Beyond the Bluff

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Maria Konnikova: I’ve been called every single word under the sun at the poker table. I’ve been propositioned at the poker table. This shit happens all the time.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, and this is our weekly podcast, What Could Go Right?, which has a companion in our weekly newsletter, also called, conveniently enough, What Could Go Right?, which you can get at theprogressnetwork.org weekly, free, free, free, free, free, free. But with information that’s valuable, valuable, valuable, valuable. So there’s that too. And part of the point of this podcast is to look at the world through a somewhat different lens, with a somewhat different sensibility about what is going on in the world, there’s a lot that’s going on that’s bad and terrible and atrocious.

So, what are the stories that aren’t out there? What are the things going on in the world that point in different directions. Who are the people living their lives, their fascinating, interesting, multifaceted, quirky lives, eccentric lives, doing work that may illuminate us, may illuminate other pathways to create other futures other than the futures that we fear we are creating? And that’s what we’re trying to do every week, to look at real issues confronted by real people with a different sensibility about, okay, what are we doing about it? How could this go in different directions than our fears? And some of that is fueled by, as I said, fascinating, interesting individuals living fascinating, interesting individual lives.

And we are going to talk to someone today who has done and is doing just that. So Emma, tell us about contestant number one.

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are going to talk to Maria Konnikova. She is a best selling author of three different books, the most recent which is called The Biggest Bluff, and that outlines her path from a journalist and psychology PhD to a professional poker player.

She has won over half a million dollars in earnings, and she also continues to write, so she will have a new book coming out soon as well. She also is co host with Nate Silver of the podcast Risky Business, and she has a Substack, as everyone does these days. So let’s go talk to Maria.

Zachary Karabell: Let us do it.

Emma Varvaloucas: So Maria, welcome to What Could Go Right?

It’s so nice to talk to you today.

Maria Konnikova: It’s so nice to talk to the two of you. I’m very happy to be here.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So I feel like with you, the backstory is really important, right? So for people that are not familiar with your work and your books, can you give us what happened, right? Like, how did you become a professional poker player and why?

And just. Give us all the nitty gritty about that.

Zachary Karabell: That question has so many different, depending on how you, the tonality with which you ask that, you could be like, So Maria, tell us what happened, or you could be like, So Maria, what happened? Or…

Maria Konnikova: And you know what, Zachary, I’ve actually gotten all of those tonalities, from like, you go girl, to like, you are the devil incarnate.

I still get these messages on Twitter, I’m sorry, I still call it Twitter, I hope that’s fine.

Zachary Karabell: We all still call it Twitter.

Maria Konnikova: Okay. I get these messages on Twitter from people being like, I’m your biggest fan. What the fuck are you doing? Like, get away, like, stop being a degenerate gambler, like, and blah, blah, blah.

I was like, thank you, biggest fan, this is definitely the way to get me to write what you want me to write.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, it’s funny too, right, because I feel like if you didn’t turn out to be a successful poker player, like, that question would also be different.

Maria Konnikova: To answer your question, so I have a PhD in psychology and I study decision making, so risky decision making, specifically under conditions of uncertainty and hot emotional stress.

And my advisor was Walter Mischel, who you might know as the marshmallow guy. I ran those famous marshmallow studies of the little kid. How long can you wait for more marshmallows or cookies or whatever it is? The delay of gratification studies. And I was his final grad student. So that’s kind of where I come from, from an academic standpoint, but I never wanted to be in academia and I actually wrote my first book, Mastermind, while I was in grad school.

So I took a leave of absence to write that and it ended up working really well. I’ve written a lot about luck and the role that luck plays in people’s lives, and I think that I have to acknowledge that I got ridiculously lucky with that first book because it centered on Sherlock Holmes and the publication date happened to coincide with the time that the BBC Sherlock series was coming out with Benedict Cumberbatch and it captured the popular zeitgeist in a way that propelled it to the New York Times bestseller list which launched my writing career.

So after I finished my dissertation, I started writing full time. So, you know, went to work for the New Yorker for many years, wrote my second book about con artists and had no idea what poker was, by the way, like this entire time. I’m not somebody who grew up in a games playing household, didn’t even have a deck of cards, didn’t know how many cards were in a deck.

So somebody who like, for whom this was a totally foreign world, I’ve had a really tough time after my second book came out, where just a lot of shit happened. I got really, really sick with an autoimmune disorder and no one could diagnose it. My grandmother died in a freak accident. My husband lost his job. My mom lost her job. Like just one thing after another, after another. It’s this feeling that, you know, your, your life is kind of spiraling out of control. And it’s interesting because that’s what my dissertation, that’s what my psychology work was about. It was about the illusion of control. So when we still feel we’re in control of events, even when we’re not, when you put us in stochastic environments and we still think that we’re doing more than we actually are. And so now I found very personally how much that had played out in my own life. And that was kind of the popping of that illusion of control bubble, where I realized that no amount of hard work will matter if you’re not lucky. And if life doesn’t cooperate in big ways that you really have zero control over.

And I wanted to write about that. And that’s actually how I originally got into poker. I was trying to figure out, you know, how do I tackle this big topic, right? How do I write about skill and chance and luck and kind of how do I process all of this? And the idea of poker came from John von Neumann, the father of game theory.

So I learned that game theory was actually born from poker, that von Neumann was a huge poker player, and that he thought that poker basically had the solution to strategic decision making, that if you could solve poker, you solve the world, prevent nuclear war. And I had no idea really what poker was apart from Rounders, the movie, and I was like, let me see what this poker thing is.

So I started Googling and looking it up and I was like, oh my God, this seems really interesting. Why don’t I learn this game, you know, spend a year learning it and use that as my book, kind of use that journey, use poker as a metaphor for life. Once again, not my original idea, suggested to me by von Neumann, though I took it in a very different direction.

And that’s kind of how I got into the poker world. And what ended up happening was, so again, luck, I got one of the best players in the world to somehow agree to coach me. He’s from Rounders. That’s how I knew him, Eric Seidel, in that famous hand that Matt Damon watches over and over in that movie. And we got along really well, and I went on leave from The New Yorker to basically live and breathe poker full time for this book.

I would be studying or playing 10, 11, 12 hours a day to kind of ramp up, and so, you know, seven days a week, and like I took this as a full time job, as a full time challenge, doing the George Plumpton if he had actually like done all of the professional baseball training as well. And then I, within basically almost a year to the day from when I started playing, I won a major international championship.

That was kind of the beginning of my journey. My amazing editor at Penguin Press, Scott Moyers, was ridiculously understanding. And I was like, Can the book wait a little, you know, can we push the deadline because this is going differently than planned? And he’s like, Yeah, absolutely. Push it as far as you need to.

And we did, and it all worked out. And here we are today. You know, I’m still playing. We are taping this podcast. I’m in Las Vegas right now for the World Series of Poker. I’m a member of Poker Stars Team Pro, so I rejoined them back in October, taking this quite seriously. But I’m also a full-time writer, right?

So at this point it’s kind of like these two parallel careers. So I’m working on my next book. I have a weekly substack. I have a weekly podcast with Nate Silver. So I’m kind of firing on all cylinders, but the one thing that unites all of these things is a fascination with decision making, with risk, with chance, and with mastering it.

And I think that’s a thread that’s just kind of been a constant in all of my work and throughout my life from the moment that my parents decided to leave the Soviet Union and come here. Talk about risky decision making.

Zachary Karabell: Full disclosure, serendipity, we do share an editor in Scott at Penguin. So there’s that too.

Maria Konnikova: Isn’t he amazing?

Can we just like do a five minute like, ode, to Scott Moyers.

Zachary Karabell: Hosanna, Hosanna for Scott Moyers. It’s funny, I was thinking, is poker an example of letting go of control too?

Maria Konnikova: Well, yes and no. So poker is this absolutely beautiful merging of skill and chance. It’s absolutely a game of skill, right?

So when people say you’re a gambler, I’m like, actually, no, I don’t gamble because I don’t play any other game in a casino, right? I have zero interest in them. I’ve never played slot machines. I’ve never played craps. I’ve never played roulette, played blackjack once in my life under duress, um, and hated it.

The reason that’s gambling is because, you know, you’re playing against the house and you have to have the best hand to win. So sure, there are different strategies, but you cannot win without having the best of it. Poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand because it’s not the best hand that wins, it’s the best player.

And there are a lot of data, a lot of studies that I actually end up citing in The Biggest Bluff that show that it really is a game of skill. And over the long term, the most skilled players will get all of the money. However, it’s a really, really important and powerful lesson in the role of chance in the immediate term.

So there’s a difference between kind of long term, I have an edge, I’m going to make money versus short term. In this one hand, right, in this one spot, am I going to win? And you learn that even if you make all of the right decisions, you can lose. And you have to keep just making the right decision. Keep focusing on the process and learning to let go of the outcome.

So think about any kind of decision at the poker table. Like imagine I just got my money and I’m a 75 percent favorite. That’s amazing, right? Like 75 percent is huge. And it’s, I mean, if I were to tell you, you can put this amount of money with a 75 percent chance to win, you’d take that risk, right? Because it’s a really great risk.

What’s going to happen 25 percent of the time? You lose. You made the right decision, but you lose. I can put my money in as a 95 percent favorite. If I told you, Hey, do you want to go in on this 95 percent favorite? You’d be like, yeah, absolutely. Like sign me up. 5 percent of the time, you’re gonna lose your money, and 5 percent is not zero, and that’s so, so important to remember, and poker teaches you that.

Poker really, really just drums those percentages into your heads, even though our brains are normally really, really bad at processing them. That’s one of the reasons why I love it, and why I recommend it as a teaching tool, and why I actually think that poker should be taught in schools. Because it’s a really great way of learning to think probabilistically, which teaches the brain probabilities in the way that the brain knows how to learn, which is by doing and by experiencing and by sampling over and over and over.

Because poker, you’re playing thousands of hands, so you actually get to viscerally experience, you know, what 1 percent feels like, what 2 percent feels like, and you know that that ain’t zero, right? That’s very, very real, and it happens much more frequently than you want. And so, in that sense, it does make you kind of acknowledge chance and let go of control because once your part is done, once you’ve made the right decision, once you’ve thought through everything and kind of done everything that is within your control, then you have to let go of the outcome, right?

Then you have to just say, okay, whatever happens, happens. I don’t control the next card. I don’t control what comes off. My decision is made. I made the right decision. I have the data right here. I can see that I’m a favorite. My task is to keep being a favorite, right? To keep putting myself in a position to get lucky, because over time then, it will even out, and I’ll be lucky.

But in this immediate moment, I might lose, and I have to make my peace with that, as long as I thought correctly. Now, if you’re on the wrong side, by the way, of that decision, if you were that 2 percent person who won, You have to rethink why you were in that, why you were in that situation. And even though it worked out correctly for you, you have to say, uh oh, my process was wrong.

I made the wrong decision. What did I think through incorrectly? What did I do wrong? How can I improve next time around?

Emma Varvaloucas: So harkening back, you know, to what you said in the beginning, which is like, if you solve poker, you solve the world or like you solve how to do your own life, right? What are the applicable lessons?

Like, how would you describe what you’ve learned from poker to put yourself in a lucky position in life?

Maria Konnikova: Well, I mean, I think that it just goes to every single decision that you make. How do you make those decisions? And it’s a way of honing your thought process and of making sure that you’re thinking correctly when it comes to making decisions that matter.

Because at the poker table, every decision matters, but it’s a lot of work, right? You’re exhausted to be thinking correctly every single time. That’s true of life, too. What am I having for lunch today? Like, I don’t know, like, I don’t care, right? It’s not a consequential decision. But at the end of the day, what poker teaches you is in those key moments where the decision matters, learn how to make your process optimal and how to keep improving that process.

So I actually have decision diaries for when I’m making important choices, and I write down all the factors I’m considering. I weight them, like how important each one is. I give them probabilities and certainties, like Okay, I’m 50 percent sure of this, like I’m 75 percent sure of this, and then I try to figure out how do I make this decision, and then I make it, but what it also does is it gives me a really lovely, objective record of my thought process that after the decision happens, after the outcome is known, I can go back and see whether I thought correctly or not because the outcome might have gone in my favor, but not for the reasons I thought.

And the outcome might have gone against me. And in that case I can say, okay, is it because I made the wrong decision or is it because I got unlucky? And so the next time you can improve it. Over and over. So that’s kind of the nitty gritty of how poker helps you every single day, and it helps you really understand probabilities.

So my podcasting partner, Nate Silver, just released his presidential model this week, and what probabilities teach you is we should be fucking terrified, and that’s kind of, and you understand that those numbers are actually really, really scary. And…

Zachary Karabell: Well, not if you’re a Donald Trump supporter, then they’re really, really.

Maria Konnikova: Yes. I’m not a Donald Trump supporter. I think that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. And I’m happy to talk about that.

Emma Varvaloucas: Maria, maybe tell us what was the, in Nate Silver’s prediction, so what was the probability of Trump winning?

Maria Konnikova: 65 percent or so right now.

Zachary Karabell: By the way, we’re recording this on the day of the presidential debate where you will, everyone will have known now what the result was of the debate tonight or whether it mattered at all.

Maria Konnikova: And the probabilities will be updated and will shift depending on that. Going back to Nate, everyone yelled at him for the Hillary Clinton loss saying, see, even Nate Silver didn’t predict it. But the thing is, he had Hillary with the lowest chance of winning, right? He had Donald Trump with the highest chance of winning.

And in my book, I actually wrote that the chance of Donald Trump winning in Nate’s model was the same as hitting a pair on the flop in poker. And just if you’ve ever played a hand of poker, think about how often someone hits a pair on the flop.

Emma Varvaloucas: Can you explain what that means Maria? For the most of us that absolutely know nothing about poker.

Maria Konnikova: In Texas Hold’em, everyone gets two cards that are private cards, they’re hold cards, and then there’s a round of betting that happens before any community cards come out, right, so you can discard your cards or you can decide that you want to play, you can raise, etc, etc. So everyone who’s still in the hand has two cards, no one knows them except for that person.

So you can hold, let’s say I have an ace and a queen, you know, great starting hand, right, ace queen. And then the flop are the first three community cards. So the first three cards that you see that the dealer deals, they’re all face up. And if any of those cards are an ace or a queen, I’ve hit a pair on the flop.

And the chances of my doing that were equal to the chance of Donald Trump winning the election. So if you think about that, that happens all the time. It’s not a low chance. And so poker teaches you, how does poker translate to everyday life? It makes you realize that those percentages are very, very real and that we can’t do what our brain wants to do, which is to actually round to a hundred or to zero.

And it teaches you that a hundred and zero are a hundred and zero. And by the way, nothing in life is a hundred or zero. That doesn’t exist. Certainty does not exist. The other thing that poker really has taught me is to be much more comfortable with uncertainty and to kind of embrace it and to realize that it’s a huge, huge part of every decision.

It’s a huge part of your life, and that’s okay. I mean, that’s just the world. It’s really hard for the human brain to embrace uncertainty.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I think part of what you point out, which is vital, is an 80 percent probability feels like a very high probability, except for the fact that there’s a 20 percent probability that it goes the other way, which while lower than 80 by every statistical measure is, as you put it, not only not zero, but it’s not insignificantly not zero.

Maria Konnikova: Exactly. It’s very high.

Zachary Karabell: And I think people, we like to think because of our desire for certainty, I mean, a lot of the conceit of The Progress Network underlying a lot of it is the certainty about future outcomes is false. The desire for certainty about future outcomes is profound and human, but it then skews our ability to read the present in a meaningful way, particularly given that there are a huge number of present variables that will lead to a, if not infinite, a nearly infinite number of possible futures, which doesn’t sit well with the human desire to know.

Maria Konnikova: Yes.

Zachary Karabell: Like, I want to know. And even in that respect, poker is a more bounded system than human existence, right? There are a lot of variables, but there are not. It is still a bounded system.

Maria Konnikova: Absolutely, which is why it’s a great teaching tool.

Zachary Karabell: You have to give up a certain amount of control, embrace a certain amount of chance, even within a bounded system you have to do that, when you then extrapolate that to real life.

I do think you could open up an incredible new front of the culture wars by trying to advocate for poker in schools as a.

Maria Konnikova: Oh, I already have. I did a keynote SXSW EDU about teaching poker in schools and got some incredible responses, including principals saying, Okay, how do I do this?

And then people saying, Maria Konnikova is the devil. She is going to be the ruin of America. She wants to turn our children into gamblers. Like have,

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. No, I’m sure that would clearly have been an issue.

I do have a question that I’m sure you’ve thought about, but I don’t know that you’ve written about, which is, why the gender skew in poker?

Maria Konnikova: One is obviously historical, right? It used to be really a boys club, men’s game, and all the popular culture depictions are kind of these smoky back rooms with these grizzled gamblers, and it just didn’t seem like a very friendly environment for women.

Fast forward to today, when you go into a lot of local casinos where you play lower stakes games, the places where most people would start out That’s still the reception you have. You have a lot of guys there, and to them, it’s their guys night out. Like, they don’t want to deal with a woman at the table.

They don’t want to watch what they say. They want to have a good time. These are not professional players. Most of the time, these are people who are there to drink, have fun. Hang out with the boys. And it can be an incredibly negative and off putting experience for females. I remember my first time in a local Vegas casino, Eric Seidel dropped me off at the Golden Nugget to play my first Vegas tournament because he said he wanted me to taste the real Vegas, not to start playing at like the nice, Strip hotels, but to go back to downtown Vegas to kind of the original and.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, at least it didn’t drop you at the Horseshoe, so I mean it could have been worse.

Maria Konnikova: It could have been worse. So he dropped me at the Golden Nugget. First of all, I got angle shot. So for people who don’t play poker, an angle shooter is someone who doesn’t quite cheat, but bends the rules to the point of cheating and basically tries to do things that are very unethical, but like go just to the line of getting disqualified to try to get you to give him information, or fold a winning hand, or like, Oh, I didn’t actually call your bet, just different things that try to mess you up, mess with your head, very scummy thing to do, but some people do do it, so that happened, and I got a lot of flack for being female, and I had some experiences during that first time where if I wasn’t a journalist, I hadn’t been doing this for a book, I didn’t know exactly why I was sitting there, I didn’t already know that amazing poker players existed because Eric had introduced me to them, I probably would have just gotten up and never played poker again, right? Because why in the world do that? And it’s slowly changing, but I think that that attitude at the tables, it takes a real shift from the top, where people are penalized for being nasty, I’ve been called every single word under the sun at the poker table.

I’ve been propositioned at the poker table and actually given a price for my services and told which hotel room I could, I could accompany the player to. This shit happens all the time. And as I actually wrote a few weeks ago on my substack, it still happens. So, I, at this World Series 2024, Maria Ho and I, Maria Ho is probably one of, if not the most, one of the most recognizable faces in poker.

She’s been around forever. She’s a public face of poker, broadcaster, you know, pro extraordinaire. We were walking back to the tournament area a few minutes before the tournament was going to be restarted and we got stopped by a security guard who said, I’m sorry, only poker players are allowed beyond this point.

And, and by the way, I’m wearing huge patches that say Poker Stars Team Pro, right? And I’m with Maria and we’re like, Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re poker players. And he’s like, I’m sorry, I’m going to need to see some identification. This point we’re like, Okay, what the hell? And by the way, we’re in a mass of men and we’re like, what are you talking about?

And so I look at him and I’m like, do you realize that you’re stopping the only two females? He’s like, well, I have to stop everyone. Like, it’s not, it’s not about that. I was like, no, actually it’s exactly about that because you’re stopping us. And at this point we have like a minute left on break and it’s really fucking with our heads.

Anyway, this guy just will not let us through. And then finally this big poker player we’re friends with figures out something’s going wrong and comes up and is like, Hey, what’s going on here? At this point, the security guard stepped back and we were allowed back at the tables. This happened three weeks ago.

Zachary Karabell: Wow.

Maria Konnikova: And just think about the fact that this is someone who just bars two women who are recognizable, you know, and, but even if he doesn’t know anything about poker, like at that point he should just acknowledge, I’m sorry, please go ahead. And instead he just doubled down and it just got worse and worse and worse.

I wrote about it in greater detail, but it was just one of those moments where you realize, I understand why poker is still 96, 97 percent male, because why bother when you have these sorts of experiences? And I think why bother is actually incredibly important, which is why people like Maria and I, you know, the Marias of poker. This is why I think we play and we fight to be good ambassadors for the game, because I think it’s important to get more women in poker and it’s important to change that because I think it’s such a powerful tool for making women better at all sorts of things and helping them enter the boys club, because it’s great if you can hold your own at the poker game, right?

If you can actually join those conversations, because so many decisions get made, not in the actual boardroom, but over whiskey and poker or whatever the case may be. And I think that it’s also just a great tool of empowerment and of helping you kind of be, at least that’s what it’s done for me, a stronger version of yourself.

And so I truly hope that we will make progress, but I know this is a very long answer to your question, but this is a big deal and the numbers have not shifted for decades.

Emma Varvaloucas: I have a burning follow up question that might seem odd given the story that you just told, but have you found that men give you more respect in other areas of your life because of this whole story with poker?

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, absolutely.

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay, yeah, yeah. Tell us more because I just kept returning to that question like, oh, she’s gone to the top, this male dominated field, I bet she gets the, like, Hey Buddy treatment, you know?

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, no, I think it’s definitely helped me outside of poker where people think, well the ones who don’t think that I’m the devil incarnate, it’s pretty cool. And it’s great that I can compete at that level. And I do think that I get more respect. I get taken more seriously in a sense, because of what I’ve accomplished in poker, which is kind of funny, right? I get taken more seriously because I play a game than because I have a PhD in decision making.

And most people actually don’t even realize that I have a PhD. My sister, who’s an MD PhD and who actually saves lives every single day, she’s a neonatologist, runs a lab, just absolutely brilliant human being, got really, really mad once when I was on a TV show. I don’t even remember which show. There was someone else on, like it was a panel. They introduced them as doctor and they just introduced me as Maria Konnikova and she’s like, you’re also a doctor, like you should insist on that. I was like, it doesn’t matter, like I’m a journalist, blah, blah, blah. She got so mad. She’s like, no, like this is important. You need to get people to actually acknowledge that when they’re giving you formal introductions.

And I didn’t care, but like, she did, right? She thought that that was a big deal. And it’s funny that kind of the poker has given me more opportunities than I ever had before then. I gave a keynote at Davos, right? I got invited to Davos after I became a known poker player. Didn’t matter before when I had multiple New York Times bestsellers and was at the New Yorker and was the same person minus the poker. They didn’t know who I was and they didn’t care, and then suddenly with the poker, they’re like, Oh, come talk to us. This is great. So I think that that was kind of one of these moments where I was like, Oh, holy shit, this is really opening doors that would not be open otherwise.

Zachary Karabell: There was a great, hilarious, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey introduced George Clooney at the Golden Globes and something like Amal Clooney is a human rights lawyer, served on international commissions, defended people. And kind of went through her whole resume and said that today

her husband’s getting an award for acting.

There are things we value societally over other things and sort of fame, notoriety for things that strike people’s fancy are not contingent with expertise and skill. And they can’t be contingent with skill, obviously. We reward different things in a kind of, wow, cool, than we do for deep study, long expertise, intensive knowledge.

And that’s just kind of the way it is.

Maria Konnikova: Absolutely, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: And I certainly think if you’re on that particular wave, you might as well ride it as long as you can.

Maria Konnikova: Absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: You described at the beginning that there is a through line for you internally. I think people who do a variety of things that look disconnected are often animated by something internally that’s much more of a north star than is apparent, right?

The dots are more connected internally than they appear to be optically. So what’s your next dot?

Maria Konnikova: Yeah. So I’m working on my next book right now, which is about cheating in games. So not cheating in relationships, but all games from poker and chess to sports. It’s something that I think connects a lot of the thoughts that I’ve had in the past, a lot of the threads from The Confidence Game, which was about con artists, which isn’t cheating, it’s a little bit different, poker and kind of chance and ethical gray lines and all of that, and just, it’s something that right now is also incredibly important as the value of truth is devalued, for lack of a better way of phrasing that, and with the rise of deep fakes and kind of distrust in media and all of that, I think the concepts underlying cheating and kind of blurring those boundaries of belief are really important, and so it’s something that I’m really excited about because thematically, I find it fascinating, but also the stories are really interesting, and so I’m doing some deep investigative dives for that, which is why the book is taking a while, because I’m trying to report out some stories that have never been covered in the media, and it’s hard to do, but it’s something that’s really combining a lot of my passions.

So in doing that, I have the weekly podcast with Nate called Risky Business, so thank you, Tom Cruise, where we talk about risk and decision making. So kind of, that’s something that obviously it’s a sandbox that I’ve played in for a very, very long time. And then I have just a weekly substack where I write about whatever is on my mind, so I have written about things that have had to do with cheating that I’m thinking about for the book, and then also things like what happened to me and Maria at the World Series.

So it’s just a little playground where I write about whatever’s on my mind that week.

Zachary Karabell: This may be a semantic question, but you pointed it out when you answered no.

Maria Konnikova: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Someone like George Santos, the dearly departed congressional representative from Long Island.

Maria Konnikova: Con artist, not cheater.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what I was going to ask you. And so what’s the distinction there?

Maria Konnikova: Someone who cheats at a game is someone who breaks the rules of the game.

It’s very, very simple. Who goes against the rules of whatever game they’re playing. First of all, Santos, sure, we can say that metaphorically politics is a game, but it’s not really. But con artists are someone who take advantage of other people for their own personal gain. So it’s a little bit different in the sense that you can do that without breaking any rules.

You don’t have to be playing a game. It’s just someone who has nefarious intentions and takes advantage of other people’s trust, other people’s confidence for their own gain.

News Clip: Bluestone argues that con artists like Billy McFarlane, Anna Sorkin, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Elizabeth Holmes are not isolated incidents, but take advantage of a cultural shift where personality and experiences are curated, filtered, and hyped into a digital fantasy.

The heart of all scams, whether we’re talking about today or 100 years ago, is the idea of selling people something that they want, a dream, something that they don’t have access to. The combination of the way we use social media and then the way that you can market on social media has just been this, you know, accelerant that has made it so that, you know, as a scammer, you don’t even have to put on pants and you can do it all from home.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny because I think about cheating in games, I think for most of us, we think about cheating in sports, right, not games per se, but actually organized sports.

Maria Konnikova: Sports is something I’m writing about as well, yeah.

Zachary Karabell: But it’s hard to cheat in sports with refs and rules and people watching.

Maria Konnikova: And yet it happens all the time.

Emma Varvaloucas: So my question about cheating is, is people that do it, especially because you said a lot of these stories weren’t reported in the media, is it just a fantasy that we think that those people like eventually get their just desserts? Or is there just lots of cheating going on and in fact the reward is good, right?

They’re rewarded for doing it at the end of the day.

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, sadly, I think the latter. One of the motivations for this is, I think, as with so many things, sunlight, best disinfectant. So I think it’s actually really good to write about this and it will really help make the industries that I write about stronger because I think it’s actually bad to sweep things under the rug.

I think it’s good to show that people will be held to account and that there’s lower tolerance for it and that people will get what they deserve, but a lot of people, their first instinct is to hide it and to say, I don’t want people to realize that cheating can happen here. I’m going to just ignore it. I’m going to pay people to be quiet. I’m going to make it go away.

And I think that’s a really incorrect attitude, because our goal should be making cheating more and more difficult, making the repercussions more and more serious, making the expected value proposition worse, so that it no longer is in your best interests to cheat, because the downside is so much greater than the upside, that it’s not worth the risk.

By the way, some people are going to cheat anyway, because some of the people I write about are like people who cheat at your home Monopoly game, like those people, they’re going to cheat. Right? Like, why? Why? There’s like nothing. There’s nothing to gain there.

Emma Varvaloucas: I kind of want to ask that question back to you, though.

Like, why? What’s the psychology there?

Maria Konnikova: This will be in the book, Emma. This will be in the book.

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay. All right. Yeah, because I’m curious. I’m curious. Like, for me, okay, I’m going to throw my theory out there. Their sense of self is so weak and unstable that they have to prove at every opportunity, right?

Maria Konnikova: I like that. I like that. The loser theory. So the losers cheat.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Maria Konnikova: It’s fun.

Zachary Karabell: Are you going to opine on that theory or just going to let that hang there? And then we.

Maria Konnikova: We’ll let that hang there.

Zachary Karabell: Okay. So that’s like to be, to be continued.

Maria Konnikova: I need to sell books, people.

Zachary Karabell: No, I get it. I get it. Teasers are very, very important.

I was thinking about the sports cheating, the European soccer championships, we call it soccer, obviously, the world calls it football, were just going on and two teams tied and went into the next round, but had one of them won or one of them lost, there was an accusation that they had purposely tied, i. e. they had cheated. They collectively cheated, which made me wonder, like, could that even go on? I mean, it’s one thing for a team to cheat. Could two teams collude and cheat?

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, absolutely they could. And collusion is actually one of those really difficult topics, because it happens in a lot of games. And it’s absolutely cheating, but some cheating, black and white, right?

Like, it’s really, like, not easy, but like, you can catch it, you can prove it. Collusion is really tough, and so it’s really hard to be able to be like, 100%, you colluded, you’re going to be penalized for this. And so it’s one of those areas where it happens, it ain’t good, and it’s really, really hard to control it to figure out, okay, what actually happened here, which is actually one of the problems that I ran into when I was reporting back in the day on con artists, because people would ask, is X a con artist?

And I would say, Well, here’s what would make this person a con artist. Here’s what wouldn’t. But at the end of the day, it’s a question of intention. And unless we have just absolute proof of a con that happened, we don’t know. We can’t see into their mind unless they tell us, was their intent to deceive or were they a true believer?

Did they actually believe the snake oil they were selling? If they actually believed it, they weren’t a con artist, right? They were a true believer. And that’s a big, that’s a difference. They could be doing the exact same thing, selling the exact same snake oil, yet one of them is a con artist and one of them is a true believer.

When it comes to things like collusion, it’s really, really difficult to ascertain did they do this intentionally? Was it subconscious, right? Did they just kind of soft play each other? Unless they were idiots, and there’s sometimes there’s a paper trail. Sometimes there’s actually like text messages like, okay, if you, you know, throw this game, do this, do that, you get paid X amount or this happens or that happens, in which case, great, we caught you.

But unless you can find something like that, those things are softer and a little bit more difficult because it once again gets into intention. Did you do this on purpose? Was it a concerted effort? What exactly happened? And this has been going on forever, you know, we’ve got the Chicago Black Sox, right?

This is kind of an age old tale where teams and players will throw games, will play in suboptimal ways for some other reasons, and yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s incredibly difficult to solve it because of that inability to point to something and be like, you broke this rule. We disqualify you.

Zachary Karabell: So, you know, in popular culture, the con artists that we think about are either glorified as being pretty damn brilliant, right?

The con artists in The Sting, or the show that Amazon did called Sticky Pete, or the Grifters movies. They were these really brilliant multi level thinkers who were orchestrating really, really complicated multi level things. And then you have the examples of some con artists that we know of in real life who were incredibly successful until they were spectacularly unsuccessful, so Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX or Bernie Madoff, many of which were kind of pyramid scheme cons.

Maria Konnikova: Yep.

Zachary Karabell: They weren’t incredibly intricate when you think about it, they were actually pretty simple. And then often those people either believe some of what they were doing, we don’t really know about Bankman-Fried’s internal reality, or they sort of inadvertently started doing something and they couldn’t get out of it.

It wasn’t reborn of some master plan, it was born more of desperation. Do you feel there are these like brilliant con artists out there populating, or have we kind of taken a human instinct and extrapolated a much more interesting character, narratively convenient?

Maria Konnikova: No, no, I mean, I think that there’s a reason they’re called con artists, right?

They are artists and I think that a lot of them are absolutely brilliant and could be ridiculously successful at almost anything in life and just choose to do this because it’s kind of this addiction almost. I think that there are tons of them out there and I think that for every Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos that we’ve brought down, I’m willing to bet any amount of money that there are more Theranoses out there that are currently being funded by VCs in Silicon Valley, right?

Zachary Karabell: Sure.

Maria Konnikova: Yes, there are bad actors who are incredibly, incredibly good at it and love it, get off on it, and who are never gonna quit. I’ve never met a con artist, by the way, who’s gone straight.

Zachary Karabell: Interesting.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, to bring us back around to the beginning, I’m curious now, other than like the negative effects on people, right?

What’s the skill space between a con artist and like a really, really, really good poker player, right? Cause both of them are.

Maria Konnikova: There’s almost no overlap because poker players, it’s very different because you’re playing by the rules of the game, right? Bluffing is part of the game. You’re actually just learning a skill set at how to play a good game strategically. So in that sense, I mean, they’re strategic actors and they’re good strategic players, but con artists are motivated to take advantage of others in a way that deceives them and goes against the rules of the game that is life. They take advantage of the norms of society and of the fact that most people aren’t down to con us and that society is built on trust, that human beings are nice and kind and hopeful and everything good about human nature is what con artists take advantage of, and flip on their head. And I write about, in The Confidence Game, the dark triad of personality traits, which is something that con artists usually have at least two of the three.

I say at least two because the dark triad is psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, and psychopathy is just ridiculously rare, right? So most people don’t have psychopathy just because, it’s 3 or 4 percent of the population. It’s an incredibly low number.

Zachary Karabell: But as you would have pointed out, it’s not zero.

Maria Konnikova: It’s not zero.

Emma Varvaloucas: Not zero, right?

Maria Konnikova: No. But narcissism and Machiavellianism are kind of the two driving forces of con artists. And narcissism is not just thinking that you’re the center of the universe, but the sense of entitlement, right? The sense of, this is owed to me. This is correct. So it enables you to justify taking from other people because you think that you deserve it more.

So like, I didn’t finish high school, but I’m going to steal this person’s MD credentials and pass myself off as a doctor because I’m smarter than most doctors and I deserve it more. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just righting the world. I’m righting the wrongs of the world. And then Machiavellianism from Machiavelli’s The Prince is the ability to convince people to do what you want them to do, but have them think it’s their own idea.

So they don’t feel like they’re being manipulated by you, they feel like they’re actually kind of doing it of their own volition, because that’s the key of a con, right? A con artist is not, oftentimes they can’t be prosecuted because they haven’t broken any laws, because a con artist doesn’t take, you give, right?

You, a con artist is someone who gets you to trust them. And then you are the one who offers everything and they don’t steal it from you. It’s not like they say give me your money. Madoff, people were begging him to take their money. Please take my money, please.

Zachary Karabell: Right. You think you can accommodate me, you think you can find some space for me.

That was the thing for Madoff.

Maria Konnikova: Exactly. Exactly. So that’s that type. And a poker player is just someone who is good at strategic thinking, good at logic, good at kind of rational thinking, managing emotion, those types of things. That said, there’s overlap because, of course, there are con artists in the poker world, just like there are con artists in journalism, and there are con artists in politics.

You know, we talked about George Santos, and in every single walk of life. Con artists is not like a separate profession. Con artists are all over the world in every single profession and in some professions more than others. I actually think journalism probably has more than its fair share.

Zachary Karabell: Separate from poker, which is much more, I think, a story that you’ve written about as illuminating and your own individual pathway there is both illuminating and kind of inspiring for a lot of people, as you mentioned, it’s execrable for other people, but let’s say for many people it’s more inspiring. But a lot of what you look at are more the undersides of human psyche consciousness, things that they do.

So how do you get plunged into those stories, fascinated by them, almost unlocking a puzzle, without getting plunged into the darkness of many of the people whose stories you are telling?

Maria Konnikova: I mean, it’s really difficult. I am fascinated by the dark side of humanity, always have been, and I’m one of those people who in college took a class that was a joint class with the med school and the law school on the psychology of serial killers, right?

So, like, I find the deviations from the norm absolutely fascinating. So in grad school, I studied individual differences, right? Not these big takeaways from decision making, but individual psychology. And it’s an area that’s very unpopular to study because people like the generalities and the big takeaways.

And I always have been fascinated by the fringe cases and okay, well, get me into the nitty gritty. I want to know about the things that make people unique as opposed to the things that we can generalize. Generalizations are great, but they fail in individual cases. I’ve always been fascinated by that.

And I’ve always been fascinated by the criminal mind. If you look at some of the stories I wrote for The New Yorker that were totally crazy, like I wrote about the mob, I got to meet some surviving members of the Genovese family, and all sorts of really fun stuff, became friends with Meyer Lansky Jr. I find those things really interesting because they really shine a window into humanity, into how we think, and into the best in us as well, because you see kind of the contrast, and you see how society is able to function with accommodating all those different types of people.

The most difficult part for me isn’t, it’s not like I’m spending time with the starkness of being like, Ooh, I should become a con artist. What’s really depressing because I also look at the victims and the people who kind of are on the other side of that, and that’s what really gets me. Sometimes I just despair.

Like sometimes I do get into like these very depressive modes where I’m like, humanity sucks. This is awful. This is just absolutely horrendous. And what gets me through it is to realize that I’ve chosen to focus on a very specific subset of humanity, which is not representative, and that’s not actually what is going on, and that most people are very good, which is what kind of enables us to thrive.

And that by focusing on it, by shedding a light on it, I’m arming people, and I think I’m trying to give people tools to understand. At the end of the day, that’s my goal. You know, I hate to be Pollyanna ish, but like, I do want to make the world a better place in my small way by trying to kind of illuminate some of these darker recesses of the human mind and figure out, okay, how do we deal with them?

How do we respond to them? How do we make good decisions and lead good lives despite those?

Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s a wonderful way to end a fun illuiminating conversation. So I really appreciate your time and your work. You’ve had a fascinating career arc to date. I’m sure There could be some weird unforeseen chapters ahead.

We could come back in 10 years and you’ll be skydiving or

Maria Konnikova: No. Not happening.

Zachary Karabell: Something other, unforeseen and other.

Maria Konnikova: Absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: Maybe you’ll be elected to office.

Maria Konnikova: Oh God, no.

Zachary Karabell: It’s been a pleasure talking with you and good luck with the new book.

Maria Konnikova: Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for the wonderful conversation.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, thank you, Maria.

Zachary Karabell: It’s very easy to get very issue oriented, and I like the fact that we do a lot of conversations that are very issue oriented.

We did the Indian election and taxation. It’s refreshing to just focus on someone who’s had a really interesting life, who writes fascinating things about fascinating and sometimes disturbing people.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. And we didn’t have to point her in any particular Pollyannish direction at all. She got there all by herself.

That was not pre planned, just so everyone knows.

Zachary Karabell: That’s right.

Emma Varvaloucas: There was no pushing for us. No, it’s true, right? Like, we, if you’re talking about progress as a concept, that has to involve the entire scope of humanity. And the entire scope of humanity is not just political issues and environmental issues.

It’s also interior life, psychology, How we make better decisions like we talked about today, art, motivation. I mean, there’s just so many different things, right? And also just the cool factor, right? Like, I feel like Maria just brings the cool factor, you know, you call it inspiring, that’s a more elevated way to explain that, but she’s just freaking badass, you know, the fact that I didn’t get to ask her this. I wonder how she feels about whether anyone could have done this, right? That anyone could have in taken, in taken, the lessons that she did over a year of poker and then become a tournament champion because to me that’s like, okay, now you’ve got to be pretty special.

You’ve got to be pretty intelligent or something is going on there, but I’m curious what she would have said about it.

Zachary Karabell: The poker as skill is clearly a reality, and she clearly developed a high level of skill where many other people who have done the same thing do not, but she also has the humility of even with a high level of skill, there’s a certain amount of chance and luck and things happen.

We know that from very high level sports, right? In order to get to that level, you have to have an incredible amount of skill in order to win against a lot of other people who have an incredible amount of skill, then there is also a certain amount of luck, usually. It’s kind of the lived experience of individual lives, and then there’s the collective story we’re telling, and more and more it feels to me, one of the oddities of our moment is indeed this disjuncture between really rich, interesting interior lives, or careers, or individual stories, which are uplifting and fascinating and sometimes weird and sometimes wonderful, or often both, juxtaposed to a pretty one note, monotonous, oh my god, the sky is falling, collective story.

And, look, we’ve talked a lot about collective stories are often negative, human beings often like drama, all that’s true. And there’s also lots going on that’s bad, so that’s also true. But, there are probably more stories of more interesting people than ever before. There’s certainly also more people than ever before, so it would stand to reason.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, it’s funny. It harkens back to that news item that we talked about a few weeks back with the news being relentless and boring. And there’s just no reason for it to be, right? Because the humanity is not relentless and boring. They’re like quirky and weird and they are always up to something interesting.

I’m reminded as you’re talking about that we have more access to stories and storytellers about someone I went to college with named Max Raskin who is collecting, you know, a not insignificant amount of attention because he has a substack where he does these wacky interviews with people, right?

So he’ll talk to Jonathan Haidt like we did, but they’re going to dig deep about Jonathan’s childhood or like, yeah, just like full scope, you know, different than anything that you see anywhere else. And I think that’s such a prime example of what you’re talking about, right? There are so many different threads that are there to be pulled and that people are actually pulling more so now than ever.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. So, let’s have some more of these conversations going forward, shall we?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: But for now, it was very cool to talk to Maria Konnikova, and thank you all for listening, as always. We will be back next week, same bat time, same bat channel, and with another interview with another person. And send us your ideas, send us your thoughts.

As always, sign up for the newsletter, What Could Go Right? And we’ll take it from there. And you can also read my new substack, the Edgy Optimist, as an adjunct to all of this. Thank you.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone. Thanks, Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.