This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg.

There are only a few real cons that exist, and the bones of the story are the same, and they've been the same for centuries.

Author Maria Konnikova has been writing about these stories for a number of years.

Her book, The Confidence Game, explores stories of con artists, opportunists, the people who build up our trust and then take everything we have.

Think Bernie Madoff, the late investor who destroyed countless lives with false promises and financial theft.

But before we pledged to fight to abolish all scams, remember there's another side to those familiar stories too.

The flip side of our vulnerability to cons is human connection and trust and all the good stuff.

So how do we protect our loved ones and ourselves? Will scams be an enduring part of society forever because we refuse or are unable

to learn from our mistakes? Rather than admitting, yep, I was dumb. I fell for a scam. You say,

oh, no, no, here are all of the mitigating circumstances. And it probably wasn't even a scam.

So I think that it takes a strong person to actually... It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to admit it.

So can scams be solved? Maria Konnikova thinks so.

Being victimized by a scam is actually a solvable problem.

Maria has gone from investigating the lies we tell ourselves to mastering the bluff herself by learning to play poker at a world-class level and writing about that too.

So I started by asking her why she's so hooked on these concepts of big and small

manipulations.

My first book was about Sherlock Holmes.

So I've kind of traveled this gamut from, you know, how do you be a detective to,

okay, what are the bad guys doing to kind of being the bad guy myself, but within a game, right?

So there are rules.

And one of the reasons that it's been such a passion of mine

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