Prologue: The Professor and the Grifters

In 1940, a linguistics professor named David Maurer published The Big Con, a study of American confidence men. He wasn't a cop or a crusader; he was a scholar of language who realized the grifters' vocabulary was a map of their method. He documented the big con not as a trick but as a production — staged in acts, each act with a name. Hollywood later turned that world into The Sting, chapter cards and all. The taxonomy is older than the movie, and it hasn't changed in a century.

Only the marks have.

Here are the stages. Learn them, because for the rest of this essay you're going to watch the last four years of your life run through them:

The Set-Up — find the mark and prepare him. The Hook — seize his attention with something he can't ignore. The Tale — the story of easy money, told by a credible insider. The Wire — the staged world that makes the tale look true. The Shut-Out — manufactured urgency; in now, or never. The Sting — the take, so clean the mark never knows it happened.

Maurer's deepest finding was about the mark himself: the big con only works with his participation. The mark supplies the eagerness. The mark does the labor. Hold that thought. It's where this ends.

I've spent thirty years in Silicon Valley. I co-founded a company that raised a hundred million dollars, sold to Goldman Sachs, and became a Harvard Business School case study. I've been inside the rooms where narratives get built. What follows isn't speculation. It's testimony.

Act I. The Set-Up — Fifteen Years of Training the Mark

Every con begins by preparing the mark. Ours took fifteen years, and the con didn't pay a dime for it.

Social media taught an entire civilization one reflex: measure yourself against a performance and lose. And it was never a competition of lives — it was a competition of productions. The vacation without the argument. The launch without the layoffs. The body without the disorder. People became expert at being something they are not, and the performances were convincing. You brought your unedited existence to a theatrical competition and wondered why you kept losing.

Of course you lost. You were the only one who showed up as yourself.

By November 2022, the mark was fully prepared: fluent in comparison, trained in feeling behind, checking the scoreboard voluntarily, hourly. No con in history has enjoyed a better set-up.

Act II. The Hook — The Verdict Smuggled Inside the Demo

Nobody ever felt inadequate because a forklift lifts more than they can. Nobody compared their memory to a filing cabinet and concluded they were obsolete. Nobody watched the toaster brown bread faster than they could and questioned their worth as a human being.

Yet within weeks of ChatGPT's launch — the fastest-adopted product in history, experienced less like a release than an event — we accepted "the AI scores higher on the bar exam" as a referendum on the human species.

That was the hook, and here is the swap nobody announced: a tool comparison was smuggled in as a species comparison. Every technology in history was measured against the task. Is the plow better than the digging stick? Nobody measured the plow against the farmer and declared farming over. But "this tool is useful" raises no funding rounds. "This tool replaces you" raises hundreds of billions. The benchmark announcements — bar exams, medical boards, coding competitions — were never framed as product demos. They were framed as verdicts on human worth.

The fear was not a side effect of the marketing. The fear was the product.

Act III. The Tale — The Inside Men in Good Suits

Here is the stage most analyses get wrong. In Maurer's big cons, the tale was never told by an obvious hustler. It was told by the inside man — the respectable figure with the credible institution behind him, whose entire function was to make the tale sound like analysis rather than sales. The mark believes the tale because of who is telling it.

Our inside man wears an MBA and bills by the hour.

The consulting and advisory industry told this era's tale, and it had three ingredients. First, the job-loss arithmetic: hundreds of millions of roles to be "displaced" or "transformed," delivered under the letterheads of the most trusted names in business analysis — numbers precise enough to terrify, methodology soft enough never to be falsified, dates that quietly slide each year. Second, the AGI horizon: the cosmic stake that converted a productivity tool into an extinction-or-transcendence event — against which any transformation budget looks small. Third, the inevitability clause: not if, but when — the sentence engineered to foreclose the one move that kills every con: pausing to think.

And here is the tell that separates a tale from a forecast: the teller monetizes both halves. The same firms publishing the job-apocalypse projections sell the transformation engagements that respond to them. Manufacture the diagnosis; invoice the cure. The fear reports function, structurally, as the marketing department for the services division. In Maurer's world, the inside man never touches the mark's money — he just makes the tale credible while the store collects. Same architecture. Better suits.

Note the class structure of the tale. The street version ran on individuals — the anointed 22-year-old founders, the "AI made me $40K a month" threads, the prompt-course economy, all whispering insiders are eating; you're outside the restaurant. But the executive version ran on corporations, and that's where the real money moved. CEOs did not panic because of viral threads; they panicked because the firms they pay for certainty told them the certainty was doom. Boards pressured CEOs, CEOs pressured workforces, and the fear rolled downhill until it arrived in every employee's chest as a private conviction: my job has an expiration date.

The tale was wholesale. The insufficiency was retail.

Act IV. The Wire — The Con That Built Its Own Casino

In Maurer's day, the wire was the crown jewel: a fake betting parlor staffed with actors, constructed so the mark could watch the tale come true with his own eyes.

Our era's wire is the feed itself — plus the demo economy that runs on it.

The tale said the future was certain; the wire made it visible. Cherry-picked showcase videos that never ship. Benchmarks tuned to the test. Agents that perform flawlessly in the keynote and break in your browser. Vaporware announcements that move markets before a product exists. And the panic distribution: "AGI next year" never traveled through peer review — it traveled through viral threads, influencer breathlessness, engagement-optimized doom. The same algorithm that spent a decade rewarding the fake vacation now rewarded the fake timeline, for the identical reason: the ranking function has no slot for true. Only for engaging.

This is what makes our con historically unprecedented. Every previous con paid for its wire. This is the first con in history whose wire spreads itself — because every breathless reposter is an unpaid actor in the parlor, cast automatically by the algorithm. AI is Social Media 2.0 in the most literal sense: same stage, same theatrical competition, same machine deciding what you fear. Social media 1.0 sold your attention to advertisers. Social media 2.0 uses the same machine to sell you your own obsolescence — with the cure linked in bio.

And mark the escalation across the acts: social made you feel worse than other people. AI made you feel worse than things. Each round, the standard you fail against gets less human and less real. First a curated self. Then no self at all.

Act V. The Shut-Out — Eighteen Months, Forever

The shut-out is the pressure stage. The mark must believe the window is closing now, because a mark with time to think is a mark who walks.

Four-plus years of AGI next year. Your job in eighteen months. Adapt or die. The deadline arrives, passes, and is re-announced. Eighteen months, forever. "This is the worst it will ever be" — a sentence engineered to make the present feel like a closing door.

Ask what that does to a person. Fear compresses time horizons. Compressed time horizons make people buy, subscribe, comply, and defer. A population that feels permanently behind doesn't negotiate, doesn't question terms, doesn't slow down to think.

That last clause is the point of the entire operation. The capacities that cannot be benchmarked — judgment, reflection, taste, trust — are precisely the ones the benchmark era trained us to discount. And here is the cruelest irony: in an economy where AI commoditizes everything measurable, those unmeasurable capacities are the only durable advantage a person has. The con's deepest damage is teaching you to undervalue exactly the assets that matter most.

Act VI. The Sting — The Con Man in the Mirror

In the classic big con, the iron law is that the mark never learns he was taken. That's what made the grift beautiful and the grifters untouchable. Our con broke the law, and revealed something worse.

Two departures from Maurer, and they define the era.

First: the classic sting takes the mark's money once, cleanly, and vanishes. This sting is a subscription. What's collected isn't a lump sum — it's the monthly fee, the data, the compressed decisions, the discounted judgment, and above all the self-worth, harvested continuously. The take was never designed to end.

Second — and this is the finding Maurer would have admired professionally: the operation achieved every grifter's impossible dream. It outsourced itself to the mark. The industry built the insufficiency machine, ran it for fifteen years, and then pulled off the greatest cost reduction in the history of persuasion: it handed the victims the controls. Nobody must tell you you're behind anymore. You wake up and tell yourself. You read about someone's launch, someone's raise, someone's workflow, and administer the verdict personally, before coffee, free of charge. The set-up trained the reflex; the reflex no longer needs the trainer.

The watchman went home years ago. We kept the watch.

We are all the chumps. And we are the con men too — running the game on ourselves every morning, falling for it by noon.

After the Sting — The Way Out

Here is what I will not offer you: reassurance. "You're doing great" is the con running in reverse — another externally issued verdict on your worth, another dashboard.

The way out is the way of every con's undoing: see it for what it is. A con, once named, is finished — that is the peculiar fragility of confidence games, and the reason they invest so heavily in staying invisible. And a self-run con is the most fragile of all, because the operator and the mark share one pair of eyes.

A con man cannot con someone who is watching his hands. You are the con man. Start watching your hands.

Three tests to carry with you. When a benchmark is waved at you as proof of your obsolescence — the Toaster Test: is this a species comparison, or a tool comparison in disguise? When a winner is held up as proof you're not hustling — the Village Test: do the winners share a method, or a zip code? When a deadline for your irrelevance is announced — the Horizon Test: who profits from your compressed time horizon? Take the long one instead.

But awareness alone decays; the wire will retrain you by Tuesday. So the second move is practice — a deliberate discipline of slow thinking: metacognition, reflection, judgment. The capacities no benchmark can measure and no algorithm can strip-mine. Even the mainstream is arriving here: Brené Brown recently told Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit that people are not okay — emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, disconnected — and that what this era demands is self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to slow decision-making. The researcher who spent twenty years studying human courage looked at the age of AI and prescribed thinking about how we think.

The con told you that what makes you human is your weakness. The truth is the exact inverse: in a world where machines commoditize everything measurable, what makes you human — the judgment, the taste, the trust, the capacity to declare enough — is the only thing that can't be flooded, faked, or benchmarked away.

They spent a century perfecting the con. It takes one vocabulary lesson to end it.

The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light.

Sources

• Maurer, David W. The Big Con (1940).
• Brené Brown, Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, October 2025.
• Consulting-industry job-projection reports and corresponding AI-services revenue disclosures.
• ChatGPT adoption-speed data, November 2022.

Stephen Klein is Founder & CEO of Curiouser.AI, a Reflective AI company. He teaches "Marketing in the Age of AI" at UC Berkeley Extension and writes about the intersection of capital, institutions, and technology. Curiouser.AI is the only AI designed to augment human intelligence. Curiouser is community-funded on WeFunder.