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[Music] how to avoid getting exploited cheated scammed conned and screwed in life in this episode we'll be looking at the psychology of con artistry and scams this is going to be a practical episode with many useful tips that will save you thousands of dollars and maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout your life so this is worth listening to i have actually quite a bit of personal experience with this is a bit of a personal episode for me um which i'll get into here in a moment but before we get into that i want to tell you a story actually there's going to be a lot of interesting stories throughout this episode so stay tuned for those some of them will be amusing entertaining the first story i have for you is i was at a enlightenment intensive this was maybe five years ago or so i was in canada in the toronto area doing a week-long sort of meditation and contemplation retreat and there we were sharing stories um and it was interesting because there was a man there about in his in his 40s who uh was sharing stories about his family life and he was sharing certain traumas that he went through growing up in canada there he came from a family of of hunters and trappers they would trap all sorts of animals his father and his brothers and so he was part of this and he was telling me about uh this one particular incident where he was telling me the the craftiness of the fox and i still remember to this day it was a very poignant example so he was talking about how tricky these foxes are and what a fox will do a fox will walk up to a house you know near the forest and let's say there's a house cat that lives on this property and the fox will start to jump up and down and get all playful trying to play with this cat and the cat usually the cat would be afraid of the fox uh but but here the fox is jumping up and down and acting all playful because it wants to play with the with the cat at least that's what the cat perceives and so the fox is jumping up and down and it's rolling around kind of frolicking and the cat lets down his guard and the cat gets closer and closer to the fox the fox is jumping up and down the fox is getting closer and closer to the cat and the cat also gets into a playful mood and then finally when the fox is close enough to the cat the fox just jumps up jumps on the cat grabs him by the skull and just crack crushes and cracks his skull open and that's how the fox hunts see what you'll notice if you observe animals in the animal kingdom is that animals in nature use trickery to survive all the time whether it's the fox or some sort of camouflage snake or many many other creatures that do this and actually human beings in this sense are not that much different human beings have turned deception into an art form and into a survival strategy and what you should know is that life is full of people who will cheat scam and con you if you're not careful and if you're as naive and gullible as this house cat so what you have to recognize is that there are foxes out there and you got to be craftier than the fox to avoid getting your skull cracked open so people weaponize cunning and intelligence now even though that's the case you have to be careful not to take the things that i'm saying here and become overly paranoid and overly cautious but uh you do have to stay vigilant against this sort of stuff and so this episode will sort of prepare you because i i feel like a lot of people are very naive about these things and they're very susceptible to being cheated scammed conned and exploited by others who are crafty and have turned this into a a lifestyle for themselves a career so to speak so this episode will help you to become um more wise to the kind of tricks that can be played on you and so here i want to i want to share with you another amusing story and this is a story of a man named victor lessig les lustig victor lustig who uh was a very uh successful and uh popular con artist and he is known as the man who sold the eiffel tower so here i'm going to read you a bit of a a passage from wikipedia about victor lustig and his con with the eiffel tower so quote in 1925 lustig traveled back to france while staying in paris he chanced upon a news article discussing the problems faced with maintaining the eiffel tower which gave him inspiration for a new con at the time the monument had begun to fall into disrepair and the city was finding it increasingly expensive to maintain and to repaint it part of the article made a passing comment that overall public opinion on the monument would move towards calls for its removal which was the key to convincing lustig that using it as part of his next con would be lucrative so after researching what he needed to help him utilize the information from the article lustig sent to work preparing the scam which included hiring a forager to produce fake government stationery for him once he was ready lustig invited a small group of scrap metal dealers to a confidential meeting at an expensive hotel whereupon he identified himself to them as the deputy director general of the ministry of posts and telegraphs in the meeting he convinced the men that the upkeep of the eiffel tower was becoming too much for paris and that the french government wished to sell it for scrap but that because such a deal would be controversial and likely spark public outcry nothing could be disclosed until all the details were thought through lustig revealed that he was in charge of selecting the dealer who would receive ownership of the structure claiming that the group had been selected carefully because of their reputations as honest businessmen his speech included genuine insight about the monument's place in the city and how it did not fit in with the city's other great monuments like the gothic cathedrals and the archde triumph during his time with the dealers lustig kept watch on who would be the most likely to fall for his scam and found his mark in andre poisson an insecure man who wished to rise up among the inner circles of the parisian business community as poisson showed the keenest interest in purchasing the monument lustig decided to focus on him once the dealers sent their bids to him arranging a private meeting with poisson lustig convinced him that he was a corrupt official claiming that his government position did not give him a generous salary for the lifestyle he wished to enjoy believing the sale of the eiffel tower would secure him a place amongst the top businessmen poisson agreed to pay a large bribe to secure ownership of the eiffel tower however once lustig received his bribe and the funds for the monument's sale he soon fled to austria lustig suspected that when poisson found out that he had been conned he would be too ashamed and embarrassed to inform the french police of what he had been caught up in yet despite his belief he maintained a check on the newspapers while in austria his suspicions soon proved to be correct when he could find no reference to his con within their pages and thus he decided to return to paris later that year to pull off the same scheme once more however when when lustig attempted to call another group of dealers and had managed to find a mark among them willing to buy the eiffel tower the police were informed about the scam and he fled to the u.s to evade arrest and quote that's from wikipedia and he went on in the united states to make further cons which you can read about on his wikipedia page quite fascinating so these are the kinds of tactics and maneuvers that con artists engage in and there's a lot of variations on this which we'll be discussing and i'll show some share some tips with you for how to avoid this kind of stuff there's actually a great movie that i'm reminded of from the 1980s a 1988 movie called dirty rotten scoundrels uh with steve martin and michael kane which is sort of sort of a comedy movie about two con artists who are trying to uh out do one another and trying to con some poor young lady of her um of her you know life savings um so that's a great movie to watch on this topic uh but now to bring it to more of a sort of a personal point uh the reason is this issue is personal for me is because actually i grew up in a family where uh where we had a lot of con artistry and um my dad was a bit of a con artist and he he conned people and companies and governments out of hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars and this is how we survived and i have a lot of crazy stories of the kinds of cons and exploits and scams that he would do i won't be sharing all of them uh there's quite a lot there to share i could talk about that for hours but uh the only reason i bring it up is because it gave me a very early exposure in my life as a kid i grew up in this kind of household where this is how survival happened and it gave me uh early exposure to how cons and scams work and it made me very very savvy to this kind of stuff and so i feel like i have some unique insights and i feel like a lot of people are just so naive because they didn't grow up in that kind of household so they don't understand the mind of a con artist where i saw that firsthand for me it was like almost like learning a language you know you learn a language when you're really young you just absorb it and you pick it up and you see how it really works and then you can speak it fluently without even having to study it and i feel like a lot of people have missed out on that and that's why they're easy marks uh and so i want to share with you some of the sort of like tips and insights that i learned from observing this uh very intimately and they were very uh well i should say not very but there were pros and cons to this kind of childhood the pros is that it made me very vigilant and aware and it made me nearly immune to being conned it's very easy for me to see through cons and through con artists which is why for example it's like it's it's just so painly obvious to me with trump for example that he's a con artist the way he behaves is exactly like a con artist but it's funny to me that a lot of people don't see that and they just fall for his cons so that that was the positive the negative though of growing up that way is that it made me somewhat distant it made me cynical it made me overly suspicious and it created some trauma within me um and it took me years to overcome some of that trauma and maybe there's still some of that left that i'm still working through it also instilled in me some bad habits because in my family lying cheating stealing and low integrity behavior was very very commonplace and you were just expected to play along with that and it took me many years to overcome that and to shed some of those bad habits and in the end this sort of lifestyle ended up destroying my family um so it has terrible consequences so i definitely don't recommend living this kind of lifestyle it's it's very dysfunctional and um it leads to bad stuff but like i said most people are naive to this kind of stuff especially in first world countries i find that people are actually more savvy in third world countries where this sort of con artistry is more common but in first world countries in like nice neighborhoods in america i feel like people grew up in these sort of like comfortable cloistered suburbs and they don't know what it's really like to get caught or scammed because that kind of stuff just doesn't exist there or you grow up so sheltered from it that then you become very susceptible to being conned and i feel that a lot of people who are raised in honest households where this kind of behavior is unacceptable or considered immoral they can't even imagine the mind of a con artist and i can help you to understand that cons and scams are inversely proportional to one's level of development and consciousness the less developed you are the less conscious you are the more open you are to using cons and scams to get by in life and to turn that into your career with no moral qualms about it because this is just how you survive in the same way that you know when the fox is being crafty in the way that it hunts the fox is not feeling guilty about it this is just the way the fox survives this is how it hunts and so it is for a lot of con artists and scammers out there which is why uh in third world countries actually countries like china india russia nigeria and elsewhere like that uh scams and cons are extremely common and in those kind of countries if you want to grow up in those kind of countries like you're going to be exposed to that kind of stuff very early on and you're going to become very savvy to it and this is why a lot of times when first worlders travel around to third world countries they get scammed and conned so easily these are very common kinds of stories you know some rich americans go to china or to russia to india and they get caught up in a con because that kind of stuff is not as prevalent in america although of course it exists here but it's way way worse in a country like china india or russia so what you must understand is that cons and scams are how low consciousness people survive it's a survival strategy so don't try to take it too personally desperate people people who are desperate to feed their family they will lie cheat and scam their way into doing that and if you're into cons and scams yourself or your family is it's crucial that you commit to reforming yourself or to extricating yourself out of that toxic family situation because living the life of a con artist or even adjacent to a card artist having a con artist or scammer in your life whether it's a family member or a friend something like that will ultimately end up destroying your life these people cannot help themselves they don't like to change they keep coming up with new cons and scams and so you need to be able to distance yourself and if you are part of that you have to stop doing that otherwise it will destroy your life and so really this just goes to the sort of classic buddhist principle you know one of the buddhist principles is right livelihood it's important if you want to live a good life and you want to develop yourself and grow your consciousness and all this and become successful and happy in a genuine way that you understand the importance of this principle of right livelihood there are right ways to make a living in the world and there are wrong ways to make a living in the world and this is not a moral judgment this is simply a consequence of karma if you live in the wrong ways karma will come back around eventually it'll boomerang on you and it'll get you and you will lose your all your wealth all your success uh your reputation you will lose your friends your family and maybe even your life if you get caught up in this kind of stuff on the other hand if you practice right livelihood and you work hard and you're honest in the way that you work you don't scam people you don't cheat people then this is the true path towards success and towards happiness i've actually had even though i am pretty savvy to being con and scammed i still had experiences in my life growing up where you know early experiences where i got duped in various ways i'll share some of those with you so for example um one of the earliest experience i can remember maybe i was like 10 years old and there was i was into video games at that time and i had all these video game magazines and every one of these video game magazines they seem to have like this two-page full ad inside the um magazine at the time this was back in the mid 90s or so where there was like a sweepstakes you can send them five dollars and enter the sort of sweepstakes and then what they would do is they would have a grand prize and on this two-page ad they would show you the grand prize and the grand prize was like this ultimate entertainment system that you could get it included like a big screen tv and a satellite dish and like a stereo system with surround sound speakers like you know like the works and like a bunch of different video game consoles just like everything you got like the full i don't know that was probably like a 10 or 20 000 like full home entertainment system like at that time to me like as a young kid i'm like oh my god i love this thing i just want that entertainment system right so of course i'm going to enter the sweepstakes and the way that it worked is that you send them five dollars and then what they would do is every month they would send you like a little puzzle in the mail this was back in before the internet in the mail they will send you this puzzle you have to solve this puzzle on like a paper it's like a sort of like a word puzzle you solve it and then you send it back to them and every time the every month basically the puzzles got harder and you have to keep solving them and solving them and solving them and also you kept paying them more and more every month and then as you you know as that progresses eventually i think that was supposed to work is that people were supposed to like fail the puzzles and then they drop out drop out drop out and the last man standing in the in this whole puzzle scheme or game ends up winning the grand prize that's how it was set up but it was very sneaky the way it was set up because they didn't tell you up front that you would be investing more and more every month they made it seems like oh it's only five dollars but then with every puzzle they would sucker you in because they would like raise the stakes of what you would win they would say oh okay so you paid five dollars last month but if you want to win an even better entertainment system with like you know we'll include a second satellite dish or we'll include a second game console or something like that then you pay another five dollars and of course you want that so you now you know you there's that sunk cost balance so you pay another five dollars and then the next month they up the stakes even more then you pay another five dollar and you keep doing that and doing that i didn't lose a lot of money in this thing but uh this was formative for me because actually at the time i showed this to my dad before i entered into this sweepstakes and he he told me that this is just a waste of time and a waste of money i didn't believe him so i did it anyways uh but then as i get got suckered into it more and more and more eventually i realized that wait a minute what am i doing here what are the chances that i'm actually gonna win this thing the chances were of course zero and probably nobody won that entertainment system it was just a way of getting money out of people and uh and so eventually i realized that and that was important for me because i saw how i got sucked into it i saw how my own desire for this entertainment system was used against me i saw how they kind of baited me in with that sunk cost fallacy getting me to pay a little bit more every month and getting me all excited about it um and so i didn't end up losing a lot of money probably not more than 100 which is really nothing but that taught me such a valuable lesson uh at such a young age and then for the rest of my life i would avoid these sorts of sweepstakes and similar schemes another funny story i'll share with you is that when i was a little bit older maybe like 14 years old um this was the early internet days like the late 90s um and somehow i got sucked into a scheme for buying property on mars uh this was this was hilarious so some company set up a website during the very early internet era where they started selling property on the planet mars and the way they framed it on their website is that like we have the official rights to sell property on march of course they didn't basically anybody can set up a website you can still set up a website today claiming to sell property on mars but anyways they would have like an actual map of you know of mars and they would actually show you a little a little square of where your property would be and then you send them like 100 or something and then they actually send you a certificate sort of it looks official right it's got a like a foil seal on it and it's got someone's signature on it it looks like a diploma almost like the sort of like official certificate or deed of your martian property and of course the the pitch was the way they pitched it to is like you know mankind is good you know has already been to the moon the next place mankind is going to mars and wouldn't it be nice to already like you know have a piece piece of that action a piece of that property like what's mars real estate gonna be worth a hundred years from now you know it's gonna be worth millions so get in early you know get on on the ground floor and i was so naive and i think my brother my brother was into it too i think at the time i can't remember maybe a friend a brother a friend i don't remember who but somebody else was doing this with me and um and so we just kind of like we we had this fantasy in our minds that oh you know we're going to own a piece of martian property how cool would that be so we ended up doing that and of course later i i realized of my own recognizance just how absurd and ridiculous that whole scheme was of course nobody is authorized to sell property on mars um i'm sure there were many different kinds of websites that were you know self-appointedly just selling this kind of stuff anyone can can make some certificate claiming that it's official but of course in reality the way that property on mars is going to work is that whoever gets there first and gets to defend that property that's who's going to really own it and in fact i think there's like international treaties that say that no country can clay claim to lunar property or martian property it's going to be based on a sort of like first come first serve basis so anyways yeah that's that i got scammed a little bit there too another scam that i experienced was that uh i would go to subway when i was young probably around the same age maybe 15 years old i would go to this subway and there was a little box there where you can drop your business card or something where they offered a chance to win a free gym membership so anyways i put some kind of business card in there with my name on it and then i got a call back like a month later telling me that i won a free gym membership to like 24 hour fitness it was like a 300 value of gym membership i'm like okay cool that's that's awesome i wanted to go to the gym at that point hadn't really been and couldn't really afford it so i got all excited about that but then when i actually came they're like okay so you have to like now come in to the gym and we'll set you up with the membership and all that stuff we'll get all set up for you so i come in there trying to get all this stuff set up and then as that's happening they start to upsell me they don't just give you a free membership no strings attached they start to upsell you and then eventually what ends up happening is that by the time they're done upselling you and they they fill your mind with all these you know upgrades and other things that you can do you end up owing them like 300 so really then what i realized is like oh so that that little box at subway with the free gym membership that was that was not them giving away a free gym membership that was actually them using that as like an advertisement for their gym and then even when you win the free membership they're gonna earn money on you anyways not to mention all the other business cards that they gather you know they probably gather a hundred or thousand business cards over a month and then they get to like email all those people call all those people and upsell to all those people so i realized that it was a scam or um sort of like an elaborate marketing strategy that preys on your desire for something free which is which is one of the patterns that you'll notice with these kinds of scams uh then later when i was maybe 24 years old i actually got scammed through a phishing email i had a a yahoo at the time yahoo had like an advertising platform i had an advertising platform account through yahoo and i got an email into my inbox saying that like something is going on with my account i need to click this link and log into my yahoo account to make sure that everything is on board and so i quickly did that and then not realizing the link that i clicked on was a phishing link like it it led to some website that looked like yahoo but it was like a fake yahoo i logged into it and really that website stole my login information for my yahoo account my account account was linked to my bank account because i was using that to pay for various kinds of ad campaigns and and then like the next day i noticed that five thousand dollars was missing from my bank account and the reason that was because they got my login information for the yahoo account then they use that yahoo account to make some sort of big purchase and then somehow siphon the money to themselves so i actually ended up getting a charge back i called my bank and i was able to get that reverse so i was able to get that money back but um but that was the only time that i got phished through an email this was this was very early you know now people are sort of like aware of how phishing emails work but back then this was still very early and so i didn't i didn't know what phishing was and now i know so i got scammed that way i got scammed and basically robbed of twenty five thousand dollars later a few years later after that from a uh by a by a business partner that i was doing business with so basically uh my first online business had to do with generating leads for the insurance industry and so i was generating leads and sending them to to another company that was reselling them and so they were kind of our middleman we were using them for that and um what ended up happening so we were sending them hundreds of leads over the course of a month and these leads were pretty pricey each one of our leads that we generated was like 110 dollars per lead and we would be sending hundreds of these leads every week so over a month we might send them 500 leads a thousand leads times 110 each so you know it adds up and they would only pay us at the end of the month and um from the very beginning i suspected this would be a problem because i'm wondering like well what happens if we terminate our relationship uh we're going to be owed for like a month worth of leads and what's going to be the incentive of this company to pay us for for that because the lead generation industry and the online marketing industry they're pretty shady there's like shady characters you just certain industries just attract people with low integrity and so i i knew that the the business partner i was dealing with there wasn't really high integrity and i suspected that they wouldn't pay us and sure enough that's exactly what happened after we terminated our our business um they ended up owing us for like a thousand leads and it was about twenty five thousand dollars and i actually had to do a lawsuit against them in canada the other problem is that they were located in canada so i'd actually fly to fly to canada i have a whole episode from years ago where um when i talk about this and and so basically i got scammed for twenty five thousand dollars i flew to canada i had to argue the case in a canadian courtroom myself i didn't have a lawyer i had to argue with myself luckily i ended up winning the case but even though i won the case and i was awarded the 25 000 i was never able to get it back because it's one thing to win you know an award legally and it's another thing to be able to collect it especially from another country so i lost out on 25 000 there um another interesting scam that comes to mind is that i remember my brother and i were into online games and uh we were into this game called eve online i think it still exists it's kind of an old game though um but eve online is like notorious for scammers because it's sort of like a libertarian fantasy on eve online it's all like player versus player competitive online multiplayer gaming and people are notorious for running scams there anyways uh i remember for christmas i brought bought my brother a christmas gift of like some amount of eve credits like it was a couple million eve credits this was maybe 10 10 years ago or so and i gifted him this and then and he was really into the game at that point and he was going to use the credits to buy himself some like cool ship and other cool stuff in the game and i think it was like i might have paid like 200 for that couple million eve credits at the time and then um and then i found out from him a few days later that he was going to buy himself this great ship part of this guild that was supposed to be helping him to to secure this great ship in the game and then it was actually an elaborate scam they ended up scamming all the money he lost all the in-game credits that i gifted him and um and then he quit the game because he was so frustrated with the scam and if you read about eve online this is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of scams that and and cons and the kind of machinations that happen with eve online it's it's like a libertarian hellscape there i mean everybody's scheme against everybody else and that's just sort of like the the ethos of the of the community and um yeah you will have people in the game infiltrate guilds and be part of of these guilds because guilds are very important they will be part of these guilds and they will spend years infiltrating guilds to finally you know backstab them sabotage them and like rob them of all their money and then basically destroy whole guild from years of secret covert like espionage work it's quite brutal and um and uh you know very like real in that sense it's not like a game it's like real life and then another story that comes to mind just recently my mom was telling me about some relatives we have back in russia and my uncle he took his um he basically took his life savings and he wanted to buy a condo in russia in moscow so he purchased a condo it was going to be a new development they were building a whole new high-rise where one of the build one of the condo units would be his he paid them for it he paid them cash up front and then um the company went bankrupt and years have passed now and he still doesn't have his condo and he probably never will that kind of stuff is extremely common in russia very easy to get scammed out of your life savings that way so these are just sort of a a random collection of stories from my own life i'm sure you have some of your own uh but it's these kinds of examples that made me even more savvy to being conned and scammed and exploited so anyways now let's move on to the actual tips for how to avoid these kinds of scams because really this is pretty serious uh if you're not careful with how you manage your finances and if you're very naive and gullible you can easily lose your entire life savings you can lose your retirement you can get screwed over in various kinds of investments you can lose your house you can lose your condo you can lose your car your boat you know very high value assets there are like it can this kind of stuff can destroy your life if you're not careful so it really is worth spending some time contemplating how these kinds of cons and scams work and making yourself immune to them because i'm telling you this can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout the course of your life all right so here's a list of the top areas where you can get conned and scammed this is an important list because if you're going into these areas dealing with these particular domains of life you should be extra careful extra savvy extra vigilant about getting scammed so any kind of large cash purchases a car a house a boat this kind of stuff especially if you're paying money up front if you're making big deposits if a lot of money is involved tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars you've got to be super super careful because there's always going to be connors and scam scammers when big money like that is at play next is the domain of business partnerships and legal contracts you can get easily screwed over with any kind of legal contract that's why you have to read them carefully don't just take someone's word on a legal contract it's not just okay to just sign a legal contract you have to read the whole thing especially if you do any kind of business if you're engaging in any kind of business partnerships where it's you and some other company that you're partnering with you have to be very careful with how those partnerships are negotiated how the terms are set when you're going to be paid you have to be extra careful about situations where you're delivering goods to somebody and then they're promising to pay you 30 days or 60 days afterwards right because they could go out of business or they could run out of money or they could just decide not to pay you and how are you going to enforce that in many cases you can't or it might take you years and years in a courtroom to enforce it or it might cost you tens of thousand dollars of dollars to hire an attorney to enforce it and even then you might not be able to get your money back even if you win the lawsuit so be careful there the next category of of thing is investments wall street crypto nfts celebrity endorsements and real estate all of these are rife with scams and cons and people trying to get your money and especially nowadays with crypto and nfts there's so much scam potential there it's like the hot new thing but probably 90 of crypto and nfts are just pure out scams pump and dump schemes and so forth so you have to be extremely careful which is not to say that crypto is invalid or that there's no legitimate use to it or some legitimate use to nfts but just like the hype and the mania that you see right now uh around crypto and nfts you can tell that most of it is way over inflated um way over marketed and a lot of it is just scams and people are losing thousands and even millions of dollars in these scams and in general any kind of investment products especially exotic new investment products that promise you a lot of return on your investment watch out the next category is loans credit cards payday loans and financial instruments of various kinds these are rife for exploitation the next category is insurance health insurance life insurance annuities car insurance home insurance travel insurance the entire insurance industry is extremely sleazy scammy the way they craft the insurance contracts a lot of times you may not get what you think you're going to get in terms of payouts for your insurance there's all sorts of caveats and ways that they will screw you over so watch out for that a lot of money is made in insurance and basically insurance is a scheme for exploiting people that's why people who work at insurance make a lot of money because you don't have to work very hard but yet you can make a lot of money through selling insurance it tends to be a very shady industry and in general you should watch out for these industries that are shady and be extra extra careful when you're doing business with those kinds of industries the next category is marketing ads sales discounts freebies free promotions the way pricing is done on products coupons rewards cards rewards programs all this kind of marketing stuff that is trying to save you money uh actually all of it is designed to make money for these companies so whenever you're being promised that oh you're going to save a lot of money with this coupon a lot of money with a sale a lot of money with this discount just think about it a little bit like why would some giant corporation who doesn't know or care about you be trying to save you money they're not trying to save you money they're making themselves money so if they're trying to save you money if that's what they're pitching to you you have to start to think how that's actually making money for them and a lot of times their marketing programs and campaigns their ads they're very deceptive they try to lure you in with sort of fake cheap pricing sales and discounts and all this then there's upsells that they do they promise you freebies to get you in then once you get your freebie then they upsell you or they have extra charges extra fees etc etc and that's how they get you so always be wary of of sales and deals that seem too good to be true because that's that's them baiting you in that's the little bait that they put on the hook to hook you the next category is business in a box solutions and get rich quick schemes this is huge the get rich quick scheme industry is one of the most shadiest and scammiest industries because people who want to get rich quick these are the perfect marks these are the perfect gullible fools to con these kinds of people they're desperate they want money fast and then they're gonna they're gonna pay or do anything to get their money fast or to get some business in a box idea or solution or system and then of course none of these things are gonna be sustainable none of them are really gonna work and you're not actually going to get rich quick you're going to lose all your money what little money you have you're going to lose all that and end up with nothing that's generally how these get rich quick schemes work they prey on on the desperate and the gullible the next category is passive income schemes or promises of passive income where you have to do any work but you get money every month and mlm schemes multi-level marketing schemes these are notorious notorious scams basically their pyramid schemes the next category is door to door salesman you have to be careful because of course the door-to-door salesman comes to your door tries to sell you something and then you're never going to see that person again you're never going to be able to return the product the warranty who are you going to call for the warranty like that kind of stuff speaking of which the next category of exploit and scam is money back guarantees warranties and testimonials a lot of companies offer money back guarantees that they don't actually honor you should basically expect that if somebody is offering you a money back guarantee on some product they're probably not going to honor it you should also expect that most warranty programs are scams and a lot of warranty programs will not be honored or if they will under very strict conditions with a lot of caveats and a lot of exceptions and exclusions and then you should also understand that a lot of testimonials that you see online testimonials various kinds of products they're just fake so you shouldn't trust testimonials or if they're not fake they're extremely cherry-picked and they're not representative of the actual results the product will deliver for you the next category is employment negotiations and basically any kind of contracts employment contracts and so on so when you're negotiating your salary with an employee any kind of job contract make sure you get it reviewed by your attorney make sure you read all the fine print and look at all the ways that the contract could screw you over or that you could be screwed out of your salary your bonus your you know whatever is promised to you the next category is lotteries sweepstakes and free giveaways these are notorious scams and a waste of your time and your money that's the bottom line with those you should just immediately avoid any lottery sweepstakes or free giveaways for the rest of your life nothing good will come from that even even winning one of these lotteries sweepstakes or free giveaways you think you actually won but you didn't you didn't win you're gonna actually end up losing in the end the next category interestingly enough is self-help the self-help industry is actually notoriously scammy and exploitative the self-help industry and also the business seminar industry there's a whole industry for teaching people how to start their businesses and becoming financially independent and um the way that this kind of stuff is sold and taught is very scammy they do a lot of upselling they use various kinds of pressure sales tactics to get you to buy more and more of their courses their products their books their seminars their workshops eventually you end up investing thousands of dollars tens of thousands of dollars in these very expensive courses that promise you that you're going to become a great entrepreneur or they're going to show you some secret technique for how to corner the market or whatever um and that's going to pay you great dividends and then of course it doesn't pan out unfortunately a lot of the self-help industry is stage orange spider-dynamic stage orange and a lot of them use high pressure sales tactics to upsell you on self-help products that you don't really need that are way overpriced and they know how to get you to buy that stuff the most self-help industry seminars are designed first and foremost using this kind of structure in order to to slowly lure you in into buying higher and higher priced courses and they end up wasting a lot of your money this way the next category is everything related to sex and to love see and this is such an obvious one because sex and love we crave this so much these are like deep cravings that every human being has to be loved and to have sex and so of course this makes us very susceptible to being conned and scammed and exploited in this domain and there's like sub-domains of this domain so you have to be very careful about not getting exploited in sexual relationships when you're dating in intimate relationships when it comes to pornography the purchasing of pornography porn sites porn sites that have a lot of like shady scammy stuff like a lot of times you enter your your credit card number into a porn site they will sell your credit card number they will overcharge you that kind of stuff uh strip clubs are notorious for um for robbing you of your money exploiting you conning you strippers are really good at that strippers have better game than than puas prostitutes if it comes to prostitution that's that's a very shady industry where you can easily get scammed and exploited and the pickup industry even though i've taught aspects of pickup and i have a lot of experience with pickup i also like when i entered the pickup industry i was very very aware of how shady the industry is how shady the coaches are it attracts sort of like the scum or the bottom of the barrel type of people the people who sell pick up material sell pick up courses market pick up to you promise you to get laid with girls all this sorts of stuff i'm not saying that pickup doesn't work a lot of the advice is great but you have to be very careful because of well honestly the coaches that are selling pickup products and services a lot of times they are gaming the guys more than they're gaming the girls because their attitude towards women is is pretty shallow and they game women and they manipulate women and of course that attitude that then just translates to the guys who are the customers who also want to learn how to manipulate women so people who are into manipulating a lot people who are trying to teach you how to manipulate women you have to understand that these people have no ethical qualms they will also then use those same tactics to manipulate men to get them to pay a lot of money so they will lie they will exaggerate they will promise you things that aren't true and they will exploit you so be careful and if you're a woman you have to be careful with the um with pickup guys who are into pickup because they will manipulate you and exploit you and and basically use you for sex that's the classic one classic draft for women another domain where you can get scammed and cheated is with hidden fees and monthly subscriptions and more and more companies are moving to these monthly subscription models whether it's video games or software services or whatever else and that's how they get you joining any kind of fringe communities or groups cults religion spirituality uh oddly enough funnily enough there's a there's a lot of exploitation scamming and calling that comes within the spiritual community and the new age community so you have to be extra careful there and that one is is particularly devious because the new age community and the spiritual community it seems like oh well you know spirituality in the new age it's it's non-dogmatic it's not ideological it's beyond religion it's not like an orthodox religion um and it's all about love and it's about all about sort of like community and being together and having compassion and being conscious all this sorts of stuff right you get all these ideas in your head and then of course that makes you the perfect target for scams and exploits once you're you're a part of such a community uh i've heard in many many cases where spiritual communities and cults leech tens of thousands of dollars from their followers and members basically brainwashing them and it becomes especially easy because you know as part of the new age and spirituality you can say that oh you know material material concerns aren't important right and then so it's like well if material concerns aren't important then why don't you just give me all your money that's how it kind of works and then if you're brainwashed into that you might actually do that you might actually say yeah why do i need my life savings why don't i just give my life savings to this guru he needs it to enlighten the world something like that the next category is doctors dentists alternative medicine mainstream medicine miracle cures and other kinds of new age cures so the medical industry is extremely exploitative and scammy and it's funny because they screw you on both ends you can kind of divide the medical industry into two halves you've got the mainstream traditional orthodox kind of like western medicine that you find just you know normal doctors and hospitals and insurance companies they have they have designed basically in the united states and in many other countries too the health insurance industry is designed in such a way to be like a cartel that screws you over for any kind of medical complication that you have and service that you need it's so baked into the system that most people don't even realize that it is a cartel and it's it's completely a rigged game um [Music] these insurance companies are overcharging they're denying coverage for various kinds of conditions the doctors are corrupted and influenced by the pharmaceutical companies who pay them to pitch their pills and products um a lot of times these doctors are so corrupted that they end up they end up selling you and prescribing to you pills and medications that are dangerous or that you don't even need or that will harm your health long term just because they're incentivized to do so by the big pharma companies their marketing campaigns and so forth so there's that whole problem within mainstream medicine but then you say well okay so screw that that's all sort of like very corporate and you know corporations are greedy we all know that so then you make this you kind of swing your pendulum towards the alternative medicine field the other half of this equation and sort of like the new age community and there they promise you various kinds of miracle cures and natural remedies and ointments and basically snake oil um they prey on your hopes and they prey on the the fact that oh you know this is this is an all-natural way you know and we're not very corporate here so we're not going to screw your cause we're not some big giant greedy big pharma company but actually what they're selling you might even be more dangerous and even worse than what you find from some big pharma company um and this is actually been very very obviously the case with what happened with covid so see a lot of people have reacted against the covet vaccines by thinking like well the cova vaccines are manufactured by the government and by big pharma and by like these giant corporations which only care about profits that's true a lot of these companies only care about profits and there is corruption in those industries and in the government that's true but then they say like they kind of swing their pendulum to the opposite end and they just go for like miracle cures and unscientific treatments like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or you know whatever other you know alternative treatments there are out there that it's actually even worse it's worse than a vaccine and so people are very confused about this like they take they're reacting against the corporate mainstream media or government or corporations and then they end up painting themselves into a corner where they're more like new agey or alternative medicine and that actually ends up hurting them even more right just because just because the giant corporations are are hungry for profits doesn't mean that your alternative cure is actually healthy or good for you or scientifically valid so you have to be careful you have to use nuance another domain where you can get scammed and exploited is of course politics and within media talk radio fox news alex jones tugger carlson people like this these are grifters who are selling various kinds of like right-wing ideologies and of course it's not exclusive to writing ideologies you can see this with left as well but it's very very blatant with right-wing ideologies they sell you right-wing ideologies and then they use that to get donations from you to get you to be politically active to participate and so a lot of the stuff that we saw over the last five years with the whole trump maga phenomena was basically a giant scam and con that was perpetrated by trump and his lackeys and sympathizers on like 30 percent of the american population that's what's so amazing like in history when we look back on the trump era 50 years from now 100 years from now that whole you know four years five years of trump and the maga movement and the whole you know storming of the capital and the big lie about stealing the election and election fraud and all this sort of stuff like all of that and all of trump's antics it's all going to be just seen as one giant con basically a con artist was able to fool 30 of the american population into blindly supporting him that's pretty remarkable and of course the only reason that was possible is because of the low consciousness of far right ideology you can easily use far-right ideology to [ __ ] people to manipulate them and to basically turn them into political zombies where they end up acting on your behalf to do despicable things like trying to overturn democracy or storming the capital and that's precisely what makes right-wing ideology lower consciousness than left-wing ideology now i'm not saying left-wing ideology can't be hijacked and used for selfish and nefarious purposes it can but less so than right-wing ideology and that distinction is lost on a lot of people because they want to make a false equivalence between left and right but they're not equivalent as i've explained elsewhere uh another domain is social media friend requests and emails so you have to be very careful with phishing emails you have to be very careful on social media people trying to become your friend messaging you out of the blue trying to slide into your dms or whatever else a lot of times they have an ulterior motive they don't really want to be your friend they want to get something out of you they want to scam you in some way they want to manipulate you in some way another domain is tourist situations when you're a tourist traveling around you're at a disadvantage because you're naive you're in a new country there's probably a language that you don't know how to speak or fully understand and so you're inexperienced in a new place and that makes you very vulnerable and a lot of times tourists get scammed by locals by various kinds of businesses timeshare programs and other kinds of scams that tourists fall for another domain is the dark net drugs and psychedelics of course the entire drug industry is very shady and if you're going to be purchasing illegal drugs through the internet or even semi-legal drugs through the gray sort of market um research chemicals and this sort of stuff you have to be extra careful because a lot of times these are scams or exploits and they will steal your money and of course on the dark net if you're gonna be using the dark net um that's notorious for all sorts of scams and the last domain is when companies close and go out of business you have to be careful when your company that you're working for as a salaried employee is on the brink of going broke you have to be very careful that you get your money from them you get your salary from them as soon as possible and you don't do any free work for them with you know promises that they'll pay you back later because in practice they won't in fact this happened to my brother he worked for an online startup company in texas he worked for them for like five years as a programmer and it was obvious that the company was not doing well financially and that they were they were bleeding money every year and you know him and i we talked about that and i always wondered like you know where they're getting their money from they had some wealthy investors i think from the middle east or something like that but in any situation where your business or your company that you're working for is not actually generating profit itself but is relying on some sort of external investor you can tell that eventually the money is going to run dry the investor's going to pull out and what ends up happening is the company has no more money to pay its employees and so sure enough that company went broke after about five years the investors pulled out um and my brother lost a month or two of of work that he did for them under salary he just lost that money because they couldn't afford to pay him so be careful about that all right so that's the list of domains um now let me give you a list of examples of like sometimes there's an outright con or scam but other times you get exploited in more subtle ways and i want to give you some examples of this so you're that you're kind of savvy about this like for example i really noticed this recently when i was buying a house i bought my house a couple of years ago right in the middle of covet actually a little bit before covid and it was interesting because it was my first time buying a house and it was a big purchase and um i went into it very eyes open very careful because you know anytime a big purchase is involved where you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars you have to be very very careful because you know you can get screwed in many different ways so i went to the situation with my eyes open but even so um i could see how i was being exploited in various ways like one of the ways that they'll exploit you when you're buying a new house not an old house but like a brand new one that they're building for you which is what i'm buying is a new construction what they do is the way they sell it to you is they sell it to you by showing you a model of the house so usually they'll have three or four models which are houses they already built that are just completely decked out they're decked out with fancy tile fancy wallpaper fancy wood trims and fancy backyard and lunch like fancy lighting fancy furniture like everything like these houses so what's funny is that let's say a house like in a neighborhood of new construction you're looking to buy a house that maybe cost 600 000 on average right that's what they want to sell you but the models that they show you those houses are decked out with an additional double that amount of decor upgrades and so on so when you're walking through a model for a six hundred thousand dollar house what you have to realize is that actually that model cost the builder 1.2 million but of course you walk through it you're so amazed like oh my god this house is amazing this is what i'm going to get for 600 000 a house like this incredible of course i want to buy it and then when you get your real house it doesn't look nearly as nice because it doesn't have all the upgrades but when you sign the contract and you made the deposit you were if you're naive you were assuming that your house was going to be somewhat similar to this million dollar house this model that they showed you so i knew that was the case but even still like it's it's so difficult not to get um hypnotized by these new house models because they're they're just so gorgeous they're so well done they're so well decorated so one of the techniques that i use to to kind of ground myself in reality when i was buying this house is first of all i asked them to go see actual houses that they were selling to customers so it's one thing to look at models because those are all decked out with furniture and trimmings and stuff it's another thing to actually say show me a house that you just finished building that's not decked out yet with no upgrades in it you go and look at that that's actually what you're buying and there's going to be a night and day difference between those two so that helps to get you a realistic idea of what you're paying for furthermore like i actually went with the real estate agent who was selling me the house i went with her through one of these model houses and every item in the house i would point to and say is that standard or is that an upgrade so like is the flooring in this house standard or upgrade and she would say it's an upgrade it's like is the backyard standard or upgrade it's an upgrade is the lighting the canned lighting in the house is that a standard or upgrade oh it's an upgrade so like everything was an upgrade of course and that gives you an idea of you know of what you'll actually be getting and then of course i would also ask i asked for an itemized list of every possible upgrade and what it costs so i got like a a 50-page document that contained literally every possible upgrade that the house could have and what it costs and so i sat through and i looked through it very meticulously just to get an idea of what it would actually cost for me to make the upgrades that i wanted on my house and in the end i actually came out on top and i got the kind of house that i wanted and i'm pretty happy with the house that i bought but like i was i was very meticulous in fact i was so meticulous that the the lady who was telling me the house she's like oh my god like you're the most meticulous person you're like the most anal person who's ever purchased a house for me like she was making fun of me but i knew while she was making fun of me for that like i knew the importance of doing that because if you don't do that if you just kind of bumble in there like a fool um you're going to get screwed other subtle exploits the food industry is great at exploiting you you'll notice that have you noticed that when you purchase a bag of chips at the store potato chips or you purchase a bottle of supplements or you purchase a bottle of like olive oil a lot of times the packaging is designed in such a way to make the package look twice as large as actually what you're getting in the package like you can get a bag of lace potato chips that's this big but only half of it is actually filled with chips that's a subtle way that laze is exploiting you right because they could make the package exactly the volume of the chips but if they did that you would actually you wouldn't want to pay as much for it because subconsciously you would think like why am i paying that much money for such such a small bag of chips if you're paying you know five dollars you want a giant bag of chips subconsciously this all registers in your mind and all of these companies know that uh sometimes when you buy a bottle of olive oil if you look underneath the bottle of olive oil there's like a giant like dimple in there that goes like halfway up the bottle so you think you're getting a bottle like this but actually the the bottom inside of it is carved out like a third of it is carved out so you're really you're only getting two-thirds of what you thought you were getting uh supplements are also like this you can get a bond a bottle of pills that's a supplement that looks like this big like you know a bottle of vitamin c or something and then you open it and like a third of it is empty why do they do that because subconsciously this gets you to pay more money than you otherwise would another subtle exploit for example is college textbooks college textbooks are deliberately designed to exploit college students to sell you a new textbook for some ridiculous amount of money every single year by just you know changing a few parts of the textbook nothing substantial is being added to it so that you couldn't even buy old used books because you know the the teacher and the curriculum is going to use the latest edition with you know assigning homework assignments from that latest edition they changed the homework assignments and the numbers so that you couldn't use the old editions to get you to you know pay them more than you should in a certain sense the entire university system is like a scheme to exploit students by getting them to get loans and this is especially true for for many private universities especially true for online universities talk about a shady industry online universities there you go and the kind of loans that they want you to get on their behalf to pay for their shitty education uh the medical industry with the the way that hospitals bill you um it's it's absurd i mean it it basically should be criminal like i remember i wanted i needed i was i was having a bad reaction to some antibiotics that i took a year or two ago and i actually called i was thinking i might need to go to the emergency room for some of the reactions i was having and i called a few of the hospitals in my area just to find out like what would it cost without insurance because i didn't have insurance what would it cost to go to the emergency room and it's so galling because you call the receptionist there and you just want to know you know what does it cost just to get a basic admittance into the emergency room and they don't they don't give you a price and they actually teach the receptionist there to [ __ ] you about why they can't give you a price i mean they know how much it costs this is not a mystery to them this is something they do on a daily basis um but of course they don't reveal the prices to why so that once you go there then they can charge you some ridiculous amount and then you can't dispute it you didn't even have an option to to shop around they don't want you shopping around emergency rooms they want you just to go to the nearest emergency room when you have an emergency and then because you have an emergency since it's an emergency you don't have the luxury of shopping around see i was trying to shop around like early before my emergency got so severe that i had to go there i was trying to do a little shopping around beforehand but they don't want you doing that why because then they can't they can't charge you the maximum rates they don't want you thinking about what it costs they also don't want you thinking about how overpriced it is other subtle exploits you should be careful of is in intimate relationships both for men and for women there are certain kinds of women who will exploit men for financial favors and then there are certain kinds of men who will exploit women who are gullible enough who fall in love with them then those men who are deadbeats will exploit those women you know to get money out of them to pay for their loans and so forth so you have to be very careful not to mix your love life with your finances make a clear separation between these two if somebody truly loves you if you're in love with a man or a woman then you might think like well because i love her or because he loves me we should be able to just share money freely back and forth and it's okay for me to to buy this thing and for him to buy this thing and for for me to take out alone on his behalf this kind of stuff like no as soon as you mix your love with finances that's going to ruin your love you see true love is not going to require you to take out a loan true love is not going to require you to buy some expensive thing like some really expensive jewelry or some expensive fancy vacation like if a woman really loves you she's not going to require those things of you and and if a man really loves you and respects you he's not going to be trying to get money out of you if your partner is doing that that's a huge red flag huge red flag so those are just some examples of like subtle exploits that are i wouldn't call them scams per se but they're definitely exploiting you in subtle ways and a lot of times these subtle exploits they're so subtle and they're so systemic i would call it a systemic scam in which the people that are playing part of the system and actually actualizing the scam the people themselves who are doing that they don't even know the scam they're participating in so for example when i call a receptionist at an emergency room and ask her you know what are the can you give me an itemized list of what it costs to get admitted and various procedures that i might need and she says oh no sorry sir like we don't do that because of xyz reasons see she's giving me some excuses that someone higher up from than her has designed deliberately some businessman designed these excuses and then trained her to give these excuses to me and when she's giving those excuses it's not that she's consciously scamming me she doesn't even understand what she's doing she's participating in this hospital emergency room system which is orchestrated as a scam a systemic scam that is so systemic that the the individual participants the receptionist the janitor that works there um the nurses and even the doctors in the emergency room they're not fully conscious of the scan that's being run by the emergency room they think they're just doing good work and in a certain sense they're just doing good work they're just following orders and they're doing their little part in a giant machine which is ultimately preying on people who have health emergencies same thing for example with with like the university system most of the people working in a university are not con artists or scammers the professors aren't con artists the guidance counselors aren't con artists um the administrators in the university are not con artists but together it all comes together in such a way that the loans of the university wants you to take out the overpriced textbooks that they want you to buy and other things like that that is all part of a a systemic scam that is being run and it's really a survival strategy for the university so you have to you have to understand that there's ways to get exploited and screwed in life which is not necessarily done consciously just by some evil malicious uh sociopathic individual or con artist you know the classic con artist like victor lestig a lot of times you'll get scammed and exploited in more subtle ways in more systemic ways where there's not going to be one manipulative individual that you can easily blame who's at fault and so when it comes to these kinds of systemic scams health insurance life insurance hospital system university system various kinds of charities government organizations fall into that category so to get good at not being scammed you have to become good at judging character because fundamentally con artists manipulators scammers cheaters grifters they have it baked into their character it's an attitude and you can learn to sniff that out you can develop an intuition for it so here i'm going to give you a long list of ways in which you can start to sniff this out so for example if you're promised grandiose promises or lots of promises and the person tends to exaggerate and to boast this is a red flag if someone is promising to make you rich quick or to bring you lots of business this is a red flag if somebody is overly slick very charismatic a really good storyteller very extroverted just like very um has a very captivating personality very eloquent dress is very nice as a great style all of these are a red flag now of course a lot of times people just dress nice and they're extroverted and they're eloquent and they're normal they're not they're not con artists and they're not going to scam you but it's definitely a red flag you want to um you want to be careful about because eloquence and style and this kind of flash and this kind of like smooth talking this is a great way to let down your guard that allows you to be scammed because then you start to trust the person you develop a rapport with the person you feel like they're your best friend you feel like they're such a good storyteller they're so funny so eloquent they're so stylish they're so charismatic that you forget about the actual substance of the business deal you forget about the nitty gritty details you forget to ask hard penetrating questions and then you end up getting screwed in general you ask the question does this sound too good to be true and if it sounds too good to be true that's a red flag you have to also get good at sussing out low intel intellectual integrity people some people just have low intellectual integrity they don't care about the truth and that's a huge red flag when someone doesn't care about the truth doesn't value the truth that basically gives them license to engage in deception and falsehood so it's important to figure out the person you're dealing with the company you're dealing with do they value truth and if you if they don't that's a huge red flag and you should not be doing business with them you should not be in a relationship with them you should not be in a partnership with them because truth is the foundation for everything if you don't have truth you're going to have falsehood you're going to have illusion delusion lying cheating [ __ ] that's the opposite of truth it also helps for you to be able to assess a person's level of ego development and if you want help for how to do that i have several video series i have my entire spiral dynamics video series that helps you to understand cognitive development and uh and then i also have a three-part series called the nine stages of ego development which explains the susan cagroider model if you study that model and you go through some of those stages yourself you you become good enough that you can actually see what stage of development an individual or even a corporation or a group of people are operating from what spiral stage and what ego development stage and this this gives you a a good idea of how likely it is that these people will try to exploit you the lower the stage the lower the level of ego development the more exploitative and scammy these individuals or groups are going to be and even just like if you're trying to get into into an intimate relationship it's really good to be able to assess your partner's level of spiral development and ego development and if their level is too low like you shouldn't be having sex with this person you shouldn't be turning them into your girlfriend or boyfriend you shouldn't be marrying them certainly you shouldn't be having children with them and yet a lot of people just overlook this and then they you know they have sex they become girlfriend boyfriends they get married they have children by the time all that's done um it's too late they didn't they didn't assess the person's level of development and now they're they're wedded to this very low consciousness low level of development individual and there's there's really nothing you can do to solve that other than to leave and by that point you're so invested it's very difficult to leave very painfully another red flag is are your emotions being manipulated so look how this works fear greed lust hunger anger laziness desperation love these are the emotions that are used to separate you from your money another red flag is is a shortcut being promised are you being promised some sort of magical shortcut to avoid doing hard work if you are see what that really is is the con artist preying on your laziness most people are so lazy they don't want to work hard they don't want to work for years and decades to earn their wealth they want some quick solution they want a shortcut they don't want to go to the gym and work out for six months to lose their weight they don't want to change their diet they don't want to learn some deep skill set that's going to take them a decade to master they want some shortcut and then those shortcuts are what you're sold and of course most of those shortcuts don't work and they end up disappointing you or even worse they end up wasting your time and even hurting your health your wealth and your happiness so beware of when a thing sounds too easy or too fast it usually isn't true ask yourself the question what is the true cost of a thing a lot of times it's people get scammed because they don't appreciate the true cost of things like what's the true cost of being healthy and fit in reality the true cost of that is changing your diet learning about nutrition going to the gym working out every single day caring about your health that's the true cost that's the kind of stuff that nobody wants to do that everybody wants us sort of a magic shortcut around or like what's the true cost of being financially independent and having a passive income the true cost of that is not a thousand dollars purchasing a thousand dollar course to become financially independent you can just see that it doesn't add up the true cost of of having an actually sustainable stable passive income uh to get that usually you'd have to work your ass off for five 10 20 years to get something like that and something like that is worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars nobody's gonna sell that to you in a course for a thousand dollars another way to make yourself immune uh to getting scammed is ask lots of nuanced questions and be very detail oriented ask a lot of questions to the point where you start to annoy the person annoy the salesperson with your questions let them be annoyed get all the details you need because it's in those details that you start to see contradictions and problems you start to see the [ __ ] things don't add up ask for full pricing a lot of times you go into a situation and the way the system is designed is that you you feel uncomfortable or you almost feel bad for asking about the full pricing of a thing like a lot of times you go to a dentist and the dentist is offering you certain services once you're into that in the dentist chair they will offer you upgrades and you know additional services and you're just afraid or embarrassed to ask for the full price before you okay the procedure and a lot of times they screw you over that way so make a rule with yourself that you're not going to agree to any procedure or to any kind of purchase unless you have the full price beforehand so if a doctor wants to prescribe you medicine ask them the price first before you agree to the prescription if a dentist wants to do a procedure on you ask him the full price ask him to to print it out on a piece of paper so you have it before you agree to anything and if they don't want to give it to you or they're giving you excuses which a lot of times they'll do they'll give you excuses like oh we don't know the true price so like oh we'll have to talk to insurance or we can we can discuss that later let's look like don't settle for for those kinds of excuses get the full price and if you don't get the full price they don't want to give you the full price they don't know the full price tell them then then my decision is no i'm not purchasing that another question you should ask yourself when you're investigating these situations is like is this sustainable a lot of these solutions that are sold are simply unsustainable and it's pretty obvious a lot of people they don't have a mind or an eye for sustainability for me personally whenever i go into a business deal or i'm considering some investment or uh a partnership with somebody or whatever i'm always thinking about sustainability is this sustainable long term because most scammers and con artists are very short-term thinkers they're not thinking long term about anything they're not thinking about sustainability they're sort of just they're looking for some sort of house of cards that looks like it's sustainable but then it'll collapse as soon as you pull one of the cards a little bit it all falls down always contemplate what's in it for them if somebody is proposing to bring you a lot of business to make you a lot of money to give you a great investment idea you always have to wonder what's in it for them they're not doing it because they're selfless and altruistic come on what's in it for them a lot of times what you'll discover is if you ask that question you can you can start to see what's in it for them and then you realize that actually what's in it for them is that they're they're leaching from you they're gaining more from this relationship than you are from this transaction from this sale from this business deal from this partnership they're benefiting more than you are but they're hiding it from you another helpful hint here is the principle that actions speak louder than words words are not honest signals it's very easy to [ __ ] with words it's easy to exaggerate to over promise to um to put a positive spin on on a situation or a product or service with words so when you're going into a serious negotiation or considering a serious purchase or something like that never just listen to the words of the person look at their actions how do they behave the principle here is that talk is cheap what are words really worth you can use words to say anything to sell anything to put a positive spin on anything what matters is how the person behaves how the product or service actually behaves that's the substance look for the substance not the cheap talk talk is cheap it's very easy to take any bad investment and to talk it up with fancy words and make it sound as though it's the greatest thing ever you have to look into the actual fundamentals of the investment not the words around it the next tip here is don't rush into things fools rush in be patient be deliberate do your research go read go educate yourself do the due diligence before you jump on board or sign a contract or sign a check or enter your credit card number or agree to a purchase or whatever beware of time sensitive sort of pressure tactics a lot of sales people and marketing systems will use this on you they will try to give you a you know a discount that's only valid for the next 24 hours you know purchase in the next week otherwise the price is going to go up these kinds of tactics so a principle that i've stuck to in my life is that any time that a business or a marketing campaign or whatever salesman tries to pressure me into making a quick decision act now or i'm going to lose out the answer for me is always no if you're going to pressure me and if you need me to buy your product within the next 24 hours the answer by default is going to be no i'm not buying it i'm only going to buy it if you give me the as much time as i want to sit contemplate research and think about it and if you're not going to give me that time then the answer is just automatically no and you can tell that to you know to the salesperson you're dealing with and a lot of con artists use this tactic because usually a con is like a house of cards that is in the process of collapsing so they don't have a lot of time they need you to act now they need you to purchase now because if you wait a few days you're going to be too sober and their scheme and all their fancy talk is going to collapse another tip is to get multiple opinions perspectives on a thing and to shop around don't buy the first car don't buy the first house don't get married to the first girl or boy that you fall in love with shop around see what the alternatives are if you don't know the alternatives then something bad can actually seem good when you have nothing else to compare it against get multiple perspectives talk to other people who have made these kinds of purchases or have been involved in these kinds of schemes that you're considering look for reviews independent reviews not the reviews and testimonials that are published on their website you have to find reviews and testimonials yourself from people who have used this product or this service or have done business with this person who can vouch for for this company this service or whatever right independent reviews the next tip is to check for narcissism sociopathy and mental illness personality disorders these are deeper topics that i don't have time to go into here but um people who are con artists tend to have certain personality defects and traits like narcissism sociopathy um machiavellianism this is called the dark triad mental illness personality disorders trauma abuse from childhood this sort of stuff so you can learn to kind of suss that out and this is especially important if you're talking about romantic relationships sexual relationships don't fall in love with a narcissist a sociopath a mentally ill person someone with borderline personality disorder this will destroy your life if you fall in love with someone like this or if you get married to someone like this or if you have children with someone like this uh just another general principle here to make you immune to being conned is know your own values and stand firm on them set clear boundaries my life purpose course shows you how to find your values once you find them then you have to learn how to how to how to be firm about them and set boundaries i'll have a whole episode about how to set boundaries and then another adjacent principle here is uh don't be too nice and friendly when you're engaged in these sorts of business transactions don't be a doormat you have to be willing to say no no is a very powerful phrase a lot of times when we're in a sales or business situation we're too scared to say no we're afraid to be confrontational like you're sitting in your dentist's chair in his office and he's doing some procedure on you and then he says well are you interested in this extra procedure let me do this on you too and you're afraid to say no and so you just say yes because you want to be polite and friendly and you don't want to be confrontational you have to stop doing that you need to muster the courage to say no to people if you are dealing with somebody in some business situation and you see a few red flags and then finally it comes to like making a decision are you going to buy this thing or not are we gonna do business or not if you see those red flags that should already put you in the in the sort of default position of no if there's red flags present like two or three or more red flags the answer should always be no no should be the default and yes should be only in those situations where everything seems to be going well and a lot of times it's the opposite a lot of times it's like for people who are overly nice and friendly their default is yes to everything and no only in the most extreme situations you need to turn that around upside down and uh in general um a lot of people don't like conflict uh don't like to conf to get confrontational with others and i include myself in that um i was non-confrontational for a long time overly friendly overly nice always saying yes to everything and i had to retrain myself in that and i had to make myself more willing to be confrontational because otherwise i just saw myself getting exploited and i was sick and tired of that so if you're sick and tired of that then stop being a doormat i'll have i'll have an episode on how to stop being a doormat and how to say no that's powerful saying no is very powerful another tip here for you is be extra careful when you're in third world countries if you're traveling to china russia india and honestly most parts of the world that are outside of like the first world western democracies you should immediately be on guard as a tourist in these places for scams there's a whole industry in all these countries designed just for scamming uh naive gullible people like you inexperienced people like you who don't know the language don't know the culture don't know the customs don't know the traps uh here's some more tips be extra careful with promises of bonuses and promises of future profit sharing this is a classic way to get screwed if your boss or your company or your business partner says that hey work for me come work for me for for months and for years and at the end of that don't worry like right now your salary is low but at the end of that you'll get a bonus once our product ships to i'll give you a bonus and then we'll share revenue and profits with you once we succeed once we make the the big sale once we launch the product i'll pay you back and then you might be tempted to say oh yeah bonus that sounds really nice you know profit sharing that sounds really nice and then in reality you're never going to see that the chances of you getting the bonus or the profit sharing that you were promised are probably less than 10 so don't work for people don't give people months of your time for vague promises of bonuses and future profit sharing and even if you do get your bonus it might be a a pitiful little amount and those future profits that are going to be shared with you you don't know how much they're going to share with you like it's that's at their whim they might share zero they might share one percent you know it might be pennies like don't don't work for people because you're putting in hard labor for months on just vague promises of some kind of profit or bonus which could be anything or nothing and usually it's nothing beware when you're in a business negotiation situation or sales situation and you're being given a large range for example they might say purchase our course and we will help your business increase roi return on investment from fifty percent to two thousand percent see it's a large range it's a very vague promise increasing our way from roi from fifty percent to two thousand percent that's that's a huge range the reality is that you're not gonna get two thousand percent you're probably not even gonna get fifty percent the low end of that range so when people give you large ranges like well you know like if you come to work for us your salary could be anything between thirty thousand dollars and a hundred thousand dollars that's a huge range when someone tells you something like that you always take the low end so what they mean there is that your salary is gonna be thirty thousand dollars not a hundred thousand dollars they put a hundred thousand dollars in there just to make it seem like it could be something higher but usually what you end up getting is the very lowest of the range so be aware of these large ranges it's a it's a manipulation tactic uh beware of the following phrases that you can commonly hear these are red flags i'm definitely going to dot do dot whatever this is a dead giveaway of somebody over promising you something whenever words like definitely absolutely for sure certainly no doubt when these kinds of words are used these are all red flags if someone says i'm definitely going to do something in my mind what that means is what they mean is they're probably not going to do it it's exactly the opposite right it's like if someone says i'm absolutely going to show up at 6 00 p.m for our for our coffee in my mind i'm thinking they're probably not going to show up at all because if you were going to show up you wouldn't need to to sort of like amp it up with these sorts of words like absolutely definitely for sure certainly you don't need to say that if you're going to show up you're going to show up you don't need to hype it up uh another phrase that's a red flag is i'm looking out for you beware when someone says that to you i'm looking out for you or another one you can trust me just trust me on this when someone says just trust me on this what they actually mean is you can't be trusted they can't be trusted if someone says i'm looking out for you what they really mean is they're looking out for themselves if someone tells you don't worry leave it to me i'll handle everything what they really mean is leave it to them to handle everything for their own benefit not for your benefit if someone says believe me don't believe them if someone says ah but what do you have to lose you have nothing to lose what that actually means is you have something to lose there's always something to lose whenever someone tells me oh you have nothing to lose just try this it's obvious they're bullshitting me so just be aware of these common salesy markety bullshitty tactics beware of emotional stories from strangers overly emotional stories that tug at your heartstrings this is emotional manipulation beware that beware of what's called fomo fear of missing out so a lot of times to get you to act fast and to buy something immediately a story is presented of like this is the greatest thing and it's only gonna last for a limited number uh number of days short amount of time act now or you're going to lose your chance fear of missing out fomo anytime you feel that kind of pressure to act the default answer should be no i'm not investing i'm not buying i'm not doing business with you beware of deflection and changing the subject for example you're asking some penetrating questions you're asking nuanced questions and then you might get ridiculed for that or some the salesperson will somehow deflect change the subject to talk about something else rather than answering your questions that's a red flag if you're dealing with somebody uh expect you should have an expectation that they give you direct answers to your questions if they're deflecting if they're dodging and weaving and changing the subject or they're cracking jokes and stuff like that without actually giving you definitive answers to your questions then the default answer to them should be no then we're not doing business then i'm not buying another very powerful principle is when it comes to lending money never lend money to anyone it's very simple never lend money to anyone especially your friends and your family and your romantic partner make a principle that you're not going to mix finances with love because see people who are close to you friends and family and your lovers and so forth they can make you feel like oh but if you love me then you should lend me money because you know we're so close i understand why you wouldn't lend money to a stranger but we're family or we're sleeping together so of course you should trust me to lend me money no no as soon as you lend money to somebody you love like a brother a father a mother a sister a cousin a friend a lover that immediately changes the dynamic of the relationship from one which is just based on on love and um [Music] and genuine care and compassion for each other to a business transaction why would you want to do that if they truly loved you they wouldn't put you into a position where you where your relationship with them now becomes financial see a high quality person is not going to come to you asking for a loan even when they really need it they won't do that to you because they value the relationship too much and the final point here is uh you have to make a distinction between the facade or the surface of a thing versus the substance of a thing so there's like the facade or the surface of a product or a service or a relationship or a partnership the facade of it and then the actual substance of it like when you're talking about an investment right like you're investing into a house there's the facade of the house and then there's actual substance of the house the structure of it is it a solid house is it built on a solid foundation is it properly constructed is it in the right location is it's going to hold it is it going to hold its value what is the quality of the materials that are used in the construction this is the substance and then the surface and the facade is like you know the the you know like the landscaping outside the house and various kinds of marketing gimmickry and whatever sale is happening right now and they're promising to take 50 000 off the top of the of the price you know this guy this is this is the facade of it you have to always go go to the fundamentals to the substance of a thing and even when you're dealing with people there's the facade of the person and then there's the substance of the person their true character what they're really like when they are not on so to speak when they're not trying to manipulate you what are they really like what are their values what are their standards for behavior what is their level of integrity how much do they care about the truth how much do they really embody love these are the substance and the facade is like what they look like the makeup they put on the the uh maybe the the funny stories they tell the kind of suit they wear this is the facade that's not the important stuff you have to be able to see through that stuff like you know how well they dress that's a facade like you can have a horrible person dress really nice so you can't judge a person by how they dress and likewise you can have a horrible person tell you interesting charming stories and crack jokes with you and build a sort of a friendly rapport with you a horrible person a psychopath can do that but the substance there is that it's a psychopath with this pleasant facade so beware of these facades and don't make excuses for all these red flags if you are going into a situation whether it's a relationship a partnership a business deal a sale whatever and you notice three let's say three or more of these red flags that should automatically put you into the default of no and then make it put the burden on that person or that party to then change your mind maybe maybe these red flags are not a deal breaker maybe you're just you know a little bit overly cautious but so what it's better to be overly cautious than to get screwed in this case so the default after a few red flags is no unless that person is is willing to do some work and and address the red flags you can bring up the red flags of them see how they react to them maybe they can address maybe they have some legitimate justifications or excuses or maybe there's some miscommunication that's fine then you can still go forward but by default unless they address it it's a no see like for example you go into a situation and the salesperson says okay you you have you have to decide to buy this house in the next week that's a red flag that would be a red flag for me and then maybe i would say well i'm interested in this house but i don't like being pressured so um why do i have to do it in next week that seems contrived and artificial do you have a good reason for why it has to be next week or are you just saying that because you want me to buy this buy the house right see and if they can if they can address that and they say well yeah honestly we already have like we have somebody who's already looking at the house so if they buy it before you then you're going to lose this house like and if they're not lying to you that can be legitimate you know that can be a legitimate thing maybe you know in a hot housing market you don't have a lot of time to buy a house sometimes uh but also a lot of times they can just lie to you about that so you have to kind of suss it out and see is the time sensitivity truly legitimate or is just some [ __ ] marketing tactic sales tactic um so that's what i mean by these red flags um in general sales people con artists and scammers they prey on your emotional vulnerabilities and your egos desires needs weaknesses and insecurities do you see how this works because the human mind is not primarily run by logic and reason it's mostly run by emotions most purchase decisions are made on emotions not on cold logic and facts and science and of course all marketers advertisers sales people and con artists understand this either explicitly or just intuitively they understand this but you know a lot of marketers are actually taught this explicitly these days a lot of marketing courses will teach you that you know to make a sale you have to prey on the fears and insecurities of your customers like literally that's what they teach you they're shameless about it so con artists tend to prey on the inexperienced con artists prey on the desperate con artists prey on the greedy and the lazy con artists prey on the impatient and con artists play on your fear these five things are huge lack of experience desperation greed and laziness impatience and fear and if you have all of these combined together you're the perfect mark but even just one of these will be enough to to scam you so the root solution here to make yourself immune from being scammed is to take care of that gain massive experience be well educated stop being desperate and needy in the situation that you go into because if you're gonna be desperate that's the surest way to get screwed over because then you have a choice see if if you get stabbed in the gut you're in a desperate situation you need an emergency room right [ __ ] now you don't have time to shop around for emergency rooms so you're just going to get taken to the nearest emergency room and of course they're going to screw you over on the billing because you're desperate see what you should have done is you should have researched these emergency rooms before you got stabbed not afterwards then you wouldn't have been desperate but that requires that you look forward you have to have like a vision a long time horizon when you're planning out your life if you're just sort of like reacting all the time in your life you're constantly desperate you're putting yourself in desperate situations like you don't have enough money so you got to go get a payday loan which is going to screw you over or you're desperate for sex so you go and you make some deal with a prostitute and then she screws you over you see how this works or you're desperate for love and a boyfriend and so you fall in love with with the first guy you sleep with and then he screws you over see how that works and then if you're greedy and you're lazy of course that makes you a really easy mark if you're impatient too and if you're afraid when you're in the grip of fear it's very easy to um to sell to you and that's what most marketers and advertisers do is they prey on your fear going through extreme life changes makes you the most vulnerable to scams and cons a lot of times for example cults and religions they have an entire marketing strategy designed around this they specifically look for people who are vulnerable who are going through an extreme life change for example they will look for alcoholics they will look for drug addicts they will look for people who just got divorced they will look for somebody who just lost someone in their family somebody died you know a parent or child of theirs died now they're very vulnerable now you can sell them on any kind of new age cult any kind of miracle cure or a course or like let's say uh somebody just got diagnosed with a terminal disease cancer or something like that this person is so desperate that they will they will pay money for any kind of miracle cure at that point so if you're in a vulnerable place in your life if you're going through an extreme life transition through a divorce through a death in the family through a loss of your job through a career change through the loss of your business bankruptcy right there are entire professions and industries designed to prey on people like you going through that specific situation there are entire industries designed to prey on people who just got a cancer diagnosis there are entire industries looking to exploit people who just got divorced or going through a divorce there are entire industries that are looking to to brainwash people who are addicted to substances because they're very vulnerable the best way to avoid getting scammed is to have a strong character low ego develop yourself educate yourself be non-needy be detached from outcome be fearless be hard-working have intellectual integrity be experienced be patient be long-term oriented and be principled have principles that you live by and in general don't be so survival oriented be oriented towards something higher than just survival or just pure utility in other words become more conscious and more integris this is the ultimate solution to getting scammed and exploited by others lack of consciousness leads to illusion and self-deception unconscious people are very easily manipulated their minds are easily controlled their minds can be filled with all sorts of stories and ideologies and belief systems that basically turn these people into zombies and human beings have been controlling other human beings in this way since the dawn of time so you should be wise to this and not let anybody manipulate you like that and the way you do that fundamentally is through all the ways i just mentioned above i mean first and foremost by raising your consciousness developing yourself working hard and being experienced and well educated i want to make a specific point here to to women you ladies need to be extra careful about guys scamming you in the domain of intimacy and love there are categories of men out there not all men but some men who prey on this because once you ladies have sex you fall in love it becomes a chemical addiction for you and um and basically men are are gonna almost say anything to you to get laid and so um once you fall in love with them then it's very easy for them a lot of times to manipulate you especially if you don't have a firm sense of your own values and how to set boundaries a lot of women fall into this trap of being overly compassionate in a feminine way overly loving overly loyal to the point where men just exploit that because you fall in love with them and this can destroy your whole life for some women this is the whole story of their life is that they fall in love with some guy or a series of guys who just um take and take and take leech and leech and leech and leech and suck you dry and leave you hanging in the end so i want you to be very savvy about that which of course is not to say that you should be paranoid and not fall in love with men it's just that before you fall in love with them really assess their character who are you falling in love with who are you sleeping with really assess their character look for these kinds of red flags and get good at saying no get good at setting boundaries i'll have episodes specifically about that in the future about how to say no how to stop being a doormat how to set boundaries because this is this is huge and of course men also suffer from this problem but um in the domain of romance especially women suffer from this problem you should know that there's two types of bullshitters in the world there are those that know that they're full of [ __ ] like the con artists and then there are those who believe that they're actually good people and that they're you know they're true believers so to so to speak they don't even realize that they're bullshitting you like that receptionist in the emergency room that you call to ask for prices she's gonna [ __ ] you and she probably doesn't even recognize that she's bullshitting you and in fact in a certain sense um the most common situation is people bullshitting you without recognizing that they're bullshitting you because they've bullshitted themselves the true hardcore con artists like the donald trumps of the world they can certainly screw you over pretty bad if you run into one of these people but they're pretty rare the majority of people are not like donald trump they're not proper con artists but they participate through their complacency and lack of consciousness and lack of care they participate in systems of exploitation without even seeing what they're doing they're cogs in a machine so the bottom line is that fools get scammed and if you want some more clarity upon that uh check out my episode called what is wisdom in that episode i make a distinction between wisdom and foolishness that's a powerful episode you can connect it here with this episode with what i just said about fools getting scammed like ask yourself the question kind of like this why do fools get scammed why is it hard to scam a wise person contemplate that there's something valuable that you can get from contemplating that and then and watch that episode about wisdom to see what is meant by wisdom versus foolishness and why fools are so prone to getting scammed and um and and that's what you see with the with the trumpism mega phenomena of the last five years if you actually watch interview interviews with trump supporters his most rabid fans watch interviews it's very fascinating from a psychological point of view i'm not i'm not being partisan here you know when i'm talking about trump and [ __ ] on trump i'm not being partisan like i'm treating him as a sort of a psychological case right like um stop caring about democrats republicans just just like look at his character look at how he behaves and also look at his followers and how they behave and the reasons they give for why they follow trump and why they love trump and what you'll see is that these people are [ __ ] fools these maga people are [ __ ] fools and that's precisely who a con artist like trump would fool is a fool they're not wise people they're not well-educated people it's not an accident that the mega crowd one of one of the clearest demarcations of the mega crowd from um from not is that they don't have a college education because the more educated you are the wiser you become the less of a fool you are and it's no accident that trump himself is not a very well-educated person it seems like he hasn't read a single book in his life but he's an amazing con artist so what's funny is that what the funniest thing about trump is like how like it's amazing how far he he got in life and how little uh blowback really he's gotten for the incredible cons that he's run i mean he's probably one of the best con artists uh of all time literally of all time one of the best connors of all time and what's funny is that his supporters don't see it because they're so blinded by ideology and partisanship and their political biases and their hatred for liberals and progressives and democrats and socialism and all this sort of stuff they're so blinded by that by the content of that that they don't see the structure see my episode content versus structure for that distinction they don't see the structure of trump as a con artist and a lot of times people are debating or arguing about trump like in a political discussion they're like well should we vote for trump or for biden but you know like trump is better at these things and then biden is better at these things on sort of like they're discussing this on a sort of like a policy level or a character level like that but like but what's missed in that kind of discussion is that biden is not a [ __ ] con artist trump is that's the most important distinction and that ends the entire discussion it doesn't even matter what the what the foreign policy is with the domestic pilot like none of that [ __ ] matters you cannot have a [ __ ] con artist as a leader of your country that's that's that's like a recipe for catastrophe that's the worst possible thing is to elect a con artist as the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world and the fact that people don't recognize that simple point is both funny and tragic at the same time it's very tragic it's very depressing it shows us the the the lack of fundamentally the lack of education of the american populace that they fall for this kind of [ __ ] because if our populist was better educated nobody would fall for for trump's [ __ ] or maybe in the single digit percentages maybe five percent of the population maybe nine percent but no more than that the fact that 30 to 40 percent of the american population actually thinks that trump makes a good leader is deeply disturbing and not because of some political partisan reasons it they just they lack a basic recognition of a flawed character see now whatever criticism you have of joe biden or hillary clinton or whatever else you might say oh they're dirty politicians and all politicians are the same no not all politicians are the same there's a difference between a [ __ ] con artist and a typical run-of-the-mill politician like joe biden politicians can lie they can exaggerate they can make false promises yeah this is all standard for politicians but then you have a [ __ ] con artist you see the difference that's a huge difference if you cannot see that difference you're really lost in life you're in a really bad place and if you're denying this difference you are utterly blinded bipartisan bias because what i'm talking about here is not a partisan thing it's it's not a matter of democrat or republican or whatever um you could have a con artist on the progressive or the democratic side and if we had one i would be saying the same thing about him or her but like hillary clinton is not a con artist in the way that trump is and the fact that people cannot make that distinction many intelligent people many political analysts and so forth literally cannot make this distinction that is deeply problematic and that's not because i like hillary clinton but also what you should understand about people like trump is that it doesn't make much sense to morally judge con artists and scammers in the end he's just like a fox he's doing what a fox does it's a survival strategy so moral judgment here isn't the solution the solution is just to become lies to the khan also i should note that this episode is not licensed for conspiracy theories and cynicism i also see a lot of that so i see that there's a big mistake that people make is that they can listen to this episode and say oh okay yeah leo i agree with you yeah there's so many con artists and scammers and bullshitters out there in the world like all the politicians are con artists and the the ceos the connors the billionaires the millionaires the corporate elites they're all con artists all scamming me they're all in on it and then you become so cynical from that this would be a mistake a very deep mistake just because there are some scams within the self-help industry or within get-rich-quick schemes or within pickup or within religion or within politics it does not mean that the entire domain is a scam it does not mean that you shouldn't read self-help books it does not mean that you shouldn't go out there and buy business courses there are great business and marketing courses out there not all of them are sleazy get-rich-quick schemes it does not mean you can't learn valuable dating advice from pickup for example it does not mean that there's not truth within religion for example even though there's a lot of [ __ ] within religion so you have to be nuanced here don't become cynical um actually the majority of humans are fairly honest decent good people who are not looking to scam you or to con you in some business deal most people do honest business there are some bad apples maybe five percent maybe 10 percent are bad apples but but the the majority 90 95 is good stuff uh so don't become too cynical here don't get paranoid about this stuff by default you should be friendly and open i don't want you going into every business situation like paranoid that you're going to get screwed over and cynical that that you're dealing with a con artist this would be a mistake because the majority of people you're going to be doing business with are not con artists but you do want to be on the lookout for these red flags and also if you do get scammed um it's not the end of the world reframe it as a learning opportunity every time you get scammed or exploited or cheated even if if it's for ten dollars you know you clip a 10 coupon and then they end up not honoring it yeah you got you got cheated for 10 or whatever use that to learn your lesson really what you want to avoid is the major scams when you're dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars when you're dealing with your retirement savings the purchasing of a large house or a car or some sort of annuity product or a life insurance product right or getting a giant loan in these situ these are the real the real disasters you want to avoid the little scams where you can scan for ten dollars here 100 there consider these as just like lessons for how to avoid getting scammed on the really big stuff so if you lose a thousand dollars it's not a big deal actually if you truly learn the lesson from losing that thousand dollars that will be well worth the thousand dollars that was scammed from you reframe it as like oh i paid a thousand dollars to learn how to never get scammed again because if i didn't learn that lesson i would have gotten scammed for a hundred thousand dollars in the future in my life because i would have been naive and gullible that reframe is important also i don't want you to use this kind of notion of a scam as an excuse to not explore new domains and take risks than to grow be careful being too risk-averse too cynical and to naysaying uh i've taken quite a few risks in my life that have panned out well for me um i've gotten enormous value from certain shady domains and businesses that you know if i would have said just like oh well all of these people in this industry are all just bullshitters i'm not even going to look at this industry i'm not going to participate that would have actually set me back i'll give you a few examples of that for example when i first got into online marketing this was like 15 years ago i got into search engine optimization i did some of that and there was a very crucial turning point very distinctive turning point that led to my becoming financially independent and what happened was that i was researching search and optimization just getting my feet wet and then i ran into on some online forum i ran into some some random indian dude from india who made a promise to me that he can rank my website number one for like a popular search term in google this was 15 years ago um and if he could do that that would mean thousands of dollars of profit for me that was that was huge right um and uh at the time i was kind of desperate i i needed some way to make a business work i didn't know how i was desperate so on the one hand i needed i needed his promise to pan out on the other hand i was simultaneously very skeptical that he could fulfill on this promise and he he wanted like a thousand dollars up front so i was so desperate that i paid him a thousand dollars and um and he did some behind the scenes manipulations and stuff um with my website to help me to rank on google and um i'm not talking about actually i don't worry i'm talking about different website and so anyways he did that for me and um and what turned it was so funny um how it panned out because what happened was that it took him months to to finish the work and he was doing the work in a very slow lazy way i got very impatient with him with how he was doing the work and so eventually um we actually kind of got like in a fight and i ended up firing him and sort of like losing my thousand dollars but so in that sense you might say well it didn't pan out but what did happen was that i did see that he was able to raise my position in the google search results not to the top but i was able to see how he affected it and just that possibility was enough to open my mind the idea that if he could do it a little bit imagine how well i could do it if i if i did it myself if i stopped outsourcing this to somebody else and so and so that's what happened is um i fired him i forgot about the thousand dollars because there was some bigger prize and the bigger prize was that i was going to learn how to do seo like really for myself so i learned how to do that and from that i ended up earning hundreds of thousands of dollars so you see that kind of risk actually panned out even though it's a shady guy in a shady industry the search engine industry is very shady notoriously very shady um see if i was too cynical i could have been like oh well this guy is promising me too much and it's a lot of money up front and he's a shady guy it's a shady industry so you know [ __ ] that i'm not even gonna try if i did that i don't know i would be nowhere right now so a lot of times it's better just to take action and even to fail in your action rather than just be cynical and just do nothing doing nothing is oftentimes the worst possible thing you could do it's even worse than taking a gamble uh a similar thing happened with the with when i got into pickup you know when i got into pickup i immediately recognized that pickup is a very shady low consciousness low integrity industry with many toxic dysfunctional people that was very clear to me but i was also able to sort the wheat from the chaff and i recognized that even though most the guys who are in pickup are dysfunctional they're sex addicts they're traumatized they have very bad relationships with women i can still learn certain principles of attraction and improve my results with women and yet avoid all the toxicity you know leave that behind i would be able to take the baby out of the bath water and leave behind the bath water so to speak and so that's that's basically what i did and it was enormously beneficial for me um but see that requires such nuance i don't know how to explain that because like a lot of i'm sort of hesitant to recommend pickup to people in a certain sense because a lot of people just kind of like jump into it and they will absorb all the toxic elements of it without being able to separate the wheat from the chaff which is unfortunate another area where i took some risk that panned out for me is with with spirituality the pursuit of spirituality and awakening there's there's so much [ __ ] within the new age circles within spirituality within religion right and a lot of like atheists and rationally minded scientifically-minded people they will look at the whole spirituality community and the whole spirituality genre or domain they will just they will dismiss the entire thing and they will say like well leo why should i take the risk of meditating so much and studying spirituality like it seems very risky it's got huge time investment and then like what am what am i going to get in the end for it isn't it all just like a bunch of mental masturbation and wishful thinking see it can seem that way and so then what do you do you act lazy you don't meditate you don't do any spiritual practices you don't do any spiritual reading so forth and then and then you got nothing basically you got nothing you go nowhere right you risk nothing and you gain nothing um but what happened with me with spirituality is that i went into it i i made some strategic risks um experimented a lot and then ultimately found the holy grail so it's it's funny how sometimes in life you will find just diamonds and gems floating in a pile of horseshit and so i'm just giving you these examples because i don't want you to become so cynical that you become inactive it's very easy to say that oh all all get rich quick schemes and passive income schemes they're all just scams and i'm gonna do nothing or like oh all these pickup coaches talking about how they're having sex with these hot girls oh it's all just fake [ __ ] and and the only way to have sex with a hot girl is to have a you know a big dick and a giant jaw and have like a perfectly symmetrical face and so because i don't have that because i'm short i'm gonna do nothing it's like oh well spirituality promises you god and enlightenment all this stuff but like it's all just wishful thinking and [ __ ] and uh you know love isn't real god isn't real none of this is all and then you're so cynical that you do nothing i don't want you to fall into that trap of cynicism it's better to try something and fail than just to do nothing because at least when you're trying stuff and failing you're getting feedback it's pushing you you have something you're moving towards and then you can adjust course if one thing fails then you can move on to the next thing something adjacent to it that might succeed right but if you're sitting there doing nothing you can't do anything with that you see and if you're mired in cynicism that can be almost worse than doing nothing because then you're sitting on your couch and you're criticizing everybody for everything that they're doing wrong and you know you're criticizing corporations you're criticizing the the media you're criticizing the politicians you're criticizing religion you're criticizing everything and that becomes your whole life you're just online criticizing people and but you're not doing anything constructive you see it's way better to do something constructive than to do nothing or to be cynical even if your constructive thing is a bit naive and foolish and you end up failing the first few times you do it but then you know as you fail you do it something constructive you learn how to be constructive in more effective ways sometimes taking action and getting scammed is better than doing nothing at all and don't forget god is the biggest scammer and con artist god scammed itself into thinking that it isn't god but it's a human sitting there right now listening to me illusion and deception these are fundamental mechanisms of how consciousness and the universe functions you are dreaming up reality reality is a giant scam that you're playing on yourself for more on that go check out my episode my three-part series called self-deception part one part two part three where i talk about the the the fundamental nature of self-deception why it's so important to the structure of reality and also in the future i'm gonna have an episode about illusion specifically we're going to talk about illusion and the role that illusion plays within the structure of reality it's fundamental to how consciousness works so the bottom line is embrace the trickery of reality see reality is a tricky thing it's not straightforward reality is full of full of illusions and appearances and facades that mask what's really at the root and so just in general i want you to become savvy to this to this kind of distinction between the appearance of a thing versus its core its substance and to stop being fooled by appearances in the future i'm going to release an episode i think called how to assess bad character we've touched upon in this episode but i specifically wanna wanna focus in on on that because really if you develop the capacity to to assess bad character in others this is going to save you so much misery suffering heartache and financial loss in your life so i'm i'm working on a list of how to assess bad character stay tuned for that we'll talk about that and that will dovetail with with this episode about how to avoid getting conned of course because if you're gonna says bad character that is like eighty percent of the work of avoiding getting conned and uh one final thing i wanna give a little shout out to a youtube channel called uh coffeezilla coffeezilla it's a great channel run by a couple of guys who basically the whole channel's premise is that they call out various kinds of con artists and scammers and grifters within especially the sort of get-rich-quick field within the self-help field maybe even with a little a little bit of spirituality with crypto nfts this sort of stuff so they do a lot of like expose videos uh great channel funny entertaining also useful and practical if you watch some of their videos like they really do breakdowns of how these grips work how these get rich quick schemes work how people get exploited from and lose you know tens of thousands of dollars falling for these kinds of schemes online so if you want some like the actual practical examples of all the stuff i've been talking about here sort of in the abstract they got really practical examples they will actually give you names of gurus and business coaches and others who are you know scamming people and bilking them of thousands of dollars so um it's a great channel go check them out and that is that so now you should be set for life to avoid getting conned and scammed this is like this episode is really like what i would want if i had a son i would force him to watch this episode as he was growing up and then going off into adulthood because i just know how easy it would be for him to get scammed and exploited in the world and so i would say just like here son watch this this will prepare you this was this will inoculate you against all the trickery that humans have come up with to separate you from your money and i hope it's had the same effect on you you