The Mind Of The Mark

Rough Translation

NPR

Society & Culture, Social Sciences, News, News Commentary, Science

4.8 • 7.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you're the kind of person who thinks you can't be conned, that assumption may make it harder for you to recognize when you actually are being scammed. We speak with professional poker player and author Maria Konnikova about how con-artists get inside the stories we all tell ourselves, about ourselves. Then we go to an international multimillion dollar scam in Costa Rica, where a master of the con meets his match... the IT guy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.
0:02.8	A few years ago, Maria Kona-Kova decided to write a book about scams.
0:07.6	Confidence games, you know, cons.
0:09.8	Maria has a PhD in psychology.
0:11.7	She writes for the New Yorker, and she's now a professional poker player.
0:15.8	So she dives into this world of con artist techniques, the cold read, the bait and switch.
0:20.8	But pretty soon she gets this uncomfortable feeling.
0:24.2	The way these stories go.
0:25.6	It's the con artist.
0:27.1	You are an artist.
0:28.5	You are the aristocrat of crime.
0:30.1	The con artist is the hero of the story.
0:32.6	And then there's the mark.
0:33.8	They're not the victims.
0:34.9	They're the marks.
0:36.2	The mark, formerly known as the apple, the egg, Mr. Bates, Winshaw.
0:42.6	He's the punchline, the butt of the joke.
0:45.3	Maria thought that there is another side to the story that is not being told.
0:49.0	The story of the victim.
0:51.5	Because when you start peeking into the mind of the victim, which is to say, into all of
0:55.4	our minds, there's a lot that's happening.
0:57.9	One of the things you realize when you study con artist is that we're conning ourselves
	...

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