, but you can, if you do it with accurate enough equipment, you can measure individual photons, particles, so you can have particles and waves in the same experiment. They're the same phenomenon. It's a single phenomenon that's just described mathematically one way or the other, measured one way or the other. You measure one thing where you emphasize one thing or you measure, you want the position of the thing so you're measuring a particle property. But if instead you want the frequency of the thing, then you measure wave property in there, it's just two different aspects of the same phenomenon. So these quantum spiritualists, they get half of it right, right? So they actually are talking about, you look at it this way, at the quantum level, you get waves, sometimes you get particles, depending on what you measure, all of that's accurate. Yeah, and you're consciously making, the scientist or the engineer who is doing this is making a conscious decision to describe it one way or the other. Suppose you're taking a photograph of a chair, you can take it from one angle and you can move and take it from a second angle. But it's still the same chair. Okay, so my question here is, they get it half right. Do you think that they just misunderstand the implications of this, or are they just hucksters making a buck on the confusion among the masses when it comes to quantum physics? Like they're hyping it up to make it seem like spirituality? In other words, I wouldn't need a hazard to guess at the motivations of those thoughts. Well, you know how this thing, business works. It's the same thing with all aspects of religion. There is a huge propaganda machine out there that keeps saying one thing and after all that, after you hear it enough, it becomes a truth. And that's the way it is. These people have heard this. People who believe this have heard so much of it that they think it must be true. And the real experts in the field, I mean, you take someone like the Noel Prize winner, Leon Letterman, when he heard about all this, he called it Mooshu physics. And most of us, you know, just laugh at this. The trouble is in this, I really criticize them for this is that's all they do. Rather than taking it on, you're among the few who as a physicist takes on this quantum spirituality stuff. You even zero in on the Dalai Lama, for instance. Most skeptics hold up the Dalai Lama in contrast to traditional religionists as some maybe exemplar of science and religion and all that. You know, there's the quote with Carl Sagan where he asks the Dalai Lama, what would you do if science proved your religion wrong and the Dalai Lama reportedly says, well, we'd have to change the religion. In fact, you show him in your book to be a big proponent of this woo-woo quantum spirituality stuff. Yeah, now he's again, I think he's not a scientist. He's not trained as a scientist. He admits he doesn't know the mathematics. And that's part of the problem, really. You know, this is a problem, as I said, if you know the mathematics, it's Fourier transform, which you get as a junior in college if you're an engineering or physics major. That's how basic it is. But if you don't ever have that, that's not so easy to see these things. You can be told it, like I was trying to explain it, but you might not, unless you see it written down, the equations written down, you may just not be convinced. And I think he's, again, one of these people because of his science of literacy, even though he has great respect for some lands, and I appreciate his stance on that. You remember, he's still not a materialist. He's not gonna agree with me when I say everything in the world is mad or nothing more. He still believes there's something out there called spirit. And leaving aside his positions on a bunch of social questions, for instance, he's anti-gay rights and that sort of stuff, or at least he thinks being homosexual is wrong. Let's leave it at that. Here you are taking on these quantum spiritualists, previous books you take on the God belief when it comes to Western monotheism. I wanna finish up by asking, where's it all going? You've written these books, you're criticizing it. Someone might say, well, here's Vic Stanger. He's just against religion, fine. But where's it going? You think you're having a dent? Are you reducing, diminishing the belief in all this stuff, you think? Well, I hope so. I mean, not just me, surely. I mean, there's been the other writers out there who probably had a lot more influence on what I think is a definite movement away from religion. Yeah, I'll just look at what's going on in Europe. You see that you can hold out hope for this country, that this country eventually will not be so dominated by irrational beliefs. And so we're working for that day. Thank you for joining me, Vic Stanger, on four good reasons. I appreciate the discussion. Well, it was a great discussion to have been on. And now in this week's installment of the Honest Liar, we revisit last week's event in Times Square and discover the inner workings of an ancient street scam. Here's Jamie Ian Swiss. Here's a game if you wanna make money five or get your 10, 10 or get your 20. Three-card Monty is a game that's been seen in the United States since at least the 1830s, and it remains alive and well throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle East and beyond, even though nobody's won yet. That's because Monty is not a game of chance, but rather a game of no chance. Monty is a con game. But if I know it's a scam, and you probably know it's a scam, what explains its continuing survival? Some might say greed, others claim stupidity, or some toxic combination of the two. But is this sufficient to explain the game's stubborn longevity? Are so many people really just plain gullible? It is almost common knowledge that a sleight of hand maneuver is part of the scam of three-card Monty, a technique that countless experts myself included have demonstrated and explained publicly and on television. Indeed, print explanations also intended to help protect the unwitting public from sharpers appear since the mid-19th century in this country and abroad. But it is a grave of common mistake to assume, as many do, including many magicians in fact, that this single sleight of hand technique explains the long-standing effectiveness of the Monty operator's scam. Rather, three-card Monty, like most con games, is an elaborate theatrical construction, involving multiple actors and above all, elaborate psychological dynamics that have been honed by experts over almost two centuries of refined practice. The Monty operator is not an expert in sleight of hand. He may be good at what he does, but he has an affraction of the range of skills possessed by your amateur sleight of hand hobbyist friend who tries a new trick out on you at lunch now and again. But like the magician, the Monty operator is an expert in deception and psychological manipulation. His game is a game of wits. It's not a gamble on three cards, but rather it's his bet that he can gain the victim's confidence, the origin of the word con in con game, and lead him to put his money down on what seems like a sure thing. So what did happen to Matt in last week's episode of The Honest Liar? If you haven't heard that yet, please go back and give it a listen now. If you have, well, given our bird's eye view of the action along with my listener's knowing perspective, you've probably guessed a lot of it already. But it's hard to imagine without seeing it, the breathtaking speed and ruthless efficiency of the psychological warfare waged by the Monty mob. While the free bet bet and switch may sound improbable, it's all too frequently effective on the street. Every player who wins money is a shill or confederate playing with the operator's cash. And any layman who tells you they ever won at Monty is, well, a liar. And although I have won on the street, I strongly recommend against attempting it. It's dangerous. The confederates help conceal their relationship to the operator with their contrasting costume and racial makeups, suggesting different social strata that serve to further defeat any notion of collusion. Some shills also lose strategically to help build Matt's confidence that his own guesswork is superior to that of his fellows and even to that of the operator himself. On CBS 48 hours some years ago, the veteran CBS news reporter, Richard Schlesinger, said to me that I knew the guy was a crook. I just thought I was better than he was. And that is the true false confidence of the con. As Matt begins to play, the operator knows he has only a few moments to relieve his new mark of his cash. Part of the purpose of the free bet dodge is to enable the operator to peek the poke, meaning to try to get a look at how much money the victim has on him, because the goal is to take as much of it as possible as quickly as possible and adjust the betting amounts accordingly. At best the operator will get three or four bets out of his victim, although in most cases not more than two. And he needs to keep the momentum going. He also needs to separate Matt from cooler conservative heads like that of his girlfriend, Rachel. So after the first bet, the shills begin to press in behind Matt to psychologically close off his escape. By the second bet, the operator in the midst of his fast-talking spiel might actually say, block your man. While Matt doesn't even distinguish the words, telling the shills and perhaps the wall man or a lookout, who's also the muscle, to get in front of Rachel and keep her out of range for a few moments. Then the elaborate theater of the bent corner dodge is put into play and the operator uses a skillful sleight of hand maneuver called the hype, practice for many hours in a cell on Rikers Island to secretly move the bend from the winning ace to one of the losing black tens. It's a magic trick of sorts, but it's a trick that does not work without a cast of well-rehearsed characters and a rapacious set of psychological tools that have been honed over centuries of practice. Even at this level of detail, this inside tour of the Monty is far from complete, but it is thorough enough to make a point. The Monty operator works hard to take your money. He works with specialized skills that he has mastered over countless repetitions, honed and passed along from generations before him. His sleight of hand skills are in fact the very least of his arsenal. His real weapons are those of psychological manipulation and outright deception. He is a specialist and deception is his specialty. As it happens, I too am a specialist in deception. My skills of deception, psychological, physical, mechanical, are most visibly applied to the creation of entertaining and artistic illusions for the pleasure of my audience and like any artist in service to the communication of my personality, point of view and ideas about the world. But in my case, I am also deeply interested in many kinds of deception that are far less benign from con games to cheating at gambling to fraudulent psychic claims and more. My expertise is narrow but deep. I know how to fool people and I know how to recognize how and when people are being fooled. One of the lessons of Monty is also a lesson of magic and indeed of all art, that the method is not the trick. Indeed the method is never the trick. The one or two simple sleight of hand maneuvers that the Monty operator relies upon are minor tools in his elaborately skillful and brutal game of wits. Rather the con, and in this way only, the con is like a magic trick, the con relies upon all the other layers of the production, the theater, the psychological insight of manipulation, the narrative in the form of a story being created solely to appeal to the mark, to lull him into safety and lure him to his destruction before he can stop himself. These are the real secrets of the con. The method is not the trick. Be it for the magician, for the filmmaker, for the painter, for the software interface designer or for the con man, the method is never the trick. If my expertise has taught me anything, it is this, that anyone can be fooled, even an expert in deception. All too often we blame the victims of a street side short con or a grand Ponzi scheme. But in the relationship of predator to prey, do we give the tiger credit or do we simply fault the antelope? If the default position is to blame the victim, we give no credit to the victimizer. We fail to credit the con man. But what then do we credit the con man with? With our hard won knowledge that the method is never the trick. Credit the con man with knowing the difference. This is Jamie Ian Swiss and I am the honest liar. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. For updates throughout the week, find my page on Facebook or follow me on Twitter to get involved with an online conversation about today's show. Join the discussion at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the views of the JREF. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. Our music is composed for us by Emmy Award nominated Gary Stockdale. Contributors to today's show include Jamie Ian Swiss and Christina Stevens. I'm your host, DJ Glovey.