Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion, Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter. He is the author, with Moisés Naím, of Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Quico Toro explore whether fraudsters are motivated by self-deception or the desire to scam, how the internet and our society enable charlatans, and how to resist them.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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Yascha Mounk: You have written with our mutual friend Moisés Naím a new book about charlatans. Charlatans have always existed. If you go back to the first human settlements, presumably there were already charlatans around. What makes charlatans particularly interesting or important in this moment?
Quico Toro: Well, yes. I always think of the story of the golden calf in Exodus. Whoever made that was clearly making up stories about its magical power. So it is a timeless thing. That is right. They have clearly always been around.
The reason we wrote this book is that when you read about charlatans in earlier times, there were really only a couple of common types. There were get-rich-quick schemes and snake-oil health scams. You can see why, because those are very broad nets. Many people have health problems, and if you have one, you dream of being healthy again. Almost everybody would rather be rich than not rich. For thousands of years, if you were standing on a soapbox in the market trying to hoodwink people, you had a good chance of finding a market among a random crowd.
What has changed in the last few years is that technologies now allow charlatans to microtarget the people they want to reach. As a result, we have seen an explosion in the types of charlatanism today. It is not just “get rich quick” or “get well.” It is things like connecting with aliens, preying on people who are depressed or suicidal and dream of relief, promising true love, or pushing ideas like “making America great again” or racial reconciliation. There are many kinds of things that people are deeply committed to.
Charlatans now have the technology to find those audiences, build new communities of followers, and exploit them in new and creative ways. That makes the phenomenon especially interesting.
Mounk: Why do you think it has become that much broader? Presumably in the past there must have been things other than “get rich quick” or “get well” schemes. I imagine, for example, that people—whether we want to count that as charlatanism or not—wanted to sell spiritual salvation.
In a sense, you could say that the whole Catholic Church, for a few centuries when it was selling indulgences, turned itself into an institutionalized charlatan. It was saying, if only you pay a hundred golden ducats, then you are going to get 500 years less of being tortured in purgatory.
How do we define charlatanism, and how does that help answer the question of why you think there are more of them around today?
Toro: We define a charlatan as somebody who connects with a prior belief that you are deeply committed to and then interposes themselves between you and that belief. They usually start by creating this link, then make assertions of having access to special knowledge or particular powers that ordinary people do not have. They manipulate you into believing that the things you hold deeply can only come true in the world through them.
There are many charlatans in the book who take religious themes and exploit people on that basis. Sometimes people ask, are you saying that all religions are based on charlatans? That is not what we are saying, because there is also a harm standard. What defines the charlatan is the string of broken lives left in their wake.
Looking at mainstream religions today, there is a great deal of social science research showing that people who are religiously observant—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims—are healthier than others, happier than others, and more embedded in their communities. They have stronger social connections than people who do not participate in those communities. So there is no sense that their lives have been destroyed.
Mounk: But how do we define harm then? I am imagining some extreme religious cult or spiritual cult—a yoga guru who takes all your money, alienates you from your family—but for some lost people, that may actually make them happier. Perhaps if they had not become bound up with that community, they would have ended up as drug addicts, alcoholics, or perhaps even killed themselves.
Even if the community is completely exploiting them, selling something that is complete nonsense, made up by some 32-year-old on Ayahuasca, if the standard is, would your life be worse if you had never encountered this? then perhaps for many people it would be worse, but for some people it might not. For some, life may turn out relatively better devoting themselves to this ridiculous spiritual quackery or cult than it would have otherwise.
Toro: You are getting at one of the hard realities that makes writing about this so difficult. Across the board, when you attack a charlatan, the first people to defend them are those inside the charlatan’s movement. In many cases, charlatanism includes an aspect of financial fraud.
That makes it extremely hard to prosecute people who are taking advantage of victims who not only refuse to press charges but even protest on behalf of the charlatan. You are asking a deep question—deeper than we usually conceive of it. What we see is that the people inside the lives of charlatans’ victims—their family members, those close to them, the people dearest to them—normally have no trouble identifying the harm charlatans cause.
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Oftentimes, after the spell is broken, victims come out and sheepishly begin to understand. It is almost like cult deconditioning. People need to rebuild their lives, because what a charlatan does is manipulate your identity against you. When you break free, you must rebuild your identity on a new basis, and that is very hard.
Mounk: That gets to the offering. At each stage, and with each individual, you are susceptible to a particular charlatan who promises to deliver on your most deeply cherished hopes and avert your most deeply held fears. When a Cypriot turned up in the Republic of Venice at a time when Venice was declining and in an economic downward spiral, when everybody felt that they were being shoved from the sunlight in political terms, he said, I am going to produce gold, and through this alchemy you will be rich and relive your golden age.
How do they produce this sort of product-market fit, to speak in contemporary marketing parlance? Charlatans are always brilliant at reading people exactly. Is it simply that they offer a pitch and see who shows up? How do they manage to exploit these deepest hopes and fears?
Toro: In a way, it is not actually that difficult. The story of Mamunya in Venice in the 1580s is a classic example. It was no secret that the nobility and the city fathers of Venice were deeply anxious because their city had been a superpower. Suddenly they were cut out of trade routes, as the Portuguese could sail directly to India and the Spanish had built a new empire in the Americas. Venice no longer had a central role, and it could not sustain its status as a superpower. The city was broke.
At a time when alchemy was widely believed in, someone like Mamunya could arrive in Venice and claim to have found the Philosopher’s Stone. He understood that once he said that, people would line up behind him. The interesting thing is that a charlatan does not have to change anybody’s mind. They rarely try to, because it is too hard and does not usually work. Instead, they figure out what people already believe and then champion it—champion it with charisma and with verve.
When there is something in the world you feel must happen—something without which the world does not make sense—and somebody makes the strongest, most appealing case for it, our cognitive defenses are weak. It is natural and normal to fall for people who reflect our deepest values back to us. The danger comes when those people are unscrupulous, feel no remorse, and only want to manipulate you. That puts you in a very bad position.
Mounk: So you were speaking about the victims of this manipulation, and you said that what they have in common—though they are very different from each other in all kinds of dimensions—is that they have some deep hope, and that is being manipulated. What about the charlatans themselves? Are they all sociopaths? Do they all know they are selling something that is not true? Are some of them delusional? Are there some who seem to have had fellow feeling but ended up as charlatans nonetheless?
What do we know about the commonalities and the differences among the charlatans themselves?
Toro: This is a question Moisés and I spent years going back and forth on and arguing about. When you think about it, it is very hard to tell, because you would have to be inside a charlatan’s head, and that is the one place you can never really be. They are very protective of that. Did I tell you to develop a new system for seeing inside the head of a charlatan? If you just give me all your life... No, we are not doing that.
It is very difficult to tell. But we did find a couple of cases where I thought we had a strong sense that the charlatan really believed it. I always think first of Dr. Joseph Mercola, the COVID disinformation superspreader who built a scammy online supplement empire. Court documents reveal his net worth is at least a hundred million dollars, and we do not know how much more he has made. He built a huge fortune selling quack medicine.
In a way, this is a throwback to the snake-oil salesmen of the old West. While researching the book, we had to sit and listen to Dr. Mercola’s podcast for hours. He is really good. Even listening with skepticism, at a certain point you found yourself thinking, maybe I should try some magnesium. Maybe that is the problem in my life.
The place where he really got us was his crank theory, which is not true. I spoke to many doctors who all said this was nonsense. His theory is that people accumulate too much iron in their blood, and the only safe way to get rid of it is by donating blood. Every time he had a guest on his podcast, he would ask, when was the last time you donated blood? You should go and donate blood.
We thought about this. It is strange because he does not make any money from it. Donating blood is one of the best things you can do in terms of prosocial behavior—you save lives and improve your own health, though not for the reasons he claimed. He was giving correct advice for the wrong reasons, in a way that did not benefit him personally. So we came away saddened. He is obviously a charlatan, but he believes it.
Mounk: I have two thoughts here. In philosophy, there is a distinction between truth and true belief. The idea is that some people believe things that are true, but they do not believe them for the right reasons. Therefore, they do not truly hold the truth. There seems to be something similar here. He may be advocating a course of action that is beneficial to the world, perhaps with side benefits for you, but for the wrong reasons. It is analogous.
If I were to be a cynic about his motivations, I might say that is a smart way of pulling the wool over people’s eyes. If I want to get as much money out of you as possible—if it is a romance scam or we are just friends—if I never pay for anything, you are going to think quickly that I am selfish. If I am generous to you in many ways, and then suddenly I come to you and say, Quico, I need $50,000 because this horrible thing is happening in my life, you are much more likely to give me money if I have always paid for lunch.
So is there an element of that here? He may say, yes, I tell people to buy my supplements, but I also tell people to do all kinds of things from which I gain no benefit. Therefore you should trust my intentions, and therefore you should trust this other action I am taking.
Toro: That is possible. I cannot rule it out because I cannot climb into Joseph Mercola’s head—thank God. But if so, I have to say it sounds a little too clever by half. We read about a lot of charlatans and spent a long time looking at their different stories. That case seemed unique, because we did not see such a roundabout approach elsewhere.
If you listen to him, it is difficult not to get the sense that he is genuinely convinced that unless you give blood two to four times a year, you will be very sick. Please, listener, do give blood two to four times a year. It is very important for entirely different reasons. But that is one case where we felt we had some insight. He seems like a true believer. In many other cases, you just cannot tell.
Mounk: You just cannot know. Elizabeth Holmes—did she buy her own nonsense or not? Did she believe it at some point, then realize she was in over her head and shift? Did she half believe and half not believe? It is incredibly hard to know.
Toro: There are people—we write about Arif Naqvi, who ran a private capital fund in the Middle East investing in developing countries—who took all kinds of sophisticated investors for a ride.
Mounk: Tell us that story, because I had not heard about him before. It is fascinating not only because the scale of the grift was incredible, but also because he was able—as Elizabeth Holmes was as well—to pull the wool over the eyes of very sophisticated people.
Toro: He seems to have been initially just an investor and a capitalist who was very good at what he did. He was a Pakistani financier who set up a shop in Dubai. He started doing deals, buying and selling companies. Very soon he was going to Davos and other confabs of the rich, where people felt guilty about their extreme elite status. He realized their dream was not about having more money—they already had more money than they knew what to do with. Their dream was about feeling they were doing something virtuous for the world’s poor.
He began targeting them with this. “Doing well by doing good” grift is what we call it. That was a phrase he used to convince people that through Abraaj, his private equity fund, they could buy companies in developing countries, reorganize them, make a lot of money, and create more economic dynamism in poor countries, improving poor people’s lives.
He does appear to have started with the intention of doing that. But as business went less well than he expected, he seems to have morphed over time into a Ponzi schemer. People who end up acting in charlatan-like ways do not necessarily start out that way. Even Charles Ponzi himself is an example.
Mounk: That is true of many financial Ponzi schemes. Some are conceived as Ponzi schemes from the beginning, such as selling things in a neighborhood or other small operations. But in many cases, the person begins simply as an investor. At some point, they are unable to pay the returns they promised. At that stage, instead of going bankrupt, they start taking on new investments in order to pay out the old ones. They push themselves into being a Ponzi schemer rather than accepting failure.
It is the moment of desperation—when you should say, I am sorry, I made a mistake. You will get back cents on the dollar, and I will go live an unremarkable life—that you instead start falsifying the books. The only way to keep going is to make it bigger and bigger. I may be misremembering the details about Bernie Madoff, but I think that was true of him as well, was it not?
Toro: I am not sure about Madoff, but Charles Ponzi himself in the 1920s seems to have gone through something like this. Historians disagree about it, but Ponzi did have a good idea for a good scheme at the start. It was only later that things went off the rails. That seems to be a clear case.
Mounk: Of all the things to get named after you, it is amazing. Lou Gehrig had great athletic achievements and then suffered a terrible disease. What is he remembered for? The fact that he got that disease. There is something particularly strange or ironic about being Mr. Ponzi and having all of these schemes named after you.
I want to go back to the psychology piece of this. I know many people who have dreams they think they are about to realize, but they never do. They believe they will be great stage actors, novelists, or entrepreneurs. From the outside, it looks obvious that they do not have it. Most people around them seem to know it too, but they believe.
Presumably that is the generous interpretation of some charlatans. They believe in themselves. Charlatans are people like that with a better sense of how to sell things. They convince themselves, I have figured out the recipe for doing this. I am on the way to figuring out the recipe. Or am I wrong to think that?
Toro: Maybe, but after looking at many of these cases, I really do not think so. The psychology of someone with great or outsized belief in themselves seems like a very normal psychology. This is what normal people do. They become attached to things, want to pursue them, and want the world to be different in some way.
What we see in many charlatan cases—it is tricky because I am not a psychologist, and neither is Moisés, so we cannot diagnose them—is that if you look at the definitions of antisocial personality disorder, what used to be called psychopathy, you find traits such as inability to feel remorse, inability to see other people as true subjects deserving of respect. Machiavellianism, narcissism—you see these abnormal traits again and again.
The conclusion we come to is that the victims are normal people. There is nothing wrong with the victims. There is something wrong with the charlatans. There is an abnormal psychology to realizing the power they can have by manipulating dreams, enjoying it, and building their entire lives around it. Cross-culturally, people with these “dark triad” traits tend to persist and appear in many societies.
Mounk: Let me think about the converse of this. Right now I was considering the case of somebody who is able to deceive themselves but does not have those dark triad personality traits. They do not have talent for something. For example, I have recently been playing more soccer, and I suddenly convince myself that at my age I am finally going to become a professional soccer player. Clearly that is not going to happen. But I am not selling stocks in my future earnings. I am not getting people to invest in my soccer career. I just become irrationally convinced that if I practice enough, I am going to play for Bayern Munich. Humans have an incredible ability to self-delude in that way, and perhaps some charlatans might be like that. You are a little skeptical.
What about the inverse? What about people who are relatively competent at something? What they are selling is not a complete lie, but they have strong dark triad traits that lead them to hugely oversell what they are doing. That seems to me to be the bigger phenomenon. When I look at many politicians, startup founders, or online influencers, the most disturbing thing about our culture is not the poor souls who deserve compassion but are not very dangerous, who completely delude themselves about one day achieving something impossible. It is not even the outright scammers, though they are the worst and can do real damage in certain domains.
Most people fall somewhere in between. What they are selling is not completely made up; it is vastly overhyped. They seem to share many of the traits that most charlatans do. They have dark personality traits. They know exactly how to manipulate. They know exactly how to sell. It is probably easier to do all of that if you have something that works to some extent. So is that half-charlatanism the true scourge of our age?
Toro: I fully agree with all of that. That is why we wanted to write the book—because there is something about today’s communications landscape that makes ours a charlatanogenic culture.
It puts you in a position where it is very easy to slide into charlatan-like behavior. What acts as a brake on that, ultimately, is whether you have enough of a conscience to feel bad if you are truly manipulating or destroying people’s lives. What shifts a person from the possibility of charlatan-like situations into outright charlatanry is the absence of that brake. Charlatans do not feel remorse when they take someone else’s savings, exploit them for sex, or use them to gain more political power.
We now have many more charlatans noticing niches of belief that can be targeted, and many more ways of reaching potential marks. That is what is different. In the past, if your dreams or core beliefs were very niche, they were probably too niche for anyone to bother exploiting. That is no longer true.
One of my favorite stories from the book is about Mehmet Aydın, who grew up in a farm town south of Istanbul. He lived in a farming community but later moved to the city, where he missed the rural lifestyle. He realized there were millions of people in Turkey like him. He built an entire scam around that feeling.
Do you remember Farmville, the Facebook game? He essentially ripped it off and layered on a story: if you played his game and invested in his company, there would be real cows corresponding to each screen cow. Those cows would produce cheese, milk, honey, and sausages, and you would make money. Even though you lived in the city, you could connect with Turkey’s true farming stock.
It had never occurred to me that people in Istanbul and Ankara might feel this way, but he knew, and he could target something that specific. In the book, we show how people find these niches because of their life experience and how they can now exploit them as charlatans. A hundred years ago, they could not.
Mounk: I think that is fascinating, and I enjoyed that story, which is one of many wild stories in the book. I am trying to get at where I encounter charlatans in my own life. I have emails in my spam folder trying to sell me all kinds of nonsense. Those are people who simply lie outright. For them, we have laws.
In those cases, if you claim there is a real cow and there is no cow, we know how to deal with that. The machinery does not always work, but it exists. Technological developments make it easier for scammers, and there are more scammers today than in the past, partly because there is more wealth to exploit.
What really bothers me about the world are areas where people are not doing anything illegal. They may be driven by the same character traits, and they may exploit what you call in the book the weaknesses of the human operating system. But they are “semi-charlatans” because they stay on legal ground. They overpromise rather than lie outright.
There is a lovely legal concept in England called “mere puff.” If you say, this product will make you 12% slimmer, and it does not, then you can be sued because you lied about the study. If you say, this is 100% good, you cannot be sued because that is puffery. That realm of puff seems to me to be where the charlatanogenic aspects of our society truly lie.
Let me give a few examples. I hope I am a good teacher. I tend to get good evaluations, and I enjoy teaching very much. It gives meaning to my life. But I think the most popular teachers often have something of a cult leader about them. They do not just say, we are going to talk about important subjects, I am knowledgeable, and I want to make sure all points of view are heard. They say, I have access to unique wisdom, I am the charismatic figure in this classroom, and I will give you access to this special knowledge.
Or take fundraising. Persuasion is a 501(c)(3), so I do some amount of fundraising. When I raise funds from people I genuinely like and respect, it is easy, because we are friends. It is harder to ask for money, but it happens. The people who are really good fundraisers do not just fundraise from their genuine friends. They cater, flatter, and sell. They may run organizations that do decent things, but they overstate: This will transform the world, this will make all the difference.
I think Persuasion does important work, contributes to public discourse, and helps orient people in a powerless political moment. It may even be one of the forces that help rebuild moderate politics and push back against populism. But I will not say it is only because of us. The people who are really good fundraisers will say that.
The same is true of pitches from other publications and platforms. Our pitch is: we are serious people reflecting seriously on the world, hopefully in a way that is engaging, entertaining, and politically meaningful. Please support us if you value that. Others say, everybody else is lying. We alone tell you the truth. You must come here. Some of what they publish is good. They should not be in jail. They are not breaking the law. How do we think about that space?
Toro: You are getting at a lot of important themes and many of the reasons we wrote the book. Not all charlatans are criminals. Many end up behaving in criminal ways, but one interesting thing about charlatans is that they operate out in public under their own names. That makes them different from fraudsters.
In that gray space, you have to be very careful. They work with the things you believe in—but it is good that you believe in things. If you do not care about public discourse, do not care about a free society, then Persuasion or anyone else cannot scam you. You cannot get a purchase on someone who does not believe in anything. What makes charlatans so interesting is that they exploit vulnerabilities that are also what make us human. They exploit the same qualities that make us interesting, creative, and hopeful: the desire to see change, to make a better world, to imagine how the world should be.
Charlatans are the parasitic element in society that looks at those qualities and says, I can exploit that. A world with no charlatans would be a world full of nihilists, people who do not believe in anything. If you do not believe in anything, you cannot be scammed. But if you do not believe in anything, you are a psychopath, and we would not want to live in that kind of world.
The way I think about it is that we will always have charlatans because we will always believe in people. Charlatans are a parasitic element in society that cannot be eradicated. They can only be managed, like diabetes. But we are living in a society with more sugary treats everywhere, which makes the condition harder to manage. I do not see many people realizing, or internalizing, that they are at greater risk now than before.
Mounk: So what makes people more at risk? The psychological preconditions are the same as before. Perhaps as we ascend Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, higher-order desires become a bigger part of what motivates us. That gives charlatans more areas to attach themselves.
If all you want is housing, security, and safety, those are primary concerns. Someone who promises those things can be dangerous to you, but you will know quickly whether you have food or shelter. Desires such as enlightenment, racial harmony, or everlasting beauty are different. They are complex, span long timeframes, and are easier to exploit.
If that is the case, what can we do? Is the line of defense to become aware of this concept and adjust our own psychology—so that we–Quico, Yascha, and our listeners on this podcast–can see the warning signs better, find healthier ways to fulfill our desires, and avoid the cheap sugar rush charlatans offer? Or is it better regulation and law, better ways to deal with the internet, social media, and AI? What should we do?
Toro: I think it is all of those things, but you are missing one important element: social isolation and screen-mediated societies.
Many of the charlatans we discuss target people who are not embedded in thriving human communities and lack others around them who can check their instincts. A major reason we are more exposed is not only that we are wealthier, but also that we have fewer breaks and checks on our enthusiasm. One thing everybody should do—for many reasons, and this is just one—is to turn off the screen, spend time outside, volunteer, join a community arts project, or help with a Little League team. Have humans around you so that when you hear an alluring pitch you can say, I heard this guy saying this and this, and then get a second opinion or outside perspective.
Another interesting thing about charlatans is that you can hear a hundred pitches and ninety-nine of them will be aimed at people different from you. They will try to connect with dreams and commitments that are not yours, and those pitches always sound ridiculous. You wonder, how could anyone fall for this obvious scam? That gives a false sense of security: I am protected, I will be fine. But when the hundredth pitch really connects with you—especially at a time when you are isolated—it becomes very hard, cognitively, to resist.
Mounk: That is interesting. I thought about this the other way around. There was a guy I went to college with who, every time somebody important was speaking on campus—and at a good university you have the privilege of many people coming through—he would go to every talk. If you spent your days attending those events, you could have brief conversations with important people every week or every day. He went to all of them and flattered the speakers at the end. He would say, I am a lifelong fan, you are an inspiration.
You would always see it. At any talk by anyone influential, he would be there and pull the same stunt. Nine out of ten of them would look embarrassed, recognize that he was a little strange, politely smile, say thank you, that is very nice, and forget about him twenty minutes later. But one in ten would fall for it. One in ten would respond, and then he would brag, I am emailing with so-and-so. It was a numbers game.
I had thought about it as a numbers game for the charlatan. He was a kind of charlatan. But it is also a numbers game for the targets. You may be very good at spotting ninety-nine out of a hundred charlatans. But one will have the charm, strike the right note, or catch you at a low moment, and they may be able to prey on you. That is a very good point.
Toro: One interesting thing is that different charlatans have different models. Some play a mass game, exploiting millions of people a little bit. Others are very niche, aiming to get only thirty or fifty people in the world to join them, but then going very deep and taking over their lives. At that point you move into cult territory.
The thing that bothers a charlatan least is if you laugh off their pitch, because they expect that. It is baked into the model. They know their pitch is not meant to win over people who were not already inclined. It is a discovery device.
Mounk: Since you mentioned laughing them off, I think some people might fancy—perhaps some cultures, like the British who like to make fun of things—that they are more immune to charlatanism because they have a sardonic sense of humor. The idea is that Americans can fall for charlatans because they are earnest and believe in big dreams, whereas a more cynical culture like the English may have weapons against that. Humor can take somebody down a peg and expose their grift, and often there is something ridiculous about charlatans.
Perhaps if you come from a culture where you do not allow yourself to dream big, you might be more protected. Is there evidence for that? Are some cultures more resistant to charlatans than others? Or is it the case that if you come from a cynical culture, the one person who lights up that fire of hope in you may actually leave you more defenseless against their schemes?
Toro: I have not found any evidence or research on this question. I wonder how you would even study it. I tend to be skeptical, because even cultures that superficially present as cynical or detached, once you scratch past that outer layer of cynicism, you find people are committed to certain things. That is just a normal part of human cognition. A person who truly cannot be reached by a charlatan’s pitch is, almost by definition, unusual—and not in a good way. You would not want to be friends with that person, because that is not normal psychology.
In a way, I take pride in being scammable. I do not think I have ever really been taken by a charlatan, but there have been a few times when I was curious or thought, this is a good idea. For example, I believe in capitalism and free markets, so if I had heard a pitch from someone appealing to those beliefs at the right time, I probably would have found it quite interesting.
Being scammable should be worn as a badge of pride. It means you are a normal person. I worry more about people who take pride in being unscammable.
Mounk: This is so cynical. There was a big story a little while ago about a finance writer for New York Magazine who ended up being scammed and wrote a viral piece about it. Many people online mocked her: you are supposed to be a personal finance writer, so how can you end up being scammed in this way?
There was a fascinating response piece that involved more reporting. One part of the story was that she went to her bank and asked for $50,000, or some very large sum. The response writer said this made them think she had fabricated the story. If you go to your bank and ask for $50,000, they are not going to hand it over immediately. All the alarms go off, and the bank says, why do you need it today? We can give it to you in a couple of days. Explain the situation to us.
In her article, she presented herself as a freelance writer or columnist in Brooklyn with limited means. So how did she get the money? The answer was a smaller scam she was pulling on her readers. There is indeed a branch matching her description. But it turns out she comes from a wealthy family and is a trustee of a major charity. The reason the bank did not blink at handing over $50,000 is that she has signing authority on accounts worth millions of dollars. For the bank, $50,000 was not that much.
Toro: That surprised me. I think we are too quick to judge people who get taken in by charlatans. A lot of what we are trying to do in the book is build people’s capacity to empathize, to see themselves in the position of the victim, and not to be so quick to judge. That quickness to judge, in a strange way, exposes you more, because it makes you feel invulnerable.
Mounk: But I guess, as a society, we might not want to live in a place where nobody ever falls foul to a scam, because that would mean we’re all so cynical, skeptical, and pessimistic that there would be many negative externalities. What about at the individual level? Should we cultivate the kind of skepticism that leads to that? I have a question here from my producer Leo, who asks, is there anything to learn from charlatans? Would I be more successful if I were a psychopath?
Toro: Of course, I do not think you would want to. You cannot fake psychopathy. If you are not a psychopath and you try to pretend that you are, you will only drive yourself insane. This is not a recipe that can be followed, because it is a personality trait. Thank God for that.
Mounk: You can’t learn to be a psychopath. Incredibly, psychopaths can learn to pass themselves off as not being psychopaths.
Toro: Very easily. That is not hard for them at all. There is a lot of evidence that psychopaths tend to excel in many fields, because if you do not worry about the consequences of your actions or other people’s feelings, life is essentially on easy mode. Many political leaders show signs of psychopathy.
Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed—controversially—that it may be good for a society in times of crisis to be led by someone willing to make inhuman choices for the collective good, and that someone with a more normal psychological makeup might not be the best leader in such moments. They suggest this is why there is a stable supply of psychopaths in all societies: there can be an evolutionary payoff to having that pool of talent available. Many other evolutionary psychologists, however, think that idea is nonsense.
Mounk: Presumably, the main evolutionary explanation must be at the individual rather than the group level. If you are a psychopath, you can manipulate people and situations, which makes you better at acquiring resources. You may even be more successful in finding romantic partners and passing on your genes.
Toro: Definitely. If you do not mind lying, it is easier to get laid, of course. That is obvious. But the broader point is that this is not the kind of success normal people would want. It is a definition of success that is deeply pathological.
At the individual level, what we can do is limited. You can try to keep enough real human relationships in your life so that you have that second thought. That is very important. The other part—what you can do internally, psychologically—is easy to say but almost impossible to do. You need to hold your deepest commitments at arm’s length every so often, not to reject them, but to understand them the way a psychopath or a charlatan would: as vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
It takes real self-awareness to think, I care deeply about this, and I will continue to care about it, but caring this much puts me at risk. That is a sophisticated kind of cognitive move, and not everyone can handle it. In fact, no one can do it consistently, which is why we are all at risk.
Mounk: Your argument against wanting to be a psychopath, as you point out, is a strange question because you can’t learn to be a psychopath. It reminds me of one of my favorite arguments in philosophy by Bernard Williams on a similar topic—why we shouldn’t be egotists, which is related to psychopathy. What he’s saying is that there’s this long philosophical debate about whether we can find transcendental reasons for why you shouldn’t be self-serving—why there are objective moral rules and laws that show you why you should be altruistic in certain ways or to some extent.
Bernard Williams says, look, we’re not going to find those, but that’s irrelevant. What I can tell you is what kind of life it leads to be an egotist. If you are a complete egotist, you’re incapable of enjoying friendship, love, and other social goods that are meaningful to most people. Some people may still have a psychological predilection to go there, and we’re never going to convince them with a moral argument. But for most of humanity, that is reason enough not to want to be an egotist. There are rewards in what it means to care for a friend, to care for a romantic partner, to care for a child, to care for a pet, to be part of a broader life project. The success of your life is in some ways entangled with something beyond yourself that gives meaning and structure to your life. Those are the reasons why you shouldn’t be an egotist.
If all of that doesn’t matter to you—if you say, I don’t care about any of that—we’re not going to find some objective argument that convinces you. But we don’t really need to.
Toro: Yeah, philosophers are strange. That seems to me a very odd way to discuss the argument, because these things are not normally the subject of rational consideration. I don’t think they are. For people who are basically psychologically normal, this is both inevitable and entirely a given, to the point where if you’re unable to act on those insights, that is prima facie evidence that you have a badly disordered personality and probably a personality disorder. So I think we’re saying the same thing.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Quico discuss charlatans in politics, why they thrive, and whether politics will overcome charlatanism. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
