Technology
Charlatans with Quico Toro
In this episode of Breaking Math, host Autumn Phineph speaks with journalist Kiko Toro about the phenomenon of charlatans—figures who exploit human psychology to sell false promises and miracle cure...
Charlatans with Quico Toro
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charlatans that they've been with us for centuries, selling miracle cures, false promises, and easy
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answers. But here's the surprising part. There's now an entire body of science devoted to
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understanding them. The book charlatans draws on nearly 25 case studies to explain not only
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who these figures are, but why we keep falling for them. Welcome to Breaking Math, and I'm
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your host, Autumn Phineph. In this episode, we'll explore how charlatans attack the human operating
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system, why they thrive in the digital age, and what research says about protecting ourselves.
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When we hear the word charlatan, we often picture someone that's a shady character on the edge of
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a 19th century town peddling miracle tonics. But today, charlatans are alive and well. Only now,
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there on our news feeds are ballads and are wellness blogs. They've traded the traveling card for
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TikTok, the pamphlet for a viral video, or the megaphone for a live stream. The book charlatans by
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Kiko Toro and Moses Nam is more than just a catalog of frauds. It's an x-ray of how deception works,
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and why it keeps working. Because there's an uncomfortable truth. The charlatan is only half the
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story. The other half is us, our hopes, our fears, our hunger for uncertainty, which brings me to
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today's guest, Kiko Toro. He's a journalist and commentator who has spent years unpacking political
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power, and he's a thinker for dissecting forces that shape our world. But before we begin,
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I have to make a really important note for this episode. The discussion you're about to hear
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reflects the views of the authors of charlatans. These opinions are their own and should not be
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taken for those of me, the interviewer, anyone at Breaking Math Podcast or Breaking Math Media,
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or its affiliates. So with that in mind, let's step into the strange unsettling and surprising
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scientific world of charlatanism. Kiko, thank you for coming on the show and joining us today.
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Let's start by defining terms here. Now, most of us hear the word charlatan. We picture some
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obvious scammer in our inbox, whether that's a fake guru with a shady supplement. But in your book,
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the word has a very particular weight. It's not just about fraud. It's about exploiting how some
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human beings are wired. So the big question that I have for you upfront is, why are people so
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gullible? And let me even rephrase this a little bit more bluntly. How can anyone be persuaded to
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do anything so stupid? It's amazing, but we fall for things because we care.
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It's something that you really care about. If there's like an idea or belief that you're really,
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really committed to, that the world doesn't make sense to you. If that thing is not true,
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and somebody comes along and starts like just petting that belief and affirming it for you,
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especially if they're charismatic and they affirm it like powerfully, we're just drawn to those
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people. We can't help it. It happens sort of automatically. And then there are people out there
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who would know how to use that first moment of spark to reel you in and just get you to go deeper
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and deeper and deeper into whatever it is that they're scheming. And that's what we call charlatan.
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But in the book, the word charlatans is a very particular way. You go from about 25 different case
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studies. And it's not just about fraud, but it's also about exploiting how human beings are wired.
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You come from this scientific perspective along with, you know, this I'll say essentially scammy
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side of things. So how exactly do you define a charlatan in the 21st century?
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A charlatan is what they've always been. If someone who asserts a claim to special knowledge or
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special powers and who uses that claim to connect with you, to earn your trust and then to manipulate
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you and to get you to act against your own best interests, which is the amazing thing.
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Journalists are people who suck us into this web of beliefs where we feel like our identity is
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connected to the thing that they're selling. And like they can't even be criticized because
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we're so bound up with the thing that that connects us to them that to criticize them as to
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criticize us. So I think we'd notice again and again when we were writing this book is that
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almost in every case, a charlatans number one defenders are their victims. Now,
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police really struggle with this because how do you prosecute a guy when like the victims are
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like, no, he's a fearless leader. So essentially, you have made these people into hackers of the
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human operating system. Can you unpack that metaphor a little bit more for us? Well, sure. I mean,
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our brains are wired in a certain way. When we receive a new input, we process it emotionally
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before we are even aware of what we're doing. So when you hear it is really counterintuitive,
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but there are lab studies that actually show this temperament. So the parts of your brain that
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react emotionally to a given message activate before your prefrontal cortex and you're thinking
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bit of your brain. So this is what Daniel Kahneman called fast thinking and slow thinking. So when
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that charlatan like champions, your beliefs back to you really powerfully, you're drawn to them.
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Like you feel attached to that message before you've even had a chance to think. So that's why
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it's so difficult to resist these calls because we feel like these things need to be true.
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So what's the comparison to fraudsters, snake oil salesmen or anything of that sort of history?
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Look, there's obviously a spectrum there and like people shift between these categories, but
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the reason we wanted to do charlatan specifically is that a fraudster is kind of boring. A fraudster
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just fools you and then walks away with your money and then you realize you've been fooled and
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then they gave us up. So I know kind of they don't do what charlatans do. Fraudsters are anonymous
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usually. They're not public figures. Charlatans are always public figures or people who are legal
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enough to have a operate out in the open. And charlatans, they embed themselves into your psyche
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and into your life. So they're able to take you for a ride that often just doesn't, doesn't have an
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end. Like there are stories, especially when you look at some of the lifestyles or wellness charlatans
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or religious charlatans that can just continue praying on the same victim for decade after decade,
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after decade. And people don't know who they are aside from like their connection with their
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charlatan. It almost feels like we've built the perfect stage for them, whether that's social media,
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fragmented institutions, and the endless appetite for just simple answers in a very complicated
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world. One of the strengths of charlatans that I've noticed is the way that it's told.
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It's not an abstract theory, but through vivid stories in each case is like this little detective novel.
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It's the rise of the wellness guru, the strongman politician, or the big scammy thing that
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academics don't like to talk about. And we'll get into this later in the episode is the crypto
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messiah, the industry's differ. But the mechanics feel eerily familiar. Do you want to talk about
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a couple of these cases in the book? One that I found really interesting was astrology. And there
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was another one on Japanese blood types. Let's get into that before we get into some of the heavier
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stuff. Sure. Sure. Yeah, this was interesting. Astrology is hugely popular with with everyone
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amazingly to this day because this is the system of beliefs that was developed around the same time
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that people thought that if you were sick, you needed leeches and that like battered, made you sick,
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or that, you know, witches were lying behind the recorder. And over time, as science developed,
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we sort of ditched most of these medieval superstition, but there was one that got through.
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No, why exactly? And there's some people like I know get really upset because like astrology speaks,
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speaks to them really personally, but when you start to look at the way astrologers like
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charlatans astrologers are not all charlatans obviously, but charlatans astrologers can really
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burrow into their victims lives because the victims are asking they're already out looking for
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with that for that connection with sort of metacosmic values such that they're already primed to like
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be told really, really outlandish things. And in the hands in the hands of someone who's ill intention
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or of scrupulous and wants to take advantage of you, that can be like really, really dangerous.
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And then we see it in the book. There are people who would lose their life savings and things like
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this. But one way that sometimes it makes it easier to understand how weird astrology is is if you
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look at a separate system of belief that is like it, but in a completely different way. And I live
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in Japan now and in Japan, when you meet people, they usually ask your name where you're from and what
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your blood type is. And then they know my blood type because that's not a normal thing that like
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normal people in the West would know, right? But in Japan, everybody in Japan, everybody has another
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blood type because there is this widespread like belief that your blood type determines your
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personality. And this was this actually actual Nazi science in Germans were working on this in
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the 1930s and then like realizing what's nonsense. This just has to do with like your immune system
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or your blood type is. But some Japanese pop author like resurrected this in the 1970s and wrote a
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series of like bestselling books and this thing just like entered Japanese culture and South Korean
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culture recently too. And it sounds kind of wacky because like, oh yeah, he's such a type. That's
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what he did. It's like, no, he'll never agree to that. He's a typo. What are you thinking? But
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there is a situation now where people with blood type B in Japan are signatized and like they have
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a hard time getting dates in the same way that like there's some astrological science that people
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in the West know, I guess Gemini have a hard time getting dates, right? So switching signs like a
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Gemini. There we go. Exactly. So yeah, so I think it just helps us, it just helps us to see this way
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in which system like, look, Japanese people, this is a very sophisticated, well-educated,
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scientifically and technically advanced place. But sometimes these beliefs, they just get into people's
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psyches and and then it's easy to use them to, if you're ill-intentioned, you can manipulate
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people on the basis of that. So is that where type A personalities and type B personalities come from?
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I think the separate, I think that's a different thing. I think that's a just psychological profile thing.
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I don't think that's a blood type. Very, very interesting to see that because you see that a lot more
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in Western culture than just for the blood types. Yeah, yeah, it's just completely out of left
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field. And then Japanese people are surprised, said foreign people are surprised by the question.
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It's like, well, it doesn't everybody in the US already know that obviously type B's squarely
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and you can't trust them. No, not at all. Right. So with that, were there any charlatans that
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surprised you? Maybe someone that you didn't expect to fit them all? Well, I mean, there's the weirdest
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one is Babaramdev. This guy in India who runs a yoga empire. He's a TV yogi and he found that
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people in India, there was this like thirst for in urban India. A lot of people had moved from
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the countryside to the city like wonder to generations ago on the fulc sort of disconnected from
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Hindu identity. And he realized that yoga is something that a lot of like Hindus in India had heard
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about but had never done and that he could target them. And so he started this empire. You can go,
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if you go on Indian television, there's a study done that found that you can find Babaramdev yoga class
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on TV 19 out of every 24 hours in India. He's just everywhere. And he, he, he wears his saffron
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rose and he pitches himself as a god man, as a kind of religious ascetic. He's taken this bow
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of poverty. So he doesn't own any assets. He doesn't take any debts and he just has this long
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beard. He's very charismatic. I was saying that he just wants to help you with yoga because yoga
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can do everything. Yoga can fix your stomach problems and warm you up in the morning. But it can
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also cure hepatitis B and HIV AIDS and also cancer and of course COVID. And if a doctor tells you
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that you need medicine or they need a vaccine, God forbid, that's nonsense. What you need is yoga
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and to buy products from his online store, which has become one of the largest consumer good
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companies in India and now competes with palm olive and like call gate and like uni labor. So this
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is guy who is as religious ascetic. We doesn't own anything but controls a billion dollar company
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with hundreds of thousands of workers. You found amazing stories like that.
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Let's look at some other cases because you paralleled the fact that people are not believing
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in science. But as we say here, believe in science, well, believe in things that have built
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fact and trust. But that again, that's a belief. And that is a belief that we can, but that's a
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belief that you have. The world doesn't make sense to you if that is not true. Therefore,
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Charleston can use a belief to target you. That's the whole point of the book. Okay. Let's pull this
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in for a little twist. Let's look at some medical cases that you talk about in the book. Is there
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a favorite one that you would like to dive into? Well, I mean, we can, there's always Dr. Joseph
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Mercola who we can, we always, we're glad the other ones, Dr. Oz and Dr. Oz were very different
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cases in many ways. Yes. But so there you have Dr. Oz is somebody who clearly is appealing to
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people who do believe in science and who turn to him because they believe him to be a scientific
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authority, right? Because he was a genuinely a great surgeon and an actual like just a cracker
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jack cardiologist. One of the best in the world. He invented devices and have sent saved tens
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of thousands of lives. In some ways, Mehmet Oz is the very opposite or might have been the very
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opposite of our Charleston, but he realized that he could make more money if he flattered people's
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beliefs that they could achieve optimal health. And so he put himself at the head of this like
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TV empire that became incredibly skimmy. And even though Mehmet Oz did not personally endorse
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the products that were advertising on this show, he ended up at the head of this machine for
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generating money for scammy products and generating advertising revenue for his network because
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there was this thirst of people to get good scientific advice about their health.
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12 dream of perfect health, right? Like if you have a dream, you can be targeted and this is one
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of the most common dreams. Now what was the other case study that you know the other case studies
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were different is Joseph Mercola who is an out and out. But he's interesting actually because he is a
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proper lunatic as far as I'm concerned. He has died in the will anti-vaxxer. He has this very woo-woo
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kind of supplement store. Well, he was charged you a lot of money for products that he claims have
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health benefits. And most doctors would not say have health benefits. And he's said, well,
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not exactly how much, but court documents show he's made at least $100 million net worth doing this.
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So that that has gone well. But there he's he's targeting a very different kind of set of core
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beliefs because say he's not talking to people whose core belief is that size will save save them.
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He's talking to people whose core beliefs is that science or something wrong with it. And doctors
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want to hide things from you. And there's all this stuff that they don't want you to know. So if
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if that's the way you make sense of the world and you go to Dr. Mercola's videos and his website,
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then you can really see how he just like connects with people and then just brings him in and
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then he squeezes him for cash. So yeah, so the actual belief almost doesn't matter. It could be
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something really anodyne or something really niche or something really widespread. It just
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matters that you have a belief that it's important enough to you that you will not question it. And
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then somebody goes and connects with that belief and that's the big edge. A couple of other topics
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that you actually go into include mega churches and even the crypt of grift. I wanted to dive into
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mega churches for everyone sees these very large churches and people gathering. But in these cases,
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they're preaching not just to a small population, they're preaching to the masses.
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Yeah. What's that psychology behind that? Yeah. I mean, here I think it's important to say first
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that religion, old timey religion, a mainstream religion is not Charlottes of self-adol. And we
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would never say that. And then they can tell you that because my definition of Charlottes,
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somebody is a Charlottes and if they buried her life in destroyed or ruined it. And mainstream
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religion does the opposite. This is one thing that social science actually does agree on because
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there's a lot of research in this. People who are religiously observant whether Christian,
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Jew, Islam, Buddhist, whatever it is. If you go to your temple once a week, you build community. This
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has strong positive effects of mental health on your well-being in general. So I'm not talking
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about normal church. I'm talking about the subset of church, not the church, Protestant churches
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that latch onto this, to the prosperity gospel and find a way to just burrow into people's lives
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and just exploit them. I think some of the worst cases in the book are these scammy churches.
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In particular, there's the universal church of the kingdom of Christ in South Paolo,
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Brazil, which many of your listeners probably have never heard of. But it's huge. It just
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Brazil's number one export. They're active in 125 countries, which is more than McDonald's
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is active in. They have tens of millions of members and in Brazil in this birthplace.
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This church is an absolute powerhouse. They have a political party. They control like 10% of the
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seats in Congress in Brazil. They have a TV and radio network. They have a bank. They have
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security details. They're like a country inside the country. And the way they've built all this
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power, this one charlatan, a d'Irmacedo, who started this mega church, as built by targeting poor
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people in Brazil slums first and then in slums in other developing countries. And telling them,
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like getting them into these very emotionally charged kind of full-body experience services,
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which lasts like two hours at the last 45-minute suffrage, are just this very aggressive,
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hard sales, like collection. But it's not like a collection in a normal church at all. This is like
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really in your face, telling people that there are demons all around them. Demons are out to get
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them. Only the Holy Spirit can defend them, but the Holy Spirit will only take the trouble to
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defend them from demons if they sacrifice for the Holy Spirit. If they show their commitment,
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not by making a small sacrifice because that, anybody can do that. But like doing something that is
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actually really pushing them to their limits, and they're very aggressive in this message.
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They tell poor people, if you give a small donation, you'll insult God and you'll punish you.
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Imagine that. Tens of millions of people in the slums of the Afghinsha sign, like poor people in
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the Philippines, poor people all around the United States too, turn their lives upside down and
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work themselves to the bow and then go hungry in some cases to give money to this guy in Brazil,
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who also private jet on the son is on the Billy and Ursula. It's shocking. I shouldn't pick
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favorites because like asking me to pick a favorite one of my kids, but out of the 25,
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charlatans that we looked at in some detail, if you ask me which one,
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Adirma says, oh man. There's so many cases of this. But then there's other cases in the
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cryptograph. A big one that has been across the news is San Bankman Freed. Do you want to get into
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some of these big scammers that have kind of made the industry look absolutely terrible? Look, I think
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the San Bankman Freed, when you look at the story, when you look at it in the context of the book,
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I think if you read it on the book, you realize all the continuators between what he was doing and
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what grifters and charlatans have been doing since the 10th century, right? When we started,
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we start the book with actually in Venice in the 16th century, where there's this like mysterious
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guy from the mysterious he is called Mamunya, who hoodwinked all of the noblemen in Venice into
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believing that he could turn base metal into gold. Venice was really in a lot of financial trouble
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at the time. People really felt like they needed a new source of income of gold to like reestablish
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the city's glories. And he convinced him that he knew how to do alchemy and they named him official
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alchemist for the city of Venice and gave him one of the best palazzi in all of Venice. And he
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just threw these like lavish parties at state expense. And of course, he went, he can turn anything
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into gold. I think when you look at the San Bankman Freed case, it's really just Mamunya for the
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21st century. Like if you manage a convinced people that you have some secret aesthetic knowledge
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that can create wealth out of nothing, some of them will believe you. And if you don't have the
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ethical guard rails in place, it's very easy to end up in the situation where Sam and the
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double jizz and jail for a very long time because you end up scamming people and destroying people's
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lives. And it's not about crypto as such. I mean, there are lots of people doing great projects
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on crypto and it's a technology that probably, you know, by the time my great grandchildren are
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around, they're going to wonder how we ever get along without it. In any of these cases, when you
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when you have a technology that's built on a core of like really complicated half, right?
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That most people just don't have don't have a view into. And you have people who understand that
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other people believe in that esoteric math without understanding it, then you can exploit them.
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And that's what we saw. I mean, one of the, I think the most important theme in the book, or at least
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the way we try to write it, is this idea that the charlatans who speak to dreams and beliefs that
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you don't share, they always seem ridiculous to you, right? You look at the people they, they
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swim on, you're like, how did you believe? You got really think breathing funny is going to cure
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ovarian cancer that's absurd, right? But if you're a devout Hindu, that doesn't sound absurd at all.
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That's speaking to like your, your deepest sense of self. So our deepest sense of self lives in
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different kinds of places and sort of lodges into different kinds of beliefs. And for some people,
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this like libertarian belief that we can liberate money from the government becomes something that
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that really matters to them. And of course, that's going to allow their allow them to be hacked because
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that's creating a vulnerability really from from from an attacker's point of view. That's how I always
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think about charlatans is that they are attackers hunting around for where the vulnerability in your
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defenses is. What the messages are that they can give that that allows them to control the other
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person. So if you're going to start on whether that's some sort of new venture, what are some of
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the most reliable red flags people can look for when spotting a charlatan? Huh, well usually you
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don't go out and find them. They they go and they find you, right? So it's actually very hard because
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it's very easy for me to say, but it's extremely difficult to do in practice. We are hard wired from
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birth and convinced of this to vibe with people who like agree with us and the things that matter
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most. And there's a lot of research on academic research on why that is and how that is. So when
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somebody tells you that thing that matters so much to you, that's brilliant, that's true and they
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can make it come true. And you can only do it with me. We can do it together, but you can't do it
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alone. Those are categories of messages that are very difficult for us to defend against because
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we have to think slowly. We have to sort of stand outside that belief and look at that belief
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from an outsider's perspective and subjective to critical scrutiny. And that's really easy to do
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when it's a belief that you think is stupid or just don't make any sense, but when it's your
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when it's, oh, it takes some like presence of mind and some like discipline to do that. And I'm
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sure, and I don't think everybody can do it, which is why I think there will always be there have
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always been trollotans and there will always be troletons. Not a problem you can solve. This is
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probably you can manage introspection, but also by staying close to real flesh and blood people in
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your life who can serve as a sound newborn. So, well, that's a whole other issue we can get into
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is that we are losing that and that's why we're more exposed. I think that also comes with a lot
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of information with media literacy and critical thinking. So would you essentially call that
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a little bit of a vaccine for having a lot of more knowledge behind these?
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You know, I'm ambivalent about that because I think it's what's really dangerous is when you feel
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that you're exempt or that you're sort of immunized. None of us is ever going to be fully immunized.
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I mean, people maybe we'll pick up this book and they'll read it and hopefully at least one of
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the 25 stories will like be one where they can imagine having been taken in by that grift or
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or did were taken in by that grist and hopefully seeing the variety of them healthy understat
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helps you put that in a little bit of perspective, but deep down the only way you can be fully
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protected from charlatans is to not believe in anything. Right? If you don't care about anything
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and you don't have any beliefs, you can't be manipulated, but who wants to live like that? That's
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not a correct way to live, right? So what we end up advocating in the book is just telling people
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breathe slowly. Think about the things that matter the most to you. Think about how difficult it
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would be for you to face life in a world where those things aren't true and just realize
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how vulnerable that makes you to people who superficially speak those truths back to you.
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Right? Because the other thing that we saw that we thought was really interesting is that charlatans
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need never try to persuade anyone. It's not a persuasion game. They're not trying to get you
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to think something you don't already think. They never do that. That's a losing strategy.
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Their strategy is to identify a thing that a lot of people already believe and then just say
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it back to them in a passionate way. And that's that's how they get you.
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Is there one particular case study that you want people to know about and that you thought was
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really important? I mean, the one that might have gotten me was Abraj, was this guy Adif Nakhvi,
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who was a Pakistani financier, Aval Osman, who is who jet around from one international conference
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with another. In the book, we we picture him at first at the White House lecturing White House
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staff about how they're not doing a in the Obama years lecturing them about how they were not
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doing a good enough job helping the world's poor. And he was an investment banker and he figured out
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going to these like fancy conferences that a lot of very rich people felt actually really guilty
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because they were so rich and they and they were they kind of felt like this whole like one
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percent thing. There might be something to it or just need that they're conscious of this
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as wise. So what he did is he set up a fund to invest in developing countries and he said that he
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was going to be a magnet for doing well by doing good and that he was going to create all these
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innovative companies all around the developing world and you could make a killing doing this but
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also help poor people in India, Africa and South America. And he launched this company called Abraj
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in Dubai, which is a private equity company that would buy his purposes to buy up companies
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into the developing world, reorganize himself them again, private equity, but just doing it in
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poor countries. And his pitch was so compelling that everybody went for it. We're talking
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the OPEG, which is the foreign investment part of the US government went for it, the French
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government went for it, the Prince went for it, the Gates Foundation, all of these like
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plutocrats and Davos people like the most sophisticated financial minds in the world went into this
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and it was a palm sea scheme. Like he ran out of money, he started paying the earlier investors
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with money from the previous investors and you know, you have dozens of highly trained
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financial specialists who you would think their job would be to do the due diligence to make sure
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that the pretty speeches Mr. Nakve was making were actually backed up, but nobody did this for years,
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it took years for an auditor for the Gates Foundation, that's it turned out to finally like put
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together that some of the money clearly wasn't where it was supposed to be and some of the things
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that had been promised clearly hadn't been done and then the whole thing unraveled and Mr. Nakve
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is well, denies all wrongdoing, but he allegedly did all these things and he's awaiting
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extradition for what could be a lengthy person sentence in the US. You know, it just goes to
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show that you could be a very poor person in Islam in Sao Paulo in Brazil, but like really believing
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that you could connect with the Holy Spirit, somebody can cheat you on the basis of that belief.
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You could have 17 MBAs from Wharton, Harvard and I don't know where else and be like the biggest hot shot
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financial analyst in the world, but if you have believed that capitalism is good and capitalism
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can be used to further the the lot of the poor in the developing world, like somebody can also go
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and exploit that because it's just a thing that you're committed to.
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What what new schemes do you essentially expect within the next decade?
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I mean look, I think the internet and the AI give aspiring Charlottes an unprecedented set of
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opportunities, right, because you can just go more and more and more niche. Look, let me back up here
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for a little bit. Sure, we go back to like the 19th century and before there were only really two
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charlatan graphs around which were curals like snake oil because that's a very common thing.
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You get sick, you dream of good health, right? This how huge doesn't get any more human than that.
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And they were easy to identify and then get rich quicks game because again, you know,
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like it's a wide target. Before the information technology got a sophisticated as it is now,
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it wasn't really possible to triage your your marks to to get at a small niche.
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But these days it is like in the book, people who are convinced that they're meant to
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communicate with aliens and that they need special spiritual guidance to like make that one
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in one contact with extraterrestrial life beings. Stuff gets really, really niche. Now, what I do now
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is structurally now more and more we have the technologies to identify more and more specific
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niches or what I'm going to what we've the trend we've seen and the way I think this is going to go
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forward is that we're going to get more and more charlatans that are targeting smaller and
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smaller groups of people but varying deeper into their lives and extracting more value out of them
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on the basis of things that I don't even know about. What I tend to think is that this is what's
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coming down the pike is going to be more in terms of mass customizing that feeling of direct
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contact with the charlatan because AI is getting to the point where pretty soon it's I think it's
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going to be able to do that. So I don't know how I'm not a charlatans. I don't know exactly how you
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would do it. But if you really give 10 million psychopaths, there are probably 10 million psychopaths
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on social media. It's a bit of like mass media do at the end of the book where you like multiply
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the number of people's social media by the prevalence of like anti social personality disorder
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and dark triad traits and it gives you there are probably 10 million people with a dark triad
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on social media. If 1% of those figures out a way to use AI in a really compelling way to target
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people in a particular niche, that's 100,000 charlatans. Right? So then this becomes a mass problem
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and then this becomes an issue where it used to be that having a niche belief might protect you
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but I think that's going to be less and less the case as a managed to automate more and more
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so that the triage for for Marx and bringing people into the first place.
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Now one big question that I do have for you is what pushback do you expect to have with this book?
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Okay. Yeah. So of course like people who are devoted to the charlatans that we try to write about
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are not going to like it. If you're really in the pledges of Dr. Merkola or Babadam Dev or any of
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the other people in the Masayah though, of course you're going to think that we're being terribly
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terribly unfair and that we're attacking you but but the look the reason we put in 25 stories from
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different very different parts of life some of them are political some are much more personal
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their stuff about love there's all kinds of stories in this book is that we hope that by putting
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all those different types of schemes in one place that that gives you as a person who's upset
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that your charlatan has been called out the space to like go and look and say well but look at all
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these other people and like the people who are taking advantage of them to me that's really obvious
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that they're being taken advantage of like is that how they see me right? So that's that's what we're
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trying that's what we're trying to do with about I don't know if it'll succeed I suspect it won't
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work with a lot of people because some people go very deep with their child. Now essentially did this
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project change anything for whether it was you or folks that you know have already read the book
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did it change anything with how they engage in news media or even politics?
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Well I think so I mean I think I think people in this end age by definition already have to
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to begin to be more skeptical of what is around you because there are so many ways of taking advantage
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of us we are trying the book is very much intended also for family members of people who are
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seeing their lives turned upside down by charlatan we have some stories from like the family members
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of QAnon people which are really heartbreaking because this is these schemes do destroy lives and
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we hope that by we always go back to this idea that a charlatan story that is not aimed at you
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sounds ridiculous to you and you think that protects you but it doesn't because the charlatan
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story that is aimed at you sounds entirely different than one that saved that somebody else so we
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just want to give people a sense of how that works and how the people who are trying to target them
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look exactly the same from the outside as other charlatans look to you so out of curiosity
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is there anything that you want the audience to take away or if you wanted to leave like one line
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on why this matters? A long time ago we used to live in a society where look for 99% of human
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history were 100 gatherers were gathered around with 100 150 people if one of them was a little
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bit weird or a psychopath or just anti-social we know who that was and there were mechanisms there
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to deal with that person as we move into these more kind of atomized societies where a lot of
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our social lives are radiated through a screen and we're in contact with many many more
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have to really be able to understand that there are a lot of people out there who might be
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interested in trying to find out what your beliefs are and to exploit you on the basis of your
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devotion to those beliefs so learning to set out has always been like a good skill but that's the 21st
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century rolls on it's becoming a survival skill like yeah touching grass is now a survival skill
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Kiko thank you so much for coming on breaking math today it was a pleasure having you on the show
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now one thing that i have to add as we're wrapping up here today was that we did not fully get into
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a lot of the psychology case studies and neuroscience of this and it was intentionally left for the book
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we wanted this episode to be a little lighter because the book itself does have a lot more intricacies
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of the case studies there but i do have to recap some of this and it's just that
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human nature is always of something to stay curious about and in the end charlatans isn't just a book
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about fakes and frauds it's also a mirror and it shows us not only the tricks of some con artist
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but it also talks about the vulnerabilities that we all carry and maybe just maybe by understanding them
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we can make ourselves a little harder to fool and as always stay curious and stay informed of the world
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around you