(waves crashing) (contemplative music)
Narrator: What happens in the mind of con artists?
What makes their brain so well-equipped
for psychological trickery?
Is it greed, a lack of empathy, loose morals?
Whatever it is, we are fascinated by con artists.
(contemplative orchestral music)
Announcer: Go back to the story now
that's shrinking the hedge fund industry.
And this time, it's in Germany.
Announcer: Hedge fund manager, Helmut Kiener,
founder of K1 Group,
caused one of the biggest financial scandals
in German history.
Announcer: He embezzled $400 million
by running a classic Ponzi scheme.
Barclays Bank may have lost nearly $220 million
and about 5,000 private investors lost about $141 million.
Announcer: He would fly to work in a private jet
and he owned a $23 million beachfront home in Florida.
Announcer: Kiener is described as an inconspicuous man
who maintained any premeditated wrongdoing.
Announcer: He was charged with fraud,
forgery of documents, and tax evasion.
Announcer: Kiener was sentenced to 10 years
and eight months in prison.
Narrator: We've all been lied to.
We've all been offered something
that is just too good to be true,
and still, we fell for it.
Although we love a good con,
we hate it when it happens to us.
To find out how to resist the manipulation,
we invited some of the greatest con artists
to our institute.
Together, with a team of experts,
we are going to analyze their stories,
pick their brains,
and reveal what their body language tells us.
Welcome to the institute.
-: Hello, Mr. Kiener. -: Hello.
-: How was your trip? -: Very nice, thank you.
-: Good to have you here.
They're waiting.
-: Okay.
-: Shall we?
-: Yes.
-: Hello.
Mr. Kiener, come in.
Welcome.
-: Nice to meet you.
-: Nice to meet you too.
Can I call you Helmut?
-: Yes, definitely.
-: Thank you.
I'm Kerry.
I'm Kerry Daynes.
I am a consultant forensic psychologist.
And this is Mark Frank,
and he's a Professor of Behavioral Science.
-: We're interested in what is going on inside the mind
and how it manifests on the outside of the body.
What this may tell us about the con,
but also what the con may tell us
about human behavior in general.
-: And this is Moran Cerf,
and he is a Professor of Neuroscience.
Moran: In many ways, you're the perfect subject.
-: Okay.
-: I mean, Kerry told you
that I'm a Professor of Neuroscience,
but I actually also have a position
as a Professor of Business.
And I teach people marketing research, and finance,
and a lot of things that you're an expert.
So I really try to dig into the numbers,
and understand how you did what you did,
and how you cooked the numbers,
and who actually has different ways of thinking.
You're ideal.
I can't wait for the time together.
-: Okay, nice to hear that, yeah.
-: You were behind the largest case
of hedge fund fraud in German history.
-: Yes, they said, yeah.
-: That's what they say.
And you were convicted of running a Ponzi scheme
worth $370 million.
But actually, at its height,
the whole fund was worth, I believe, $2.7 billion.
-: Correct, yes.
-: And Barclays Bank alone invested $1.1 billion
into the fund. -: Correct, yeah.
-: But also, you were able to persuade
10,000 smaller investors.
-: Not myself, but my intermediaries I worked with.
-: Your team, your intermediaries who lost their money.
So it had a huge impact on an awful lot of people's lives.
-: Yes, correct, yeah.
-: Well, what I should point out is we're not your doctors
and we're not here to diagnose you certainly.
We're not here to offer therapy.
We're just here to try and understand you better.
You've got some time now to settle into the institute,
enjoy yourself, have something to eat.
So please go and make yourself at home.
-: Okay, thank you so much.
-: Thank you.
(contemplative orchestral music)
Hello. -: Hello.
Kerry: Sorry, have you been waiting long?
-: No, not that long. -: Good, good.
I'm really looking forward to talking to you.
So if it's okay with you,
I'd like to start with your childhood.
-: We had a grocery store
where my mother ran the grocery store.
My father was working self-employed as a carpenter.
They were not millionaires,
but they had enough money available to give me everything,
all toys I wanted to have.
I always had enough money as a child
and money had no value for me.
So my grandparents,
they were very religious
and they influenced me to get also quite religious.
When I was five years old,
I said, I want to be a priest.
And everybody took it serious there.
Look at him, you see a future priest,
maybe the future Pope here, you know?
Everybody liked it.
-: So what was it that made you change your mind
and opt for a career in the business world?
-: When I finished my university,
I bought a house quite soon, you know,
and had a big loan to pay.
And then I looked in the newspapers
and I realized there are some investments
where you just invest the money,
invest 10,000 and make 10,000 every few months,
so your problem is solved.
-: You make it sound very easy.
-: It was just a coincidence, you know.
It was just luck.
And I was lucky at the time.
And I said, oh, this is very good.
I can make a lot of money in this industry.
At first, it was quite volatile,
but all in all, after a few months,
I could double my money, something like this, you know?
-: And were you very competitive?
Were you always chasing the next big investment?
How were you?
-: Yes, I was aggressive.
And at that time, I thought when I have even more money,
I could even could make more money.
And that's why I started advertising in newspapers,
maybe some 20 advertisements looking for intermediaries.
And out of these intermediaries,
the whole system developed.
And I thought, yeah, higher, bigger, faster, more money.
Everything, more.
Narrator: Helmut Kiener collects his money through a fund
with the simple name K1 Kiener one.
Because he was banned from doing business in Germany,
he moved the fund to the British Virgin Islands.
Keener promised more than 10% returns
and thus wins more than 5,000 investors
and also large international banks as customers.
(contemplative orchestral music)
-: Did you enjoy all of the aspects of religion
that you were exposed to
or did any of them cause you any difficulties?
-: I didn't enjoy it that much, you know?
-: No.
So it was something that you felt
was imposed on you a little?
-: Yes, correct.
-: So what process do you have to go through in your own mind
to reconcile that with your actions?
-: Yeah, it was just a big fault, you know?
And everybody makes mistakes and faults.
I can't change it,
I would make it different differently now.
But in hindsight, I cannot change it anymore.
So why worry about things that I cannot change, you know?
-: How important is winning to you?
-: Yeah, it was very important at the time for me.
Yeah, I wanted to win.
I wanted to be the best.
I wanted to raise more money than others, you know?
-: Isn't it the case that your business jet
was faster than Donald Trump's business jet?
-: It has a longer range.
It made it to Germany
and his wouldn't have made it to Germany.
His jet would only have made it to LA, you know?
I always said, when you have your own jet,
you have made it in life.
Otherwise, at that time, you haven't made it.
(upbeat pop music)
Bigger, faster, more money.
I was very determined.
-: So his legs are a little bit wider,
which actually often suggests dominance.
When dominance, in charge, you take up space.
People are worried, submissive,
they don't take up space.
They stay within the contours of their body.
The elbows are in and so on.
-: It's very much an alpha male thing as well, isn't it?
-: Yeah, the manspread, as they say.
But then with a little bit, you know,
he looks a little relaxed with the hands there,
but they were twittering the thumbs a little bit.
So he's still burning off
a little bit of anxiety throughout that.
And his head is up.
That is also part of the dominance.
So even though you're seeing little signs of worry
about what he's going to say,
but he's saying in a way,
sitting in a way that says he's still in charge here.
-: You're gonna see a balloon.
And every step of the way,
you can press this button by clicking
and then it will inflate the balloon.
So the balloon is gonna get bigger.
As it gets bigger, you earn five cents every time.
-: But it can blow up and then I get nothing.
-: Exactly right. -: Obviously.
-: So this is the button.
(balloon hissing)
-: People usually take risks,
but when something bad happens,
they stop taking risk.
That's kind of a behavior that you can expect.
If you look at the con artist,
we can have them play the same game
and we can both see behaviorally what they did.
Did they take a risk or did they not take the risk?
And when they did take the risk,
we can look at their brain
and see this part that we expect to be active,
was it more active or less active?
Was it responding in any way
in a different pattern that can tell me,
these guys think of risk differently.
That's it.
-: Okay.
-: I think you got the most amount of money
in the game that I've seen.
I'm not sure if it's because you were lucky
or because you took a bigger risk
or you somehow rigged the game
and found a way to have a good tactic.
Do you have an answer?
-: Yes.
I realized that that the game wanted to influence me
when it crashed earlier maybe.
The game wants me to manipulate in that sense
that when it crashed earlier,
I stopped earlier,
but I thought that the game just wants to manipulate me,
I go up, more up, you know?
-: Well, people like risk takers
and I sorta like risk takers too.
And these are like the ultimate risk takers.
It enables them to really do things
that most of us on our worst day
could not imagine trying to perpetrate.
And you know, so that makes it attractive.
-: To be fair, I'm having a hard time
'cause he represents to me all the things I don't like.
He is my former students gone wrong.
Like I teach my students all the time
how to not become manipulative when they go to Wall Street,
which they do,
how to try to make the world a better place.
And the image that I hate is that image
that they're going to look up to
and someone tells them,
you're gonna get a big plane
and you're gonna get a luxurious life
because it's tempting.
And it's like seeing the guy who won the lottery
and thinking, oh, I can win the lottery,
which we know is a mistake.
-: But you sometimes have to pull yourself back.
I have a little off switch on myself.
If somebody's starting to pull me emotionally,
there's sort of a circuit breaker kicks in.
I go, okay, hang on.
He has a label.
We know who he is.
We know his past.
-: He's the Wolf of Wall Street, isn't he, archetype,
and it's hard to warm to it.
(contemplative orchestral music)
The con artist has to overcome
any of their own objections to what they know
they know is criminal behavior.
So it's wrong.
It's legally wrong and also it's morally wrong.
So how do they do that?
Well, what they do is they lie to themselves.
They distort their thinking processes.
And quite often, what they can do is
they can throw themselves into a state
of what we call cognitive dissonance.
And that's where you have two completely contradictory
sets of thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs.
And what you try to do is you try to reconcile them,
which is very difficult to do.
Or you simply compartmentalize,
box off one set of thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs,
and go with the other while it suits you.
In 2008, we had the global financial crisis.
So how did that impact you?
-: It was a period.
It was not one day.
I thought, it must be recovered
because it recovered all the time,
the last decade.
This toxic papers,
we had a lot of funds which showed that toxic papers.
They were degrading in value every week and every week
and it was like an infection, you know, like a virus.
Every hedge fund after the other collapsed.
Announcer: Employees without jobs left in droves.
Helmut: And this was never seen before
in the hedge fund industry.
Announcer: So how did one of the country's
oldest investment banks end up in bankruptcy?
Announcer: We never imagined this would happen.
-: The world is drowning, the hedge fund world.
-: So there was a point at which you had a choice to make,
which is you could have filed for bankruptcy.
-: Yeah.
-: But you chose instead to operate a fraudulent business.
How did that switch occur in your mind?
How did that happen?
(contemplative ambient music)
(speaking in foreign language)
-: At that time in Germany, every family had violence
in terms of that the parents beated the children
on some occasions, you know?
Sometimes, it was just small things, you know?
It was not important things.
And my father was working very hard.
And when he was so stressed, he got aggressive.
I'm coming in.
My father's behind the door
because I was running away, yeah?
Then I'm coming back and he's behind the door.
And once I entered the room,
he jumps on me behind the door and was beating me.
This was a shock for me, you know?
I was so shocked to know when he did this.
He thought he's luring me behind the door.
It's my father.
I'm a child, he's a man.
And this was hard for me, you know?
He always said, "Don't cry.
Otherwise, I beat you more," you know?
Kerry: What would you have done differently in hindsight,
of course, which is a wonderful thing?
-: Yeah, I would just file bankruptcy with the funds
and said the funds are bankrupt, so it is.
-: Well, I can imagine that if you've got 12,000 people
that are all very, very angry with you,
that is a huge amount of pressure.
-: If I imagine to say them
that the fund has a value of zero,
they will come to me and basically kill me,
not in a direct sense,
but basically coming and and blaming me a lot.
And people would ask me, that can't be right,
something must be wrong.
And they're coming to me and asking me.
The phone would have rang every day.
I couldn't have dealt with this.
At least six months,
I wouldn't have nothing else to do
then explaining people what happened,
what happened, what happened.
-: You see a little stretch.
That's the risorius muscle that you typically see with fear.
Maybe it's anticipatory fear of like,
is Kerry gonna probe me?
Is she gonna make accusations of some sort?
-: And there's the shrug.
-: Yup.
And again, the shrug is uncertainty.
He knows why he's here, right?
He knows why he's in the institute and he knows his history.
This is the reason he's here.
-: Why didn't he just say,
look, my investments are failing.
It's a difficult financial crisis.
You know, it's a difficult financial environment
at the moment,
and declare bankruptcy.
I think it's because declaring bankruptcy
would have felt too much like,
oh my goodness, I'm weak here.
I failed.
And then he's back to being that young boy again
who is punished for showing weakness.
He would be beaten.
And if he cried, then he would be beaten all the more.
-: The assumption that at least deep inside our brain,
there's one truth and it's correct is false.
That's not true.
Our story keeps changing in our mind.
We lie to ourselves constantly,
big lies and small lies.
-: If there's no truth then, really,
because our autobiographical memory
is like a complex tapestry of information
that we've gathered from lots of different places
plus genuine memories,
can we ever really be fully true?
-: That's one of the interesting quandaries
I wrestle with when I think through
in terms of thinking back through your own life, you know.
To what extent are you putting a little bit in
to make yourself look better,
and you kind of know that,
and to what extent do you not know that
and you're saying things that aren't true?
(contemplative orchestral music)
Kerry: What was he trying to teach you, do you think?
-: He wanted me to make a tough person,
not crying like a kid.
Crying is a sign of weakness.
Stay strong, get strong, get invincible.
-: You must have looked at Ponzi schemes
and how Ponzi schemes operate,
and thought, right, that's our new model.
-: Yeah, we didn't regard ourselves as a Ponzi scheme.
Maybe you can call it a modified Ponzi scheme,
but I think it wasn't a real Ponzi scheme, you know?
-: Well, what would you call it?
-: I would call it just cooking the books, you know?
Not just, its evil enough,
but cooking the books, you know?
-: Well, yeah, but cooking the books,
it's a nice euphemism.
It makes it sound less serious than fraud.
-: Yes.
-: You gave them false bank statements, didn't you?
-: Yes.
And it was so easy, so nobody said,
is the estimate right, or is this correct?
Just give them estimates and I did, you know?
They accepted every estimate I gave them
and they never checked it.
-: Do you hold them responsible?
-: They did not end up in jail like my guys, you know?
-: But that's because their actions were fraudulent
whereas you could say that Barclay's actions
or investor's actions were negligent,
not criminal or fraudulent.
Were you struck by his optimism and invincible nature?
-: I wrote optimism bias.
-: If we take him at face value,
he has just stumbled into this multi-million pound scheme.
I'm not buying that.
I'm really not buying that.
Underneath that friendly, avuncular exterior,
he is really quite the aggressive,
competitive with himself and with others businessman,
isn't he,
who I think gets really quite excited
to cook the books, as he puts it.
Moran: You come across kind of like a friendly uncle.
Is a trick or it's a?
-: No, it's just how I am.
So, sometimes,
sometimes I had a meeting
and I had to complete my exercise.
I said, wait 30 minutes,
came in my best suit and said,
opened into this door,
said, wait a minute,
I have to complete my swimming, 30 minutes.
I'll be back, so wait here.
-: But is it a tactic?
It's like you know it--
-: No, I'm not playing games, you know?
-: It doesn't make sense.
-: It's not my character to play games and say,
or saying,
I'm just being like this just to get his money, you know?
-: How do I get 12,000 people to give me $2,000 each?
-: Yeah, I mean, this was a multilevel system, you know?
Every intermediary earned from the other intermediary,
from the other intermediate.
And the good returns.
-: You're unique, right?
Like, there's something to you that,
that's what we're trying to understand.
-: I was also lucky, I tell you,
other factors could have--
-: I'm not getting the right answer.
-: Could have closed the funds.
Well, what did you say?
-: So the answers luck and the system are too simple.
There must be something about you also.
-: I was brought up Catholic as well.
And when I think about my upbringing,
I think that I spent a lot of time in church
and a lot of time confessing for things
that maybe I hadn't done.
So we talk often about Catholic guilt,
but do you think any of the teachings of the Catholic Church
have stayed with you
or any of the morality of the Catholic Church
has stayed with you?
-: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
I mean, I didn't want to hurt anybody
and make it right for everybody.
I always regarded me as a humanist.
The Catholics are very humanistic orientated.
It helped me, but the praying.
Sometimes when I was in there,
I was even get close to phobia.
I thought, I gotta get out here.
I can't swallow, I can't breathe.
Not breathe, but I had to swallow, swallow, swallow.
It was like claustrophobic situation.
-: And here we go.
Go forward from here.
Normally, if you looked around his eyes,
if this was an enjoyment smile,
something caused by pleasure,
you get the muscle around the eye that also activates
called orbicularis oculi.
And what you're seeing there
is actually almost a little bit of concentration.
The eyebrows are down,
but the muscles around the eyes are not.
And there's a term for it.
It's called a masking smile.
He smiles a lot.
It gives him some credibility,
makes him look very non-threatening,
but he's using it in this particular instance
to try to mask a little bit of that negative emotion,
thinking back about his upbringing.
-: How are you doing?
-: I'm doing fine, thank you.
-: I'm gonna get a bit closer so it will be less formal.
I'm trying to understand if in your mind,
you at some point said to yourself,
this is a crime that I'm doing fully.
I'm conscious of that.
I know that it's not okay.
But throughout the (indistinct),
you tell yourself,
there's a way to get away with it
and I can make it happen.
-: I suppressed this that it might be a crime, you know?
It was in my unconscious mind maybe,
but I didn't say I stop a crime because in my mind,
it was not a real crime, you know?
-: Could you stop?
Do you think you could have stopped
or it was constantly addictive?
-: Obviously, I couldn't stop.
Otherwise, I would have stopped, you know?
And there were some Asian investors
who promised hundreds of millions.
And if this money would have come,
it would have saved the funds probably,
but it didn't come.
You know?
And I thought like a deterministic thinker,
I thought I gonna be saved by anything or anybody
maybe in the last minute.
-: Well, I think his big lie to himself
is that I would have turned that around,
I would've paid those people back
had I just been given enough time
and had I got that last investment.
-: The ability to convince yourself
that that's a viable option when the odds are so low
often in many of these cases.
-: One of the things that I struggle with sometimes
is that actually,
if you ask people
to take a more realistic view of themselves,
that can be genuinely psychologically destroying
and damaging.
So actually, how much self-awareness
and self-honesty is healthy?
-: Right.
-: But when you do that,
you have to admit that you've really impacted people.
You've hurt people.
You've done damage to people that might be lifelong.
What does that mean about you?
What does that make you?
Who do you consider the victims of your deception?
-: Yeah, I can't think about them.
Otherwise, I get sad.
But I can change it,
so why should I always think about it?
This doesn't help anybody.
I thought about a lot when I was in jail at the time.
I didn't have time to think about it.
(boy whispering) (contemplative music)
Announcer: Police are searching the sea for the gun
with which an alleged German fraudster
committed suicide on Saturday.
Helmut Kiener's managing director, Dieter Frerichs,
killed himself in Spain before police could detain him.
Kerry: Your business partner took his own life.
-: I said,
I immediately was angry about the police hunting him down.
You know, I didn't let it on me.
I said, it's really not my fault.
The guy was innocent.
And if you hunt an innocent person
than the one who's guilty,
who hunts the innocent person,
and not me, you know?
Why should I be responsible
that an innocent person is hunted
and pressed to suicide?
So, I didn't have remorse or whatever, you know?
Kerry: So, you lost a friend.
-: It was a business partner.
-: So, things are good.
-: Yes, correct.
-: When we spoke to Kiener about the person
who was involved in his scheme
who unfortunately killed himself,
he immediately deflected, didn't he?
And he started to say,
well, that was because the police were pursuing him
almost as though the police had no reason, no reason.
They were just doing it to be unpleasant.
So that rewriting of history, it's extreme.
-: People who lost their house,
who may have led to divorces, depression,
a lot of things that he can easily not see
because all it is is like an accounting thing for him.
-: Hello, Helmut. -: Hello.
-: How was lunch?
-: Yes, quite nice.
-: If there was a typical investor, who would they be?
-: Men and women.
A lot of academics like doctors.
There was some invested,
only invested two and a half thousand.
And maybe here was the whole money they had.
It was hard for them.
Or invested 10, 20,000
and this really was their life savings, yeah?
You can say this, yeah?
-: Right.
So just people,
everyday people with lots of different types of jobs.
-: Correct.
There were some intermediaries who focused on medical,
on physicians.
And there were a lot of physicians as well,
but they lost a few hundred thousand each.
They cannot deal with money as well.
The doctor doesn't have time to think about what he does.
And the doctors lost a lot of money.
Some wrote me letters, very friendly letters.
We don't think that the money is lost.
It will turn out to be good, you know?
-: Well, that's very optimistic.
I suppose, they--
-: I didn't have the guts to be honest
to tell them the whole money is lost.
âª I've been a miner for a heart of gold âª
Don't let your heart get cold!
Announcer: That was Helmut Kiener!
-: I've seen videos of Kiener where he's at charity events
because he sees himself as quite the philanthropist.
He's given a huge amount of money to charity,
other people's money, yeah,
I must point out, not his own money.
So, ill gotten gains to charity.
But you see him at these charity events
where he's singing and rapping.
Many of his investors
were probably at these very glittery events.
They've seen him on the stage.
Well, there he is, singing, dancing,
having a whale of a time,
and handing over a huge check to charity.
Well, surely, this is somebody that we can trust.
-: And one of the things about,
I think, successful con artists
is they don't look like con artists
'cause if they look like con artists,
people would be suspicious.
-: Well, what does a con artist look like?
-: Right.
Well, it's like serial killers, right?
They're successful
'cause they don't look like serial killers, right?
It's the neighbor next door.
It's some very pleasant looking person.
and same thing here.
You think of some shifty kind of guy,
and I don't know what else
would go into the con artist appearance,
but it doesn't look like that.
-: I didn't care what anybody thinks about me, you know?
You never would see the expensive watches or jewelries
or expensive clothes, you know?
I didn't take care of this.
I went to Zurich to a bank.
They said, this Kiener guy looks like
he has second hand clothes.
-: I don't think it really matters, does it,
what clothes you're wearing
when you arrive in a private jet.
-: That's correct, yeah.
They said, he has its own jet.
Yeah, that looks good.
We give them the loan.
-: Do you think that helped you
build business relationships though?
-: Many banks said this guy can't be cheating people
because he's so authentic,
he's so honest,
and he's not wearing expensive clothes to convince us,
or doing this or doing that, you know?
It was an advantage, you're right.
Kerry: Yeah.
-: The next thing we're gonna do
is a game where you basically will receive money
for participating.
That's just the beginning.
You will be paired with other people, again, online.
And what you choose will affect how much money
they and you make in this game.
You're player B.
And it always gives you two options,
option one or option two.
If you choose option one,
then you get 400 and they get 400.
If you choose option two,
then you get 375 and they get 750.
-: Okay.
I go with one.
-: Perfect.
Okay.
So in that case, you got 400, they got 400.
And now again,
you're player B and now you have two option.
In one, you get 200 and they get 800.
In the other one, you get zero and they get zero.
-: Hm.
Doesn't make sense to both get zero.
-: Okay.
And an option, you get 700, they get 200,
or you get 600, but they get also 600.
-: Yeah,
I mean, this is better for everybody
and it's a random game anyway.
-: You get 800 and they get zero
or you get 400 and they get 400.
Now, the good news is that there's some signature.
It's tiny and we can kind of see it by eye
after you average all the trials.
And the bad news is that it's not a,
you know, kind of characteristic
that you can say, okay,
if you have this response,
then you are a con artist.
If you don't have it, you're not.
It's something that a lot of people would have.
-: So if you threw Helmut's data in
with a bunch of undergraduates.
-: You wouldn't pick him out.
-: I still don't fully understand what a Ponzi scheme is.
-: The Ponzi scheme works that way
that there's someone who raises money.
The guy who takes the money,
he buys luxury houses, luxury cars.
-: Helicopters, jets.
-: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Part of the money,
I have already shifted to untraceable accounts,
but only part of the money
because I need some reserves for redeeming investors.
-: In a Ponzi scheme, none of that gets invested really.
-: None of the money gets invested in a Ponzi scheme,
but we had a modified Ponzi scheme.
And this is a different, you know?
-: So in what way is your modified Ponzi scheme different?
What percentage of the monies
that you were getting were being actually invested?
-: It was actually almost all money invested,
but it didn't have any value anymore.
And this was the crime, you know?
-: I think that Ponzi scheme
is the perfect crime in many ways,
because it allows the criminal
to not have a victim that's kind of front row.
And it creates all the conditions
that there are so many people involved
and so many things involved
that you really can tell yourself,
there were no victims.
And in the end, all that's lost is money.
-: And this ability to sort of separate yourself
from the victim.
And I like this thinking about the Ponzi scheme, right,
the layers between you and the specific individual,
as you said,
to go face-to-face, to hit somebody,
whereas, you know, the bomber pilots,
they talk about that.
When you're at 20,000 feet dropping a bomb.
Stalin's classic phrase, right?
The death of a soldier is a tragedy,
the death of a million is a statistic.
-: I developed maybe some new (indistinct).
I was very compulsory,
being careful not to be infected by diseases or whatever,
wash my hands a lot,
being careful that I switched off the lights everywhere.
Otherwise, the house could blow up.
I have some visions that the treatments of people
that are involved in frauds are getting better.
You know?
If you know their brain activity like this,
you can in the future maybe not put them away,
just put them away, but treat them adequately,
maybe even with surgery or with psychotherapy.
This study is very useful for this, I think.
-: So, but you feel that it could be a brain disease.
What makes you think it's a disease?
-: I regard it like this.
Kerry: Do you, why?
-: Because you are a product of your environment
and your genes.
And I think to a big part,
you can't do anything,
that you developed that way,
so it is like a disease.
I knew a lot of these guys,
and I always said, it's like a disease.
-: You guys described him as very kind of non-emotional.
And in my test, indeed,
he comes out as extremely rational.
In every choice and every decision he had to make,
chose the correct answer,
thought about it, had an explanation to why,
and did that.
And this, to me, is contradictory
to the fact that when you talk to him
kind of outside of the test,
he speaks about religion,
which is the kind of antithesis of like rational.
Like, it's kind of you believe in things
that you cannot explain.
There's no logic to it.
So he lives in two worlds.
One is his mind,
which we can capture by looking at his brain in a test,
the behavior, and so on.
And one is the person that goes out of the test
that has an entire different narrative of life.
All the money in the world
doesn't give you the pleasure that you want,
like things that kind of don't align,
the two different worlds in one person.
-: And yet he was an investment banker.
He still works in finance.
I mean, that is the most, well, capitalist.
-: Proud of the big plane and the nice cars.
-: Very proud, very proud of the big plane.
Bigger than Trump's, wasn't it?
I think I did see Helmut Kiener's core self.
And I think that what I saw were
how strong his psychological defenses are
and how much he finds it difficult
to face up to his own weaknesses and failures.
Certainly, for me,
I feel that he's a classic case of somebody
with dark triad personality characteristics.
And no doubt, they're mixed in
with lots of other more acceptable, if you like,
or more pleasant characteristics.
I wanted to talk to you
about dark triad personality traits.
Are you familiar with that phrase?
-: No.
-: It's a psychological term.
And dark triad personality traits
are a mixture of aggressive,
not physically aggressive,
but competitive personality trait.
Quite arrogant personality traits
and total belief in your own abilities.
-: Yes, yes.
-: And Machiavellian personality traits.
So there's these three tiers.
So Machiavellian is manipulative behaviors.
-: Yeah, I know this expression, yeah.
-: Yeah.
And those three personality traits are very, very common.
In fact, they are necessary
to succeed in the world of business.
Can you identify with any of those traits?
-: Usually, I'm not very arrogant,
but at that time, some said, yeah,
the guy gets more and more arrogant.
I usually cannot describe me that way.
-: Why do you think you became more and more arrogant
in the eyes of other people?
-: Germany is very, nobody likes arrogant people.
They are very down to earth.
And then if someone is making jokes, you know,
I'm gonna rule the world or something like this,
they take it serious and they say, listen to this guy.
-: One kind of question that comes up again and again is,
can people change?
These people supposedly are the complete story.
They did something bad, they got caught,
they paid their price.
Now, we reflect back on their life as if it's over.
But the question that still remains open
is are we gonna see episode two of Kiener back in the news
or someone else kind of starting again
and like doing the same things with a different narrative?
And I have, unfortunately,
usually, I'm optimistic.
On this thing, I'm quite pessimistic,
as in I think that it's very hard to change.
-: Yeah, I always say
I'm not involved in this business anymore,
so it cannot happen.
It was bad decisions, and it was agreed on others,
and it was a part of my personality as I said.
Don't be a coward, carry through.
You fight the fan through, it will recover.
Fight, fight, fight, you know?
And developed a fighting spirit
and this was a disadvantage at the time.
-: And when you were in prison,
you obviously had time to do a lot of thinking.
Did it change you?
-: No, not that much,
because I thought I'm not the kind of guy
who can be intimidated,
just to be thrown in prison.
I'm not like a mouse, which has an experiment.
And the mouse gets a reward
or gonna be punished if she's doing something.
So this is kind of this behavior changing,
put someone in a prison.
I said, don't let it on me.
It is not the right measure.
And this will not change me.
-: But did you have to acknowledge
that you're not invincible?
-: Yeah.
As the fund broke down, if I'm in jail or not,
I knew I'm not invincible, you know?
-: And where are you in life at the moment?
What are you doing?
-: Yes.
I'm working in e-commerce with a company.
I'm employed.
-: I find him particularly narcissistic.
I find him quite arrogant in some respects,
but I believe that that is compensatory narcissism.
I believe that it's developed
out of a need to compensate for his own anxiety.
And I feel that as a child,
he was and he's been very, very kind to his father,
but he was subjected to some terror by his father
and it did, you know, it impacted him.
It impacted him emotionally.
So I think that that's a contradiction in terms,
isn't it?
An anxious narcissist.
That's what he is.
-: Right.
To be the best, always be the best, always be the best.
Yeah, there's something there.
-: And I think that there's a real need to say,
no, no, I didn't do anything really bad.
It wasn't a real Ponzi scheme.
It was like a Ponzi scheme
because he was definitely trying to convince us of that,
wasn't he?
-: Yeah.
-: Otherwise,
how can you go through life saying I'm a humanist,
yet I've been involved in this really very cruel,
capitalist, and calculating behavior?
Hello. -: Hello.
All together. -: Yes.
How are you?
-: Doing fine, thank you.
-: You actually, when I look at your brain, did a great job.
You actually scored the highest
that I've ever seen in one of the tests
that has to do with assessing risk.
At the same time, when I look at your brain,
your brain was normative.
I couldn't find anything that is an outlier there.
-: There's no brain disease.
there's no brain disease that can explain this.
Helmut: Yeah.
-: So you seem normal. -: Unfortunately,
I don't have any excuse then.
-: Exactly. -: That's exactly the point.
-: Well, thank you for what you shared.
And I do think that a challenge for you
is to maybe be a little more self-aware
and to take responsibility for your choices.
-: Mm-hmm.
-: You can't, I'm afraid,
you now have the evidence,
you can't blame your brain.
-: Unfortunately.
Oh, that's too bad.
I have to rethink it now.
Kerry: You do.
-: Use the same brain to think about that.
Helmut: Yes.
-: Do you have any questions for us?
-: No.
-: No?
Then it's time to say goodbye.
Can we wish you luck in the future?
-: Yes, thank you so much.
You helped me a lot. -: Thank you for coming.
-: And thank you for having me.
-: Thank you.
-: Thank you for coming.
-: Thank you so much, yeah.
-: It was a pleasure. -: It was a pleasure.
-: Yes.
(contemplative orchestral music)
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