 Well, welcome to the show, Chris. We're super excited to talk about your latest book and dig into fraud's deceptions and how we get duped. I'd love first to just talk about why do we love conman, magician, psychics, and deception so much. We see it in the news, movies are made about it, and it seems like we're fascinated by it, even though some of us might be on the receiving end of the deception. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that partially it reflects the fact that when we are deceived and when people are defrauded and conned, it's because something happened that contradicted their expectations or contradicted the way we would predict a situation and normally unfold. That's almost the essence of deception. We predict one thing would happen. We may not make a verbal prediction or say something, but our minds are constantly predicting what's going to happen next. When the end of the story doesn't match the beginning, all your money is gone from the fund where you thought your life savings were for 30 years or something like that. Well, that's a shock, that's a surprise, and that's part of the essence of storytelling and narration is surprising things happen. These are all surprising outcomes. There's also, we have to admit, there's a strong emotional pull in sympathizing with the victims and also, of course, romanticizing the criminal, mafia movies and so on. It's always interesting to think of these guys like staying ahead of, and they are mostly guys, but these people staying ahead of their victims of law enforcement and then, of course, law enforcement trying to catch them, build a case, the whole forensic files approach, and so on. It really combines so many elements that by themselves, like attention grabbing, entertaining. There's a lot of reasons why we find these stories so entertaining. I think one of the more intriguing aspects is why don't we seem to learn enough from them that this stuff keeps on going on despite all the movies and podcasts and books and everything that have sort of documented these kinds of cons and scams? I think there's also an assumption that it has to be super elaborate, but when you dig deeper, so catch me if you can, a lot of that ended up being another deception, so his stories weren't even real, but we bought into these elaborate stories. The Theranos story, a similar thing, it was not that elaborate. It was just them running samples to another lab and spitting out results, but here we are thinking it has to be super elaborate and technical for us to be duped or deceived. Yeah, so movies like Ocean's Eleven and that great series Money Heist feature these super elaborate cons where there's all kinds of technologies involved to shut off the power grid and tunnel under this and disguise someone as that, but even the complicated business cons are composed of simple elements and simple things that victims fall for or victims don't realize are happening and so on. And it just takes a few of those to assemble an elaborate ruse, but it probably only takes one of them to actually get away with something significant. So in our book, we talk about all the different elements, the things that grab us, but then also to think about larger scams as combinations of those rather than something in a totally different category because we're in the real world, Ocean's Eleven stuff doesn't happen, right? So we shouldn't worry about that. And probably the guy had insurance for his millions and billions of dollars that were lost, but on the other hand, we could lose our savings or we could have our identity stolen or we could be deceived into believing untrue things by relatively simple mechanisms. Have you ever been duped or defrauded? I'm not sure I've been duped or defrauded out of a lot of money, but I certainly have been misled. I can think way back to, oh, about 25 years ago, a friend of mine was one of the founders of an internet company and it went public and the stock price was great and I actually owned a little bit of stock in it myself. And I just remember being very excited when shortly after it had gone public, four big New York brokerage houses came out and said, strong buy on the stock. And I was like, wow, strong buy, this is great. And then of course, my friends who knew more about how this stuff really works informed me that, well, they said strong buy because they're the ones who were the underwriters for the IPO and 99.99% of the time they put out a strong buy after that. And this was sort of in an era before there were deep investigations into what these recommendations for buying and selling stocks from analysts really meant. The system is somewhat different now than it was then. But I sort of felt misled. I sort of felt stupid, but I also felt a little bit misled. And I think one of the most fundamental things that causes us to be misled was at play in that example right there, which is the concept of truth bias. So our brain seemed to be constructed so that information that comes in, we sort of tag as being true and accurate. And it takes extra effort to relabel it as false or even just to be uncertain about whether to believe it or not. Sort of maintaining uncertainty as a bit of a hard mental feat. And the default seems to be to go for assuming truth. So if someone says strong buy, I sort of assume that they're giving their honest opinion. We've analyzed this. We really believe it's a strong buy. We really believe, and I don't know exactly how naive I was about the stock market and the IPO market and so on, but it certainly felt like I was misled at the time. And not by my friends or anything like that, but just by the system in a way. And that one jumps out in my memory right now for some reason. I'm not sure why. I had a situation in Bangkok that I think might be fun to unpack some of the habits and hooks that were at play. So traveling to Thailand, I had a wedding coming up a couple months after this trip. And all of my friends when they found out that I was going to Bangkok said, you have to buy a suit there. Suits are amazing and they're cheap. And I was thinking, okay, well, maybe I'd be a great purchase before this wedding. This is about eight years ago. So I wasn't planning on buying a suit. We got up really early to go on a floating market tour that involved a bus ride and we were out in the sun all day. And then it was late afternoon, we got back into the city and we just kind of got dropped off by the tour company in the middle of nowhere. And we pulled out our phones to try to get our bearings and this took took driver approaches us and he starts chatting us up about Obama and the U.S. and how he's a big fan of the U.S. And his cousin wants to take us to this temple that we were looking for on our map. So we hop in the took took and we're happy to be going to this temple that we couldn't find. And on the way he starts pointing out some other temples that we should check out. And there's one that's really spectacular that a lot of people don't know about. So we're like, Oh, this sounds good. So we follow him to this temple. There's a few other took took drivers there. And they're talking about how it's the king's birthday. And all of these stores are celebrating the king's birthday with a sale on suits and jewelry. So we're hearing the took took drivers talk about this and a few other couples who are in took tooks were like, Hey, yeah, that sounds good. So I start asking questions about the suits and he's like, Listen, let me take you to my favorite shop. This is where the king gets his suits. And we hop in the took took and all of a sudden I'm in the shop. I'm looking at all of this fabric and they're sizing me up. And comes out of the piece of paper writes the price down. I'm like trying to hag a little bit. He whittles it down a little bit. And he's like, Okay, let's make your payment and we'll deliver it to your hotel for you. And I was like, Wow, this is amazing service. Incredible. So I give him my credit card. He takes it in the back. And he comes back and he says, Hey, your credit card is not working. Do you have a debit card? Sometimes debit card works better. So without even thinking, I just hand over my debit card. And now I'm excited. I'm getting this suit and I'm chatting with my girlfriend at the time. My wife was with me on the trip and we were like excited like, Hey, I'm going to have this great suit for to remember this trip. So we get the paperwork and we give him the hotel address. And then he takes us back in the took took. And he's like, Hey, I want to take you to this other place. I want to take you to this other place. And we're feeling really at this point, like he's been super helpful. So we're just agreeing to everything. And then he takes us to a restaurant and there's no prices on the menu. And we're like, We don't want to eat. This is a little suspect. And he's like, You have to go to this jewelry shop. And we're like, We don't really want jewelry. Can we just go to our hotel? And he's like, One more stop. I need to take you there because they pay for my gas. And I'm just like, Hey, I'll pay for your gas. We just want to go home. We're pretty tired. He's like, No, no, no, you have to go to this one last stop. So at this point, like things are starting to bubble up, but I'm not sure we get back to the hotel. And I'm like, something about this suit, I just feel a little off. So I go online and immediately there's a forum and there's this elaborate scheme, multiple took took drivers, they pressure you to buy suits and jewelry and they say it's the king's birthday. And it dawns on me that I gave my debit card. So I'm like frantically calling my bank trying to see if we can reverse the charge. And thankfully I had Schwab and they helped me out. But in the moment, there were so many signs that I just was completely blind to because I was excited about this information that my friends had given me, great suits in Thailand, great prices. And then start using this took took driver, the trustee built with me to be like, Oh yeah, it's king's birthday king suits and got really excited about the potential for this really cheap, amazing suit. Did you ever get a suit? No. So in actuality, so what I read online is they will send you the suit and the suit is basically taped together. It's not even sewn because they turned it around so fast. Yeah, I was wondering about that. The suit's not the fabric you wanted and it falls apart basically when you try it on. But at that point, they demand that you keep the payment like you keep the suit. So there's like a back and forth. And I'd given them our hotel information. So when I called my bank, I said, please don't run the charge and they agreed to and then I told the front desk at the hotel is like, Hey, anyone who comes to the room asking anything wanting to deliver anything, we don't want to delivery. We're not accepting it. Please help me out. And I tip them a little bit to protect me. But yeah, basically the last part of the scam is they come to your room and they pressure you at that point. And there's not really much you can do once the suits in your hands. The other thing about that is you're in a foreign country. You're a guest. Oh yeah. Right. So all the trouble that is ahead of you, it's easier just to eat it be like, you know what, fine, you got me. And it's elaborate enough where the suitors are in on it, the took took drivers are in on it, the jewelry stores in on it and some of the police are in on it. So everyone's getting cut in on the suit that I just paid for. I mean, I didn't know about that scam, but I think there's a family of scams that are kind of like that, which I've heard examples of. And as you alluded to in our book, we sort of try to come up with a framework for thinking about what is it about victims that lead them to be victimized. And mostly we're thinking about sort of what we would call cognitive factors, how we think, how we pay attention, how memory works, what kinds of information we find attractive and believable and so on. So of course, there's a whole separate area of things like your desire to look good, you know, at this wedding and so on, right? If you didn't really care what you were going to be wearing, you wouldn't have been in the market for a suit in the first place, and you're not the mark for these guys, right? You know? So that point sort of actually gets to one of the important points we do discuss, which is selection. So oftentimes a scam might seem ridiculous or how could anyone fall for this, but you have to think about the fact that the scam wasn't designed for everyone to fall for it. It was designed for a very specific group of people to basically raise their hand and say, please scam me. So people who come a long way to a tourist destination are in a way already self-identifying them as potential victims, themselves as potential victims, probably people who go on tours, probably people who say things like, I'm going to a mirror for a wedding and so on. You're probably sort of self-qualifying yourself as a sales lead for these guys, right? You know? So they probably ignored like 50 other people who were around that day, right? And you had no idea, but they were sort of like picking you out because of what you would already said. Kind of like the infamous Nigerian email scams, you know, send out thousands of emails saying, I need your help recovering, you know, print so-and-so's money. 999 people like, you know, don't respond, but the one who does is probably, you know, already selected themselves, you know, for these guys as a potential candidate. So there's a little bit of element of that in there too. I think one thing that's to me also was the extent to which we rely on familiarity as a queue of trustworthiness. So, you know, you didn't know a lot of people in Thailand, but this guy had been driving you around for a few hours, was probably the person you knew the best in a way who wasn't already your friend or a relative or something like that, right? So when you hear information from them, it may seem more credible than if you hear it for just from some, you know, some other random person. So as long this is a clever idea of theirs to sort of befriend people for a little bit and then scam them, as opposed to just walk up to random passers-by, right? And then start the process, right? That would be a little bit harder, but they sort of build it up over the course where you sort of have this familiarity. So familiarity is important. Another one is that we talk about quite a bit in the book is the idea of focus. That is, we only sort of consider what's in front of us at the moment. We rarely make appropriate comparisons to things that aren't in front of us or think about information that's missing. Oh, it's the king's birthday. You know, do they tell, do they say this every day to everyone? Like that's just not, you know, normally a thought that occurs to us. Maybe it should now, right? Whenever someone tells you anything's a special day, we should think like, well, what are they doing on all the other days? You know, do they use the same ploy and so on? But in the moment, you tend to focus on the information you've been given. Oh, it's the king's birthday. You already had this belief that there were good suits to be had and good prices in Thailand. Admittedly, I've never heard that one before, but apparently it's a belief that's going around. I've heard about Hong Kong, you know, and so on. So you have what we would call a commitment. A commitment is sort of like an assumption you're making that you sort of don't think to question. Like you come into Thailand with the belief that it's a good place to buy a suit. So when someone sort of satisfies that commitment or delivers on your expectation, like, oh, we can, you know, we can measure you up and get you a suit by the end of the day, you're sort of predisposed to believe it, right? So they're not going for people who are there probably for, you know, I don't know, like for the snorkeling or something, because those people aren't looking for suits, right? They're there for people who go for weddings and other kinds of events like that. Another one that you alluded to also, which we talk about in the book is this concept of efficiency. So we try to be very efficient with our thinking. Like, thinking is expensive. It's a little bit aversive to do for ourselves. It's time consuming. You know, our brains are evolved quite nicely to be able to make a lot of decisions with very little information. So we tend to not ask questions when we should or we tend to too often accept what we're told without digging deeper. And in your case, it was a suit and maybe a few hundred dollars, I'm guessing, on your debit card that was at stake in a few more hours of your day. But in the book, we have stories of people who sort of fail to ask critical questions, and therefore lost, you know, millions and millions of dollars or more as a result. And it can be difficult to sort of be the jerk, you know, who interrupts the everyone's fun and says, wait a minute, like the king's birthday? Like, are you serious? Like, what are the odds? You know, like that's a little, you know, sometimes you don't want to be that guy, sometimes you do. But so those are a few of the things that, you know, that jumped out at me. I guess another one would be, you know, we didn't think about it in this context, but sometimes people offer, you know, sometimes people exploit our taste for the idea of what we call potency. So potency refers to the fact that there's there's a small thing that can create something really big. We talk about it a lot of times in the sense of sort of policies and treatments and like quack medicine and so on. Like, if you just take this, you know, this supplement or something like that, you know, your life will, you know, improve in many ways. I mean, the idea that you can make like a perfectly fitted suit in an afternoon or something like that from scratch, you know, is I guess maybe like the fashion equivalent of something like that, right? Like, does it normally take like a couple of days to, you know, to add a few fittings, you know, and so on? Like you should have a fitting after the first one and, you know, and so on. So I don't know, those are some of the things that jump out at me. But I really like this example, because I think it shows how pretty much any scam, con, fraud, or deception, there are going to be some elements which come into this framework, not all of them. And they might not all fit sort of like as perfectly as you might like. But all of these cons are sort of exploiting these cognitive habits that we have in one way or another. They sort of can't do it without that. Because if we didn't have these cognitive habits, and if we didn't have the truth bias, we would just be questioning everything. We'd be, you know, uber skeptics, you know, we wouldn't, we'd never be able to make any decisions. We wouldn't have gotten to Thailand in the first place. But, you know, we could live our lives without sort of some degree of belief and trust. And then that provides the entry point, you know, for all these other cognitive factors to be exploited. The other thing that goes along with that, I mean, we have a lot of, in our own DNA and those cognitive practices that get exploited all the time. And we do it to ourselves a lot. People tend to think that only dumb people fall for these scams. But in actuality, the smarter you are, it can be a detriment to you as you're rationalizing everything along the way. Oh, it's the king's birthday. It's my lucky day. I can't believe it. Yeah. Today, oh, well, in Bangkok, they whip these things up. That's all they're doing. They got a whole factory just crushing these things. This is all just falling into place. I don't know that more intelligence makes you more vulnerable, but it probably makes you vulnerable to, like, worse kinds of scams, right? Like, it takes a certain, you know, in a way it does take a certain level of cognitive powers to convince yourself, you know, of things or to think another another angle on it is to think that you are so smart that your intuition works really well, right? So we've seen stories of this often with business leaders who they get to a really high position or they acquire a lot of wealth or their company becomes very valuable. And they've sort of learned that from that process somehow that their instincts are always good. And they will make quick snap decisions, again, without sort of questioning, like, what are my assumptions here? What questions should I be asking? You know, is my attention being misdirected or something like that? And we have some examples in the book of people who some of the cleverest cons and longest cons have worked on because I think these people deceived themselves a little bit into thinking they were smarter than they really were. I mean, they're not they're not dumb in the conventional sense, but they just didn't understand the situation, you know, as well as they think they did. And that's that's sort of very sophisticated con artist, I think, you know, will actually tailor the con for the specific victim or the specific type of victims. And that could be a small set of people like really wealthy people can be conned, but in different ways from, you know, from people who aren't so wealthy. And that intelligence can lead to the expectation that you're deserving of this great deal. You're deserving of these outsized results from investing with Madoff, that you're deserving of that next business venture succeeding or the next stock pick being correct. Sure. Yeah, I'm really smart. I know a lot about finance. I found this great, I found this great opportunity that nobody else misses. And in fact, Madoff is a great example you bring up. You know, I don't know what was in his mind at all moments of this Ponzi scheme that he ran for, you know, about 30 years or so. But certainly he understood that making it seem like an exclusive club was an important part of the deal. Like he never advertised. There were no prospectuses. There was in fact, none of the ordinary documentation and information that you would expect from a hedge fund, let alone a mutual fund, which has much more public, you know, disclosure and so on. And yet he managed to make it seem as though everybody who got in was really smart for figuring out how to get in and really smart for being with him and really deserving of that opportunity because it was so scarce, right? So if you get something that's scarce, you sort of feel that you feel that you deserve it in a sense. Yeah. As everyone was moving into technology and moving online, he was still hand typing statements and sending them only upon request. So you feel like you get this white glove service like, wow, I'm being treated like royalty when every other bank, every other mutual fund in the world was moving online and building a platform for you to access whenever you wanted the information. Yeah. To look at your balance and to see your account balance and to see the transactions in real time, it's really kind of remarkable and retrospect that so many people went along with this for so long. And of course, some people did question. We shouldn't pretend that nobody questioned this. There were whistleblowers. There were investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And there were also investors who were pitched by Madoff, especially towards the end. It's a Ponzi scheme. So he needed money constantly coming in to pay out the people who requested their money back. And as this financial crisis hit and the stock market started to fall, he was getting more people requesting money. And so he was trying to get more money in. But there were people who did ask questions and said, literally they asked questions. They said, can you show me this? Can you show me that? And when he either said no or just didn't answer or was evasive, they relied on that as a way of making the decision as opposed to sort of sticking with the lure of this guy's paying out 10% a year. It's a sure thing. So it is possible. That shows that it's possible to overcome these cognitive habits and hooks and make better decisions, because some people actually did, even in that case. We touched on a few, but I'd love to just dig into the four key cognitive habits that are going on here. And then we can unpack a couple because I know you have a great possibility grid that I think is really helpful. Okay. So we started with truth bias. So the fact that we sort of tag incoming information is true by default is sort of a prerequisite for all kinds of deception. Then the first of the four habits that we talk about in the first part of the book, we call the habit of focus. And that just means that we are very good at focusing attention on a subset of all the possible information that we could be using at any one time. And that's built into our visual systems. For example, we're very good at focusing on certain elements of a noisy and complicated visual world in front of us and understanding them very well. That is, for example, how we're able to watch sports, right? You couldn't watch sports with all the players moving around in the ball and the fans cheering and so on. It would make no sense unless you could really track things individually and pay attention to some parts of it and not others. So it's a critical ability for driving, for all kinds of things. But yet, the downside of it is we sort of don't realize how much we're not noticing, thinking about paying attention to when we're focusing. So a good con artist, basically, just like a magician, will try to control your attention, make sure that you have the information they want you to have, make sure you're looking where they want you to look while they're doing the tricks someplace else, and use that at sort of multiple levels. You can see it in, for example, when psychics do what they call their cold readings. What they're really doing are cold readings. That's just a mentalism technique. Plus they're doing some additional cheating, usually, of looking stuff up about people online in advance and so on. But the way they make people believe in this is they get you to focus on exactly what they're saying and not think about what they're not saying, not think about what they said a few seconds before, which is no longer relevant or downright wrong. And that's one reason why they go so fast often. So controlling focus is one of the key things. One way to try to overcome that is just ask yourself what's missing. You need to sort of step back, slow down, and say, what's missing? What am I missing? And as you mentioned, in the book, we present this idea called the possibility grid. We call it the possibility grid. It's not really our invention. It's a common thinking tool that emerges from research in cognitive psychology. And the easy way to think about it is to imagine a coincidence. A lot of people are very drawn to coincidences. Their entire books and self-help movements based on coincidences being more meaningful than they are. For example, you applied for a job a couple of days ago and you had an interview the next day. And then just when you're thinking about how much you'd really like to have that job, the email arrives with the job offer. Right? Now, some people out there want you to believe that you got the email and the job offer because you thought about getting the email and the job offer, as opposed to worrying about not getting the job offer. They would say, if you worried about not getting the job offer, you would not have gotten the job offer that your thoughts would actually control the future in that way. Of course, that's not what's going on. What's happening is you're focusing on what we would call the top left box in this two-by-two grid. So imagine a two-by-two grid, four cells, like a tiny little tic-tac-toe thing, but just two-by-two. And the top left box are, in this case, I was thinking about the thing and the thing happened. But then what about all the times you think about something and it doesn't happen? You might have thought about the job the day before and you didn't get the job the day before. You might have thought about your friend and they didn't call. There's all kinds of times when you think about something and it doesn't happen. Then there are times when things happen that you weren't thinking about. Surprisingly, I got the job offer. I hadn't thought about it at all since the interview, but then they offered me the job still. And then there's the other box in the bottom right, which is you weren't thinking about the thing and it didn't happen, which is most of life. Most of life you're not thinking about something and that thing doesn't happen. Once you see there are all these boxes and the fact that there's one little thing in the top left box, but the other boxes have a lot of other things, many more than what's in the top left, you should pay less attention to the fact that there's something in the top left because it's inevitable that once in a while you're going to think about something and it's going to happen. That's just statistically inevitable. When those things have a lot of emotional weight, they can really warp our thinking about cause and effect. All kinds of stories of apparent sense that something was wrong with their child and sure enough, something had happened at school that day, but it's almost like they had a Vulcan mind meld or something like that or whatever. If you think about those other three possibilities besides the one that you're really focused on, you will realize that your attention was really being directed, the one that fits with the story that someone's trying to sell you. This is why companies will talk about only their success stories or why marketers will talk about how this marketing campaign coincided with some big uptick in sales, but they won't tell you about all their marketing campaigns that didn't lead to upticks in sales and all the unexpected sales bumps because of things that had nothing to do with the marketing campaigns and so on. The possibility grid, I think once you start thinking about it more, you start to see more things that happen in the world that really fit into that framework. I could talk about some of the other ones too, but maybe that one, I think you rightly said, I think that's one of the best takeaways. If you really can understand that, I think that's one of the best takeaways. It reduces your chance of being victimized by people trying to control your focus on a small set of unrepresentative things. When you start to realize how much the world is focused on just this one box and the positive results and the marketing built around it and the gambling built around it and the stock picking built around it, you start to realize, hey, in these big important moments, decisions being made, maybe I should take a step back. Maybe I should look at where's all this information coming from and what are the underlying reasons that that information is being shared with me. There are just some instances where a successful company will probably be trying 20 or 30 different marketing efforts, 19 of them failing, so doing Google's latest marketing tactic doesn't guarantee success for you. Yeah, no, exactly. That's a great example too because there's this whole genre of business writing which basically has the form Amazon does this in its meetings, dot, dot, dot, and the dot, dot, dot is therefore you should do it too because Amazon is one of the best companies in the world. As though the way they run their meetings explains why they're so successful, not first mover advantage, hiring talented people, all the other things that might have made Amazon for the last 28 years or however long they've been in existence different from other companies. So we're only looking at the top left. Yes, Amazon runs its meetings like this and they're a huge company, but how many other companies run their meetings like that are not as huge and how many huge companies don't run their meetings like that, et cetera, et cetera. You can just start to see it all the time. And one thing we try to do in the book is really, we go through so many different examples of how these things apply and the purpose is not for readers to remember all these examples and so on, but more to build up an intuition so that they will start to recognize these patterns, like when am I in a situation where this might be happening, you might then be able to remind yourself just automatically to think again. It's hard to know, think again is good advice, but when do we think again? How do we know when to think again? Well, you've just got to build up your vocabulary for patterns to recognize that you might be getting into one of those traps. Unfortunately, a lot of that vocabulary comes with getting scammed a few times and you start to recognize your own flaws or the trappings that you easily fall into. Yeah, I agree that being victimized might be the best teacher of all, but we're hoping that we can help readers avoid having to learn the hard way or at least learn a few things the easy way and then have fewer things they have to learn the hard way or at least learn things that might help them when the stakes are high. We're all going to be tricked in all kinds of ways. There's all kinds of deception of all kinds of different levels and importance and so on. We can't solve it all. We can't avoid ever being deceived. Deceiving people is almost part of human nature. Kids learn how to lie very young and that's actually an indicator of cognitive growth. They've learned to represent new kinds of information, like the fact that dad doesn't know something that I know and I can use that. That's like a huge cognitive leap. We want people to be that smart, but we want to reserve our serious efforts to avoid being deceived for when the stakes are high. That can be like a big business transaction, of course, something obvious like that, a romance scam. We don't talk too much about romance scams, but that's a huge category where a lot of these same habits and hooks get exploited masterfully. Even things like fake news and what politicians are saying and so on, those can be high stakes environments. No one person's vote usually determines the results of an outcome, but a lot of people can be collectively misled at the same time and that can move things. Another big part that I stood out for me in the book is just how we're searching for these simple solutions. Going back to efficiency, we're looking for these hacks, these big wins. We're swinging for the fences in so many of these situations and that primes us for this deception. You even talk about how scientists in their pursuit of finding some of these social psychology concepts, these magic words, these nudges to move human behavior in a certain direction will be primed themselves by looking for this huge impact to be duped by fraudulent data results that they can't repeat and replicate in other labs. That's right. Sadly, there's both self-deception and deception by others even in the world of science among scientists, among professionals. One of the early reviews of our book that came out said something like, the psychologists come in for heavy criticism or something and what they're referring to is the fact that basically only because we are psychology researchers ourselves, we know our own field better than most others. We do tend to focus on it a little more, but it's a problem throughout science that scientists are human. I mean, that's not a problem. That's just a fact, but because we are human, scientists are also subject to all of the same cognitive limitations and have the same cognitive habits that can lead them to being deceived within their own realm. Good deceivers within the realm of science will do things like create data sets and entire papers and articles that don't announce the discovery of some completely new thing that's never been known before and so on because everyone's going to check that and find out that, wait a minute, that doesn't work. That's in fact how some topics like cold fusion have run aground because the results were so... And by the way, I'm not saying that there was any fraud involved there, but when someone claims a surprising new discovery, a lot of people are going to follow up on it and if they can't find it too, then interest might quickly die. But if instead, the fraudster supplies something that's basically like an incremental advance or an elegant demonstration of something that's already believed or fits in perfectly with the existing theory, and you need to be pretty smart to get into a field and figure out exactly what to supply people with, but there are people who do this. If they supply that, it meets expectations. It's sort of what we predicted. That's another habit that we have is we have a habit of predicting what's going to come next. And if we get that, then we're okay with it. So that's what scientific fraudsters often do is they supply stuff that looks like exactly what we would expect. And where they sometimes run into trouble is that in creating data and results and graphs and the kind of things that you expect in scientific articles, it's not that easy to create real data. The world is noisier than we intuitively understand. There's a lot more randomness. We tend to smooth things out in our memories, in our minds, and the way we present things and make it a little bit too perfect. And that's often where the clever data detectives can look and see, well, that data actually doesn't make sense when you really look at it carefully. Or when you compare across a lot of different articles someone publishes, you'll see the same thing seems to be repeated over and over again, or mysteriously the same number shows up all these times. Is it really completely different studies? And it's not just psychology, but also I would say that psychology has sort of led the way in some ways in sort of trying to figure out why this stuff happens. Because after all it is a psychological phenomenon. So psychologists figuring out why these mistakes are made and these deceptions happen in psychology is a good place to start and then hopefully other fields will learn the same kinds of vigilance that we sort of advise in the book. One of the things that stood out to me in the book around the sciences is there's this need for positive results because positive results leads to funding. So negative results aren't being published. Negative results aren't going to move your career forward. So there is this incentive to only search and chase positive results no matter how big or small they are. And a lot of them are just phenomenon based on how the experiment was designed and how it was run. And then you have the underlings who are working in the lab and there's pressure on them to provide this data. And then you have a situation where it gets published and all of a sudden science is now built on this. And then even more science goes chasing after this. So this need to replicate these findings, to go back and try to sort through it. I think all of science needs, it's great to see that social psychology is really diving into this a little bit further to figure out, okay, are these phenomenon that people are basing entire movements on and research on actually real? I can't just agree with any of that. I think it's interesting that you mentioned grad students and trainees and people in labs and so on. One of the interesting ways that some of these large scale frauds have happened is that someone who's like say the head of the lab gives the junior people a set of data and says, look, here's the data set. Let's analyze this and write a paper on it. And what never pops into their head is that their mentor, in a way their scientific hero, the person they wanted to come and work with, often you go to a university to work with a very specific individual to get your degree. Even nowadays, it just doesn't occur to them that that person might have made up the data the weekend before and given it to me to discover, quote unquote, what the results are and so on when they already know. That's an example of what we'd call a commitment. You have the assumption that the data came from a legitimate process. Someone ran the experiment somewhere and now I have the data and you don't ask enough questions and asking your boss, did you fake this last week? Not going to go over well. Right. There's always the social and the power and the other dynamics about asking questions, which is part of why it's hard. Even just the social dynamics of being one guy in the sales meeting who asks hard questions of the sales people. That can be hard in some cultures, some organizational cultures and so on. Being the jerk is not easy and that's part of what fuels this. That's one reason why we say in the book, it's often good to try to get advice from an outsider who doesn't necessarily have the same assumptions in their head, who doesn't have the same history of familiarity and trust with the sources, who hasn't been paying attention to all the things you have and maybe has been looking at some different things. There are plenty of examples where massive frauds could have been avoided. If the person who was defrauded listened to somebody else who thought it was a fraud before they got started into it. We have a great example of a con artist who was about to con some French businessman out of $3 million or something like that and the businessman's friend happened to walk in during the Skype call where this con was happening and said, when the friend went to the bathroom, he said, I think this is a con and hadn't occurred to the guy yet. That's why in science, we do try to have a culture of independent replication. We make things public, we publish the papers, other scientists should be free to try to replicate the same stuff and they have a different view. Sometimes it's unpleasant when you publish something and then someone else says, I tried it again and I didn't get exactly the same results but we're engaged in a collective endeavor, not individual glory seeking process in science. Although some people are in it partly for that reason or entirely for that reason, but that's not the social. That's not the social purpose of it, which we have to keep in mind. I think that our vanity and wanting to get ahead of everyone else plays into that line as well where it's like, oh, I've got the skinny. I'm moving up. I got this. I can't share this with anybody and that's exactly what they want you to think because then you start mentioning it. Of course, people are going to tell you, that doesn't add up and that you're being scammed. Of course, you want to believe that you are the smart guy who figured out the shortcut, who asked the right questions and got the right line. Some people have the reputation and many people had this reputation in the past. Their experiments always work and people started even coming up with explanations for this. One prominent psychologist said that you have to have flair, f-l-a-i-r, like some kind of ineffable ability to make the experiment work that can't be written down. There's no recipe for it. It's almost like magic or something like that. I don't think he intended it to mean magic, but it's a quality that's so hard to bottle that you either have it or you don't. That is not the way science works. Science doesn't work. If I assemble the rocket, it makes it to the moon, but if the next guy with the same training and so on assembles the rocket by the same instruction manual, it crashes. That's not the way it's supposed to work. Incentives, of course, can cause greater effort and greater work and greater achievement, but they can also cause greater fraud. If there are two ways of getting the award, the legitimate way and the illegitimate way, you're probably going to cause more of each way to happen once you put the award out there. You might almost argue that the more rewards and honors and so on there aren't a field, the more attempts there are going to be to game them in some way. Looking at the four habits, let's shift to the hooks. I think a lot of us have encountered the hooks in marketing. One thing that I thought was fascinating about the book is just deception is on the rise. We think of deception in a criminal way, but we're being deceived by businesses to gain a little bit of profit. We're being deceived by peers just to get slightly ahead. Nothing that would rise to throwing people in jail, but these hooks are definitely being used in ways to reel us in to get us believing and buying into what people are selling. The second part of the book, we talk about four hooks, which are aspects or features or qualities of what we're shown that we find especially attractive. The first one is consistency. Again, we can go back to the Madoff story for this. We're attracted to symmetrical patterns, smooth lines, basically the absence of randomness, noise, anything. Again, it's like a fundamental property of the visual system. We recognize objects by using properties like symmetry and smoothness and curves and so on. It turns out when people show us things that look like that or give us data that conforms to those patterns, we tend to believe them more. What Madoff did was it's often said that Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme and that's true, but it was really a new form of Ponzi scheme. The original Ponzi scheme promised people 50% back in six months, 50% return, like not just 50% back, 150% back essentially in six months in the 1920s. By the way, Charles Ponzi was not the original Ponzi scheme or people had tried similar things before, but he was the first one to be so successful that he got the naming rights. Madoff came along, like he did something a little different. He did not promise anyone anything. He said, here's by track record, people do well. If you looked at the statements people got in the mail and so on, every year they gained between 8% and 12% in their accounts. They never even gained less than 7%. Probably. There might have been one year when it went down to 7% and the financial journalist Diana Enriquez who wrote the best book about Bernie Madoff told us that customers were very upset when it went down to 7%. He learned. Yeah, exactly. He kept it in the 8% to 12% band which is not unrealistic for the long run average. If you invest in the stock market for 30 years, you might be up 10% per year on average by the end, but there will be some negative 20% years and some positive 30% years and some close to 0% years. Too much consistency. People liked that. First of all, there were no losses. Second of all, it was just like a smooth upward trend. It's a beautiful look for your bank account and there was nothing to worry about. Consistency is one of the main hooks that people use. Another one which is, I think, equally valuable is familiarity. Repetition, because of the way memory works, makes us more likely to remember things but also believe that they're true. This is sometimes called the illusory truth effect. You take a statement which has no truth value at all but just say it enough times and it starts to sound true. I've experienced this myself. I've sometimes felt like there's a piece of political propaganda which I recognize as propaganda the first time, but the fifth time I hear it, it seems like it might be true. It's hard to describe the feeling, but it feels different from the first time you heard it. Once something's in the environment, once it's common, once it's familiar to us, we become more accepting of it. There are lots of ways this can work. Familiarity can be based on similarity to things you already know. For example, there's this phenomenon called ghost candidates where political parties will run candidates with the same last name as an existing candidate that they want to siphon votes off from because if you voted for Rodriguez last time, maybe you'll vote for Rodriguez again this time and not notice there are two Rodriguez's on the ballot and you voted for the wrong Rodriguez. That's actually happened. If elections are close, you only need to siphon a small percentage of votes off with a third-party candidate to maybe tip the balance. That's just a very simple familiarity hack. It wouldn't work if you ran someone with a totally different name from Rodriguez, but if you find someone with that same name, then you might be able to do something with it. The last two are precision and potency. Precision is just our attraction to precise claims, concrete claims, as opposed to vague approximations. I wouldn't say everyone uses this, but when someone does tell you that you're going to get some very precise quantity of improvement or something like that, when you do something, you should worry because almost everything is variable in life. It's not the case that everybody recovers from a disease in exactly the same number of days. There's huge variability around there. It's not the case that everybody responds to a medication the same way. The more precision people put in their pitches, unless it's some kind of technical engineering thing and you're already an expert or something like that and you understand what those numbers mean, the more you should be on guard. Potency is our desire to see big effects from small causes. I think I mentioned this earlier. This is the basis for ideas like a lot of fraudulent medical scams. You don't need surgery. You can just have some simple complementary medicine procedure will solve your cancer. You don't need surgery, chemo, radiation, all that complicated bad stuff. There's something much simpler that can do much more. In the realm of psychology and social science, there's a vogue lately for the idea that very simple interventions like having students do a one-hour exercise at the beginning of college will have a dramatic effect on the grades they get for the next three or four years. Often when you dig into this kind of research, you see that there's one very small study that found this and then we get back to the problem we were talking about earlier. Is anyone else replicated that? Does it work at any other colleges? Does it work when any other researchers administer the same thing? All of these things, consistency, familiarity, precision, and potency, they draw us in and get us on the hook in the first place. Then once our attention is gotten, we can perhaps be sold. That's why we have to be wary of those ideas and tend to ask questions. Why does this sound familiar? Why have you seen something like this before and so on? Recognizing the patterns of when these things happen, that's important. You can see a lot of these hooks in action when it comes to mimetics. Mimetics is now something that all of us get to participate in due to the internet. Beforehand, a song is a mimetic. A movie was a mimetic. A television show was a mimetic. Only certain people had control over those. Now, we're all on Twitter. We're all sharing memes. We're all trying to push consciousness in the different areas. Those memes, some are based on truths. Some are on the consistency that's going on. There's another rule of two on the nose. You want something so bad, and then you see a meme that is a dead center on target. You're like, I knew it. You're sharing it with everybody because you're like, I've been telling everybody. It's right in line only to have that completely fall apart with any research. It's fun to watch. It's also fun to see what mimetics we get caught up in that serves those holes in our own psychology. I like the phrase you said too on the nose because the way I would categorize that is it satisfies your expectations so perfectly that you should be worried a little bit. In the book, we have an example of a fake news story that was passed around at the beginning of the Trump administration. When Trump nominated his first appointee to the Supreme Court, there was this fake news story about how all the rest of the Supreme Court justices had signed a letter opposing this nomination. If you know anything about the Supreme Court or American politics and so on, the one thing that justice has never talked about is who should be appointed to be a justice. Exactly. But it was too on the nose, I think, for certain voters who were anti-Trump, left-wing, maybe didn't like this guy, and so on, and enough for them to lower their guard, truth bias, of course, truth bias is there too, and so on. They passed that around. It does remind me of that famous meme, which has a picture of Thomas Jefferson saying, over 50% of the quotes you read on the internet turned out to not be from the person they were supposed to be from. And that's exactly right there. Why do people attribute things to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and so on? Well, familiarity is part of that. All of these deceptions, that's a very tiny deception, right? Like saying that Thomas Jefferson said something that he didn't say but could have said, but still, it erodes the fabric of reality a little bit every time people pass this stuff around. Well, look how easy it is for us to read a quote from somebody, but in our mind, it's read in their voice, as if they are saying it. And it's going to be even easier with AI, like duplicating people's voices so well, and so on. Then we'll actually have the quotes in their voice, right? Then it'll be a bigger problem. It raises the bar for how you have to be wary that these things might not be true. We have to sort of try to set aside truth bias a little bit. And I can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed to look up a great quote that I come across and you can't find it anywhere. It's just like, you have to say attributed to because someone attributed to that person, but that's a pretty weak sauce when it comes to fact checking, right? Attributed to. There is another concept that you brought up in the book, concrete words and phrases, and how they trigger emotional responses in us. And I thought that was fascinating. Do you mind unpacking that for our audience? So we sort of group this under the concept of precision because concreteness and precision are sort of concrete languages, precise language, right? So instead of saying, can't make up like a really good abstract, you know, gobbledygook, you know, sentence right now, but imagine one instead of saying that you say something that refers to concrete concepts like specific people, specific events, colors, and so on. Like the more concrete and physical you can make something, the more likely people are to accept it. There's an example that comes to mind right now is there is a, you know, there's a long history of people liking the idea of personality types that, you know, our personalities can exist as types. Like, you know, for example, the Myers-Briggs type inventory is the most famous version of this. Like a lot of people, you'll even see them in the email signature, like I am an INFJ or IMA something or other. And that's meant to be a particular type which denotes their personality and is thought to be sort of like powerfully explanatory of how they behave, why they behave, what they're going to do next, and so on. Some business gurus even advise giving all your employees the Myers-Briggs and then organizing your company accordingly. Well, an even more popular version of that, which is already kind of concrete to say that like there are 16 types and everyone is one of 16 types, that's pretty concrete. An even more concrete version of that is this color system where there are reds, yellows, blues, and greens, I guess. And, you know, there's all these arguments of like reds and yellows like shouldn't collaborate together, but reds and greens are great together and so on. And I think putting colors on it makes it even more concrete. You know, master politicians are really good at always finding like a concrete human example of what they're talking about. You know, and so Ronald Reagan kind of famously started bringing people into the gallery in the Capitol building when he would give speeches, because then he'd be able to point to them and talk to them and say, there's someone right here who, you know, is suffering from this or benefiting from that or exemplifies the other thing. And that is again, you know, bringing the concreteness into it. It's, I think it's hard sometimes because for some reason we naturally sort of tend to speak in generalities and abstractions and, you know, but the really good persuaders, I think, use that, you know, to their advantage. And we have to sort of watch out for it, like are we being lured in, you know, by that kind of thing, like what really backs this, you know, like is that, is that very potent emotional example, like illustrative of a trend or is it just, you know, one anecdote? Are there really like personality types or do we all sort of vary along a lot of different, you know, dimensions, you know, and it's really hard to put people in individual boxes like that. I know a popular term online now is gaslighting. It's being talked about, memed about, and everyone feels the effects of it. But it really taps into our memory and our memories being faulty. So a lot of us feel that there's this concreteness to our memories. Like, I remember this specifically like a snapshot or a video. And of course, the longer the time passes, that memory gets even more faulty. So you see this in witness testimony, and then they have video and it's completely different than what that person on the witness stand was explaining. Why is our memory so faulty? But why do we also have this bias to believe that our memory is not faulty? It's so counterintuitive. Excellent questions. And we really sort of talked about, we really talked about memory a little bit more in our first book, which was called The Invisible Guerrilla, How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. And we have a whole chapter in there on memory that sort of addresses this topic. Memories change over time because, well, for a number of reasons, but I think the main one that we don't quite realize is that when we retrieve a memory, we rewrite it back into memory based on how we retrieved it. So one metaphor that sometimes uses, it's like you're playing a telephone game with yourself. The telephone game where you pass along a story, and by the end, it's totally different from the beginning. Well, each time you retrieve a memory, you're sort of passing it back into your own memory. And the next time you retrieve it, it might be slightly different. And you retrieve it enough times, it could have mutated very significantly. And not only that, but when you do retrieve a memory, you don't just sort of take a noisy, extracted noisy version of it. The version you extract might be a little bit different depending on sort of like what your goals and mental state and emotional state are and what you're trying to communicate when you retrieve that memory. A great example is in the 2008 presidential election, Hilary Clinton was trying to show that she was the more experienced and steady and solid candidate, especially in foreign policy compared to Barack Obama, who was her opponent at the time. So she started basically retrieving these false memories about literally being shot at in Bosnia when she was First Lady. And of course, the problem is like when you're First Lady, you've got press traveling with you everywhere in cameras, and people pulled back the stories, and there were no bullets, like there were no flak jackets. It's true there was a war going on there, and it's true she did fly in, and it's true she was sort of representing US foreign policy and so on, but she had embellished it more. Not I would say because she's an inveterate liar or something like that, but because she recalled a memory that was consistent with how she was thinking of herself at that time. And then when she recalled it, she sort of rewrites it back in there, and then the next time she recalls it, it's like, yeah, when I was shot at in Bosnia. So I think that's how it happens. Why don't we realize this? I think part of the reason for that is that when we do retrieve a memory, often it feels very detailed, and it feels like it happens automatically with very little effort. It's not like we're searching a reference library for some book or something like that. One of the nice things about human memory is it's instantaneous, and it's sort of like content addressable. We think of France, we retrieve our memories of when we were in France. We don't need to look through all the countries and say, oh, there's France. It happens right away, it's fluent, and there's nothing about the memory you retrieve on the surface that feels wrong. You've got to really sort of think about, wait, does it make sense that I would have been there then because wasn't I actually there? You have to sort of triangulate among other things, and that's work, efficiency. Once again, we're back to efficiency. We don't sort of tend to do that work, so we can easily think we're right when we're not. A lot of that was also explained in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And so the faster that we have that cognition, the more true that we think it is, but studies have shown the more wrong those things are. And it's due to efficiency while everything else that is working in order for us to navigate the world around this. I would add an amendment and say it's not that sort of fast thinking is wrong more often, but that we don't really expect it to be wrong, and we don't sort of monitor it very carefully to see whether it's wrong. Intuition usually is right. We do all kinds of things unconsciously, or at least without thinking about them, that we get exactly right every day. And we can do relatively complicated behaviors without thinking about them even. The problem is that we don't really monitor it very well to compare it against some other reality. So that's why we're able to make sort of seemingly stupid mistakes when they're pointed out to us, because we're not really keeping track. And there's a really active area of research trying to figure out exactly what happens when people get these sort of Kahneman style puzzles right versus wrong. The stereotype that a lot of people have is that people always get these things wrong, but that's not true. Sometimes they get them right. Why do some people get them right? Why do people get them right in some situations? That's a lot of active sort of area of research. And reading the book, I just couldn't stop laughing because, of course, every time that I've ever been scammed started sparking memories. And I was like, oh, well, yeah, I do that. And we tend to look back, I saw all those signs, and I still fell for this anyway. And before we started, I was mentioning that I just returned from Columbia after three months. And luckily for me, I got scammed within my first week. And it showed me just how outside of my normal habits and familiarity that I was, where that if I didn't buckle down, this is going to be the norm for the three, it's going to be a long three months. And that first week, I walked to an electronic store that I was told to check out. And when I had gotten there, I noticed that it was three floors that all three stores had multiple of the same stores in the floors. And I was like, well, that's odd. That's interesting. And I even said to myself, well, this is a probably a very corrupt store. This stuff's probably stolen. But you know what, I'm here and I need an iPhone charger anyway. So I go into one of the stores that has a funky looking Apple logo. I'm like, well, that's not the Apple logo. But I do need a charger anyway. And I'm here. So I might as well pick it up. I go into the store and a bunch of very cute girls come out to help me. And I'm like, Oh, wow, this is really nice service. And they're giggling and flirting with me. And I'm like, this is utterly amazing. And I get the charger and I go home. And of course, the charger didn't work. And I was charged $60. And if I buy three months there, I spend $60 on anything. And I couldn't stop. And it was at that point, I was like, you knew you were in a bad place. You knew something was up, you went along with it anyway. And you didn't ask any questions. And if this is going to happen to you in the first week, you need to settle it down and start moving very slow. And it was at that point that every time I went out, I gave myself plenty of time to slow down to ask questions to be observant. And there's only so much social awareness that you can have when you don't speak the language as well. And because of that barrier, I made sure at that point that any task that I had to do outside that I had plenty of time to work through it. Yeah, no, I mean, at least they could have done is broken out your receipt into like $5 for a busted charger and $55 entertainment fee or something like that, right? Because it seems like you did get some enjoyment out of the experience in the end. And that's part of what I think some types of cons and frauds do is that you keep the customer entertained in a way and you deliver other things besides what is the actual promise of what they're looking for. And it might explain how they sort of stay in business for longer, right? Like you didn't maybe have the heart to go to try to turn them in. By the way, speaking of the Apple logo and memory, it turns out like our memories for logos are distorted. So I suspect a lot of people might not have even noticed that that was not the real Apple logo if it looks close enough. Like if it's flipped left to right, so the bite is out of the Apple on the other side, there's a study which has like 10, 20 different versions of the Apple logo and people have trouble figuring out which one is the real one, even though they see it every single day of their life, you know, multiple times, you know, right in their face. Like I can see it right now on my, you know, on my screen. It's right in front of me right now. So Christopher, thank you very much. This has been quite informative and our audience is going to love the book and love this episode. We love asking all of our guests this last question. What do you consider your X factor to be a trade or a skill that sets you apart from everyone else? I wish I had prepared something for this question, but I think I'm pretty good at adjusting my confidence appropriately to how much I do and don't know about a situation. Overconfidence is necessary, right? We need entrepreneurs who like, you know, start things against all odds and so on. Underconfidence is probably not that great, although it helps to balance out the overconfidence that we don't just get a super abundance of overconfidence. But for each person, I think knowing like what they know, knowing what they don't know, knowing what they're good at, knowing what they're bad at, knowing where they can make a contribution and where they should let others be the experts and not think that they're the experts and so on. I think that's really important for individual level success. You know, maybe the Elon Musk's of the world, you know, don't need to worry about that that much. But I think for most of us, it's a good trade. And I think that my study of psychology over the years has sort of helped reinforce the importance of that and the distrust of our own sort of internal signals of that and led me to try to understand it more deeply and act accordingly. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure reading this book and I'm excited to check out your last book as well. Where can our audience find out more about your research and the book Nobody's Fool? Well, you can find out about me at my website, shabrie.com, c-h-a-b-r-i-s.com. The book is available on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, Bookstores, everywhere you want to get it. The book is called Nobody's Fool, Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. And it's important to know that because there are other books called Nobody's Fool, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo from the 1990s. And you could argue that we were exploiting a little bit of familiarity hook by choosing that title, but we thought it really kind of fit. And yeah, you can find that anywhere. And our first book is called The Invisible Gorilla, which I think is a fairly unique title among books. Yeah, definitely. We'll link the right one in the show notes. Thank you, Chris. It was great having you. Thanks. It's been fun.