 It's Sunday, April 25th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothe. 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, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week is Deirdre Barrett. She is an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program, and the author of a number of books, including Wasteland and Trauma and Dreams. She joins me on the show to talk about her new book, Supernormal Stimuli, how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose. Professor Deirdre Barrett, welcome to the show. Hi, nice to be here. I loved your book. Let's start off by defining Supernormal Stimuli. These are the things what we experience in our daily lives that mimic triggers from our old evolutionary past. It's like we are reacting today like we're still living on the Serengeti, but instead we're in modern society, so all these old urges, they're kind of, they're not serving us anymore. Yes, the Supernormal Stimulus is simply an object that pulls an instinct more strongly than whatever that instinct evolved for is naturally intended for. And it's a term that Nico Tenbergen coined in his animal behavior research, but animals only encounter Supernormal Stimulus when an experimenter builds one. He would build dummy eggs and vary the size and the color and the markings to demonstrate that he could make plaster eggs that a bird would prefer to sit on in preference to its own if the color was a more intense shade of the natural color, if the markings were exaggerated, if the egg was bigger. But a bird isn't going to find brighter blue eggs with big black polka dots instead of little gray speckles sitting at its nest in nature, whereas now that humans have become so technological, we can make Supernormal Stimuli to cater to our instincts, so our world is just filled with them. And we head for them instead of the things that the instincts are pulling us toward. The old saying about just trust your instincts really doesn't apply in the modern world. You could trust your instincts if you were hunting and gathering on the African savannah. That's the setting for which they've evolved, but we haven't had time for them to fine tune to our modern world. So trusting your instincts today means that we could easily be deceived because the stuff that our instincts are pulled toward pull us much more than in our deep evolutionary history. Exactly. I mean, our food instincts are telling us, you know, look for salt. It used to be a very scarce commodity or get as much fat as you could because that was only going to be in meat and nuts, which were relatively rare, or eat sugar because that was only going to be in fruit, and get as many calories as you can because it was much easier to starve to death than to overeat in most of human evolution. So now our instincts are still telling us eat as much fat and salt and sugar and calories as you can find. And now we can find just huge unnatural concentrations of them. So it would have paid off big time when eating salts and fats and all the sugars and everything sweets and fats paid off in terms of a reproductive advantage when starvation was the norm. But it's backfiring on us now because, you know, people aren't starving. In fact, they're overeating. Everybody is the epidemic. Right. I mean, our instincts lead us toward these supernormal stimuli more powerfully than toward the real things. I mean, it's not at all just food. Again, in our natural setting, if something was cute and little and had short limbs and big eyes and was looking up at you to take care of it and making cute sounds, you know, you should be nurturing that. That was your child or possibly somebody else's in your tribe. And now it might be a pocket pet or an anime character on television or a stuffed animal that's there with the big eyes and the wide open mouth and the cute little chubby short limbs. What's the problem if people not only love the cute little babies might provide some reproductive advantage, but also their cute little teddy bears? I think that we do have some energy and resources to spare these days. So for some pursuit of some supernormal stimuli, the only downside is just wasting our time and energy and resources. And we probably have some of that to waste. So, you know, keeping, you know, cute pets of another species that we sort of bred to look especially babyish compared to their, you know, wolf or wildcat ancestors. Right. You're speaking to me. I'm the owner of a puggle and that little face, you know, is endearing to everybody who comes over. I get what you're saying, but you're saying ultimately it could be a waste of time if it takes us from more important things. Yeah. It's certainly a waste of time from an evolutionary survival standpoint. But we can afford, we can afford to waste some time. So owning some stuffed animals or pocket pets or watching cute cartoons or masturbating to the centerfold of a magazine rather than, you know, seeking out a real partner. We can do certain amounts of these and all it does is waste time and we've got some time to waste. But the extremes of doing lots of it instead of whatever the instinct is designed for is dangerous even with those instincts like nurturance and sexuality and friendship. But they're more quickly dangerous for some other kinds of instincts like our defensiveness and territoriality and aggressive instincts when, when those get falsely stimulated, it can be deadly to pay attention to the super normal stimuli. Before we get to those, those kind of more destructive ways of paying attention to super normal stimuli, let's talk about porn. You mentioned it last night, professor, I saw Avenue Q. I laughed at the song The Internet is for Porn and the song last night made me think of your book. You argue about porn in your book. You say that porn diverts the natural reproductive impulse and that some people actually favor porn over even being in relationships or maybe that their love of porn what competes with their love of real people. That sounds to me really old fashioned. It's not the kind of argument you expect to hear from an evolutionary psychologist. Well, I think it's almost inarguable that it competes for time. I don't think porn actually competes for love, although some romance stories, some people can become so absorbed in some sort of substitute social world that it substitutes for friendships and love. I think porn substitutes for real sexuality and if it substitutes once in a while in scarce times, again, just like with owning stuffed animals that are pulling your nurturance instinct, a little diversion of our natural instincts we can afford. But certainly for some people pornography becomes a big problem. William James had this phrase where he said the task of a psychologist is making the ordinary seem strange by which he meant that our own instincts are just so invisible to us. They just seem so natural and so intuitive that we never question them and we therefore can't really think about human behavior very logically. When Nico Tenberg was making the super normal stimuli for animal sexual instincts, he could build cardboard butterflies that a male butterfly would prefer to try mating with over a real female. If the butterfly's cylinder had more defined stripes on the side or if it wiggled faster than the rhythm that a real female does, it didn't even have to have wings and the male would be trying to mate with the cardboard cylinder instead of the real female sitting next to it. That just looks kind of ridiculous and stupid to us until you think that not only those blow up dolls that I think a minority of males favor, but just the centerfolds of magazines are really not very different than the cardboard butterfly without wings. I mean a six inch flat two dimensional image of a woman instead of a real woman is about as big a leap as that cardboard butterfly. So you used the phrase porn as opposed to real sexuality. You're denying that enjoyment of porn is a way of being genuinely sexual. It's artificial to you. It's a substitute. It's somehow fake. Well, of course it's really sexual in terms of the physical sensations of that individual, but from an evolutionary standpoint, from a reproductive standpoint, it's certainly not sexual in that most definitions of sex have to do with interacting with another partner of the same species. OK, well, it's a subject that fascinates me not only because the implications of your theory for say gay people and their interests and all that stuff, but just because, like I said, it doesn't sound like the argument you normally get from someone steeped in the evolutionary sciences. You hear something that could be interpreted as somewhat anti porn from, you know, the let's say the cultural competitors to the evolutionists, you know, the religious right or something like that. Yes, well, actually, I mean, it's a good point when you mention gay people because there certainly there's a distinction between much of what we do sexually is is not in an evolutionary sense forwarding our reproductive strategy. You wouldn't actually say that like homosexuality is therefore a waste of time, like, you know, paying attention to teddy bears is a waste of time. No, I mean, yeah, you make a very important point that human sexuality certainly serves a lot of other purposes besides reproduction. And our instincts are more around reproduction, but in today's world with basically over population, we don't really want much less need to be reproducing as fast as we can. So certainly there are many kinds of sexuality that from an evolutionary standpoint are not achieving any reproductive goal. Gay sex certainly isn't any sex with birth control certainly isn't any sex after the age of menopause isn't. So from a reproductive standpoint, much of what we do is, you know, is not serving evolution, but human sexuality serves a lot of other purposes. It serves a lot of bonding, connecting, social cementing of relationships kind of purposes. And all of those other things that I just rattled off, gay sex, post menopausal sex and sex with birth control are generally furthering all of those other things that human sexuality seems to have evolved to do. Whereas pornography doesn't seem to be furthering any of those agendas. You don't object to porn on moral grounds. You just think that it's not as effective at serving our needs as these other ways of being sexual. Well, I'm only categorizing it with stuffed toys and television as a substitute for more general social drives and many other things as, you know, as in small quantities, simply a waste of time and only really destructive in large quantities. I am cheeseburgers would fall in the same category. No, I certainly don't see it as a moral. I'd like to let our listeners know that you can get a copy of Supernormal Stimuli, how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose through our website forgoodreason.org. Professor, one of the things I found confusing in your argument about Supernormal Stimuli, you'll help unpack this for me is that you say one of the reasons we don't adopt, say, alternative energy as opposed to nuclear power is because of this desire we have to seek Supernormal Stimuli by pursuing stuff that gives us a lot of prestige. And it's very difficult, like, like nuclear physics, right? You know, it has this payoff for all these evolutionary instincts to seek after prestige or something. Do I have that right? Yeah, I've literally heard businesses say that wind power and solar power are kind of fancy plumbing. And, you know, they might be good energy sources, but they're a little boring to work on, whereas as nuclear and subatomic physics is just fascinating and that that's at least one of the reasons that we're busy building the Haldron Collider while making kind of modest progress toward harnessing wind power or solar power. So again, you're seeing the problems resulting from the Supernormal Stimuli as affecting really every area of our lives. The biggest challenges we face, you're saying, has to do with Supernormal Stimuli. Yeah, I'm really saying most problems in modern civilization in one sense result from some combination of our population density being way more than what our instincts evolve for, for our being stationary rather than nomadic these days. And most importantly, for our technological ability to build the Supernormal Stimuli and kind of reverse what instincts traditionally have done for all species, which is lead us toward particular objects that are good for us. As we develop technologically, we kind of stopped that process and reversed it so that instead of heading toward the natural objects that our instincts would pull us toward, we take the instincts and create an exaggeration of what they're desiring and create the objects to cater to the instincts. So you're basically saying the way that we evolved doesn't serve us in our modern society. One of the ways I think this is evident, although you don't get into it in great depth in your book, I want to talk to you about it though, is when it comes to things like belief in the paranormal or the supernatural, listeners to this show know that we come at these topics with kind of a skeptical bent, you know, it's our position that there's not really a lot of good reason to buy into these claims, or at least that the evidence doesn't warrant accepting these claims, I mean, does your notion about Supernormal Stimuli, does it help in any way to kind of explain why people believe in this sort of stuff despite the evidence? In other words, does believing in unsupportable claims, dowsing past lives, psychics, ghosts, any of that stuff, UFOs, whatever, does believing in that stuff pay off in other ways designed by evolution, even though the stuff's not actually true, like it would have paid off on the savanna. Yeah, not paying off now for modern man, but it's there in our in our instinctual repertoire because sort of its basic version paid off on the savanna. And so it's it's not paying off now. Right, I mean, I don't talk explicitly in in the book Supernormal Stimuli about belief in the the paranormal and cryptozoology. But what I what I do talk about that that's extremely related is the popularity of and people's passion for things like horror films and disaster films and and and sort of those fictional pretend, you know, movies and television shows about their paranormal and and I think that Supernormal Stimuli explains that sort of thing as just an exaggeration of some of the things that that were coded to look for and pay attention to. I mean, one thing is we're just coded to pay attention and try to make meaning out of of all kinds of events. So when we make errors, it's going to be sort of seeing meaningful connections where there may actually be randomness. It was more dangerous to miss a real connection, you know, a meaningful thing that was coming, you know, by someone's intent than than to overinterpret that. It's better in in our evolutionary past for us to connect dots between things that don't actually exist than to be wrong about that movement over there in the grass, which is actually a tiger or something. Exactly. To you know, to see human intent in something that's actually a random movement or to see big scary animal when it actually isn't there. I mean, one type of mistake is more dangerous than the other. So so we're we're geared to make one more often. I talk about connecting the dots. I want to connect the dots between that kind of believing in unseen causes, right, and translate that to the here and now. So if someone in our evolutionary past goes up to a big mountain, he feels the sense of awe or something. Well, that we can explain that maybe evolutionary psychology can explain that, you know, the the numinous or whatever and and the juxtaposition of the ordinary and that's very unique and special and you know, or or maybe oceans or whatever, you know, the like these things in nature that give us that sense of awe, maybe eventually resulting in religion. Well, now we don't need to go and feel this superstitious reaction when we see something unexplainable, right? It doesn't serve us anymore. Is there anything that we could do to rebel against these super normal stimuli? Well, I think that the thing we need to do with any kind of super normal stimuli, whether it's whether it's the the junk food or the television sitcoms or the porn or the cute stuffed animals is or the nonsense beliefs. Yeah, or or the beliefs in supernatural things or odd animals that evidence does not support or whatever that that beginning to question these things is the first step that that people do too much just want to trust their instincts. If it sort of feels intuitively right, they want to go with it. And the same way that you just can't do that in today's food environment, you know, we're pulled more toward a cheeseburger than we are toward green leafy vegetables because the salt and fat used to be harder to find. And the leafy vegetables used to be easier to find that that we do have these giant brains to override that. But the first step is this thing. William James called, you know, making the ordinary seems strange to just stop and question. Is this what I need to be doing or thinking or pursuing and sort of use our brain instead of just trusting our instincts? And I think it's the same way with, you know, hearing there's been a UFO in the sky last night or somebody tells a ghost story or, you know, or there's some story of dinosaurs still roaming this patch of wood that are ancestral thing. I mean, if you heard about some super strong, super powerful, super canny human, you know, that had ill intent out there and you didn't pay attention to that, you might have died. If you heard about some, you know, new predatory animal moving into your territory that you hadn't known about before and you went, you know, I have never seen one of those probably don't exist, you may have died. Skepticism didn't provide an evolutionary advantage. Yeah, it definitely, if you if you were going to make a mistake, it was, it should be in the direction of taking these reports seriously and, you know, acting as if they were true until, you know, radically proven untrue. So, so that's what feels intuitively right. We can just, we can hear the most hearsay improbable thing and especially if it either got some awesome, powerful, positive figure in the story or if it's got some kind of supernaturally powerful evil intended human or humanoid or if it's got some ferocious animal or dramatic exotic animal in the story, it's like, oh, wow, and, and, you know, the default is to believe it. So, again, just starting to question that impulse, you know, is this just because I sort of want to for some irrational reason or does this really, really make sense? Is the first step to starting to use your brain rather than trust your instincts? But that first step using your brain rather than trusting your instincts, you're actually suggesting that it's fighting evolution itself when we go up against, you know, the supernormal stimuli or the automatic reflex to be credulous. With our technology, we've already upset evolution terribly, this idea that instead of just letting our instincts lead us to something, we now make things to cater to the instincts. That's where we sort of, you know, take an evolution off course. But, but the more we can trust their intellect, instead of trust their instincts, the more we can sort of think out what, you know, what we should be heading toward the way our instincts would be leading us if we were in our natural environment. But you're suggesting that the kind of modern world is not our natural environment. In fact, you're going further than that. You're saying most problems in modern civilization result from the supernormal stimuli being evident in this unnatural environment. So, I mean, you're not calling for us to all just go back and live in the woods or something. But you do say, you finish up your book by arguing, we need to reorganize society to be more compatible with how we turned out through evolution or how we were designed by evolution as your phrase. To take the example from belief, well, we may have evolved to believe in ghosts or, you know, unseen causes, all that stuff. And we might not have actually evolved to believe in science or, you know, kind of understand the riddles of the universe. You're not saying that we should go back to what we've evolved to be though, right? I think it's almost in the question, I mean, with our current population, we couldn't live a hunting-gathering lifestyle as opposed to an agricultural one. We just couldn't roll back our technology or our population level. So, whether we should is just sort of, it's an interesting philosophical question, but it's not a very practical one. We're obviously going to live with a lot of the modern relatively unnatural to, you know, to our evolved instincts. Of course, but you're saying we need to reorganize society to be more compatible with. With our instinct, in as much as we can change the world around us so that our instincts will automatically lead us toward healthy things, that would be great. I think with some things like our food environment that we really could do that, you know, if we just outlawed trans fats and advertising food to children and taxed most of the other less healthy refined foods, heftily like we do some other addictive substances and subsidized growing broccoli rather than growing corn syrup as we do now, that we could really shift it around to just the food environment that would be around you would not be nearly as bad for your health as it is right now. And that would make it easier. I think an individual can struggle with will power and eat right even in our current food environment. But back to the idea of false beliefs, I certainly don't think that we want to legislate away the rather ludicrous beliefs that float around in our current environment. Certainly, certainly our population densities and our technology has made it such that anytime anyone comes up with a compelling odd story that infinitely more human beings will hear it than would have at some point in the past. And believe in it. Yeah, and believe, get all excited about it and believe in it. But just you have to hear about in first place to even potentially believe in it. So I think that's why some of these movements are magnifying. And I don't think that most of us want to re-engineer our environment to not allow improbable stories to circulate. So I think that that's when we're maybe going to change less. Although I think it's certainly a positive change that at least in America right now, it seems to be becoming somewhat more permissible to kind of say that ridiculous that isn't logical. Let's you know, let's think about that in response to religious ideas and paranormal ideas and anything else than it might have a generation or two ago for religious ideas at least. But even if that's going against our kind of evolutionary heritage, you think it's a worthwhile project and it sounds like you're a little optimistic it might actually make a dent in this you know, in this way that we were designed by evolution. Yeah, I mean, the huge difference between humans and almost any of these other species that that Timbergen was studying with Supernormal Stimuli is, is we do have this giant cortex that is rather specifically designed to override our basic instincts and reason out other specific behaviors in particular settings where our simple instincts would would lead us astray. And so the the bird who's got this giant bright blue black polka dotted egg there and is ignoring it, little pale blue gray dappled egg in preference to it just can't get off the bright blue egg. It is a fake egg or a fake egg over and over and over. It's bluer. It's spotter, spottier. It's bigger. It just looks better to the bird. And you know, no matter how many times it flies off this giant egg, it's just going to hop back on and keep ignoring its own egg. But human beings do have this ability to go, oh, my God, I'm sitting on a fake bright blue plaster egg. This isn't really my egg. I can get off of this thing. I really ought to be, you know, nurturing my own offspring. So we really can do something different in that situation. But the trick is just realizing that the artificial situation exists. It feels so natural to us. You know, our equivalent of the giant blue egg that we just so often don't question, you know, oh, this just feels like good food. Of course, we'd eat it or, you know, of course, we want to sit in front of a box of wires watching laugh tracks for half hour after half hour instead of having a conversation with a real human being. We just kind of don't question why we're pulled toward most of these things. But your your message is, hey, I'm sitting on this polka dotted plaster egg. Why don't I, you know, climb off? Yes, I think that just sort of reading about even the animal research that Tenbergen did, the concept of supernormal stimuli, once you really get it has a very, you just start seeing it everywhere in your environment and it has a very powerful sort of wake up message to shake you out of some of these bad habits. Professor Deirdre Barrett, thank you very much for our discussion. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it, too. And now in this week's installment of the Honest Liar, we compare a twenty dollar street scam with a billion dollar crime. Here's Jamie Ian Swiss. Sixty five billion dollars. That's how much Bernie Madoff took his victims for. Sixty five billion. To understand the mysteries of Monty or Madoff, you first have to credit the con man. In 1920, Charles Ponzi created a financial scam that bears his name today. For a short time, at least, his scheme became nothing less than a craze. Ponzi brought in millions of nineteen twenty dollars in less than a year's time. And also within that same year, Ponzi's con collapsed and he would eventually go to prison for it twice. Eighty eight years after Ponzi's stroke of evil genius, Bernard Bernie Madoff was arrested on December 11th, 2008 for operating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, having built his victims out of an estimated sixty five billion dollars enough to fund the American War in Afghanistan for a full year. Since pleading guilty last year, Madoff is currently serving a hundred and fifty year sentence, the maximum allowable term for his crimes. Although much still remains unknown or is yet publicly unexplained about the details of Madoff's crimes, there is speculation that Madoff was engaged in his systematic delivery since at least the early nineteen nineties and possibly since as much as a decade before that. How could Bernie Madoff have operated successfully for so long and still have been bringing in new investors that his victims literally within days of his self planned arrest? In last week's installment, I explained how in the example of the ancient street scam known as three card Monty, the method is not the trick. The sleight of hand maneuver that switches two cards in the Monty game is a useless device without the psychology, the theater, without the emotional confidence the operator instills in his mark. The same was true for Bernie Madoff, whose victims number in the thousands from elderly widows to massive banking institutions. Bernie Madoff's greed and pathology would have gotten him nowhere without the psychology of his affinity scheme, a deadly game that built trust based on tribalism, created desire based on the perception of exclusivity, built confidence with primitive monthly statements printed on dot matrix printers, mailed to widows and financial titans alike that detailed the stocks and securities they owned when in fact they own nothing of the sort. And we're inside tour of the three card Monty last week demonstrated how hard the operator works in order to take your money. I pointed out how the grifter works with specialized skills that he's mastered over countless repetitions. 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 weapons that have been honed and handed down by generations of con men before him. Deception is his specialty and it's my specialty as well. In my own reading of the Madoff Ponzi scheme, it is abundantly clear to me that Bernie Madoff worked hard to build his clients and quote friends of billions of dollars, the vaguely sympathetic notion that it's been put forward by some that Madoff was somehow hoping to make up for some early losses and eventually returned to an honest accounting is ludicrous. Although it might be conceivable that the fraud began in order to protect his ego and conceal some legitimate investment losses. Any such intentions had to have faded rapidly from his motives and vanished a very long time ago, along with any sense of human decency or empathy for his wiped out victims. Madoff knew sooner, not later, that he could not recoup what he was taking from people and he took money in bad, very bad faith. He was still taking money from elderly widows within weeks of his eventual arrest and had it not been for the economic crash of September 2008, Madoff would certainly have tried to keep the scam going indefinitely for as long as he possibly could. We do know that Madoff kept his Ponzi scheme physically and factually isolated away from his other legitimate operations and employees literally on another floor of the fame lipstick building that housed his offices on 3rd Avenue at East 53rd Street in Manhattan, a building I've walked by literally countless times in my life. Madoff, with the help of how many co-conspirators we still do not fully know, regularly generated false statements of income to his clients, which in turn by the way, his clients paid taxes on. Unlike Charles Ponzi, Madoff kept the returns on his clients' investments reasonable, between 8 and 14 percent, albeit the fact that he never experienced downturns, even in the down economy, raised warning flags to a few attentive experts. He used feeder funds as layers of protection and obfuscation and rewarded managers of those funds for sending investors his way. And he actively solicited business on an ongoing and aggressive basis, making his investment funds seem all the more attractive, not only by way of its apparent safety and steady, seemingly conservative profitability, but because of the carefully manufactured and maintained illusion of exclusivity. By turning away the occasional investor with apparent arrogance and disregard, I don't need your money. He was known to declare to prospects with too many questions. Madoff helped to build his myth and by so doing built the desirability of his fund. Bernie Madoff is a criminal, a con man, a predator and an expert deceiver who worked hard to maintain his deceptions. I often remind my audiences that being fooled is not the same as being a fool. As a professional magician, I don't get paid merely to fool the stupid, the greedy or the gullible. On the contrary, I get paid the fool's smart, observant, reasoning people who are immediately aware they are likely to be fooled since they know I'm a magician. It would be foolish to attribute the effectiveness of a magic trick on the stupidity or inclination toward gullibility of my audiences. Indeed, the fact that we magicians work as hard as we do to create effective illusions is actually yet another psychological method of magic in and of itself. So when dealing with professionals, magician, Monty or Madoff, it would be a mistake to blame the victim of a card trick, a con game or a billion dollar Ponzi scheme. To blame the victim offers no genuine insight and teaches us little about what has occurred. I once knew a professional magician who was taken in by the venerable Jamaican tourist con standing right in front of Grand Central Station, a scam in which the chief lure is nothing more than altruism. What does that teach us? Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Madoff affair, there were no shortage of voices ready to blame the victims of Madoff's predations. New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera addressed the Madoff case for the first time on March 13, 2009, almost three months to the day after Madoff's arrest, with a piece that was topped with this headline, Madoff had accomplices his victims. No confusion there. On June 29th, Nocera's headline was Madoff's victims get over it. By July 4th, however, even Mr. Nocera had to back away from some of his more scrooge-like inclinations. All there no work houses, all there no prisons, as more and more stories came to light of the devastation left in Madoff's wake. Quote, the victims of Bernard L. Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison on Monday for his heinous financial crimes, deserve our sympathies, wrote Nocera, and he continued, and ever since Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme was revealed, the victims' lives have taken heartbreaking turns, cancer patients who can no longer afford their treatments, people whose retirements have been destroyed, elderly parents who've had to move in with their children. Mr. Nocera may have changed his tune, but he was far from alone in his tendency to blame the victim. Madoff sympathizes for lack of a better term, want to believe that he somehow backed into becoming a con man, trying to make up for some market reversals. This is yet another version of blame the victim, however, based on the failure of the imagination that one experiences when trying to grasp the enormity, the monstrosity, that Madoff is. A former special agent with the FBI who constructed behavioral profiles, Greg O. McCrary was quoted in The Times comparing Madoff to a serial killer, quote, some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims, close quote. That grandiosity, the power of life and death, the power of a God, applies to Madoff as much as to a serial killer according to McCrary. He adds, Madoff is getting the same thing. He's playing financial God, ruining these people and taking their money. There are valid lessons to be drawn from the Madoff disaster, the failed responsibilities of the SEC and other regulators notwithstanding that penetrate beneath the shallow gloss of greed and stupidity. These are lessons that magicians have long sought to teach to skeptic scientists, academics and investors alike and continue to demonstrate every day in our work for after all, we do not get paid merely to fool the stupid. Lesson one is this, anyone can be fooled. The moment you think you can't, you're lining up to be the next victim. And lesson two is that before we blame the victim, we must first and always credit the con man. My name is Jamie Ian Swiss and I am the honest liar. Thanks for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. For updates throughout the week on the kinds of topics we cover on this show, find me on Twitter and on Facebook. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. Views expressed on For Good Reason aren't necessarily the views of the JREF and questions and comments about 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 included Jamie Ian Swiss and Christina Stevens. I'm your host, DJ Glothy.