Quico Toro: "Charlatans Burrow Into Your Life and Don't Leave."

Summary

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The Gist – Episode Summary

Episode: Quico Toro: "Charlatans Burrow Into Your Life and Don't Leave."
Host: Mike Pesca (Peach Fish Productions)
Guest: Kiko Toro
Date: December 22, 2025

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Overview

This episode of The Gist centers on the pervasive nature of charlatanism in modern society, the psychological dynamics that enable charlatans, and the ambiguous boundary between legitimate enterprise and fraud. Host Mike Pesca interviews environmental writer and journalist Kiko Toro about his new book, Charlatans (co-authored with Moises Naim), which explores how grifters, swindlers, and hucksters manipulate society—from historical alchemists to contemporary political and business figures. The conversation navigates classic and current examples, including Donald Trump, online health influencers, cult leaders, and even touches on the environmental movement’s susceptibility to motivated reasoning.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining and Diagnosing Charlatanism

• Trump University as a Case Study

  • Charlatan tactics: Preys on people’s desires—specifically, the “I want to make you rich” promise.
  • Key insight: Charlatans connect with what people “want to be true about the world” and exploit these hopes for profit ([09:53]).
  • Harm standard: True charlatans cause real, lasting harm by entwining themselves in victims’ lives, often resulting in significant financial and emotional damage ([12:42]).
  • Quote:
    • “Charlatans are people who burrow their way into your interior life and cause real harm... just stories of lives turned upside down, families ripped apart.” — Kiko Toro ([12:42])

• Charlatans vs. Scammers

  • Charlatans establish overt, lasting relationships under their own name, unlike scammers who often use anonymity and one-off tactics ([27:52]-[28:12]).
  • Charlatans’ victims often defend them, their identities becoming intertwined; with scammers, victims realize the deception after the fact.

2. Historical and Modern Typologies of Charlatans

• Historic examples (Mamunya, the Venetian alchemist)

  • Societal vulnerabilities to charlatans are not unique to times of decline; both rising and declining societies can be fertile ground ([17:53]).
  • Quote:
    • “We are suckers for things that…we want to believe, right?” — Kiko Toro ([15:44])

• Modern online cults and the Internet’s amplification

  • Online platforms facilitate highly niche charlatanism, making people more susceptible by isolating them in echo chambers ([19:11], [19:54]).
  • Importance of offline, diverse communities as a protective factor against manipulation.

3. Psychological Vulnerabilities & Motivated Reasoning

• Loneliness and Social Disconnection
  • Modern isolation increases susceptibility to charlatans, as people lack grounded external perspectives to “tap them on the shoulder” ([18:41]-[19:11]).
• The Mechanism of Self-Deception
  • Even those who aren't purposely deceptive (e.g., some environmental activists) can enact charlatan-like patterns by believing their own narratives too strongly ([32:41]-[34:19]).

4. The Gray Area: Capitalism and Charlatanism

• Legitimate enterprise vs. fraud
  • Not all failed business visionaries are charlatans, but the distinction grows murky (examples: Adam Neumann of WeWork, Sam Bankman-Fried).
  • Sometimes ambition, optimism, and “showmanship” required for success edge into self-dealing and deception ([22:21]-[23:38]).
  • Quote:
    • “We’re not even saying that every charlatan begins life as a charlatan. There are even some people who think that Charles Ponzi…started out with a legitimate business idea.” — Kiko Toro ([23:38])

5. Environmentalism and the Perils of Motivated Reasoning

• Critique of the Green “Halo”

  • Kiko Toro distinguishes between charlatanism and self-deception in climate activism (specifically with Bill McKibben) ([32:41]-[35:05]).
  • The West’s moralizing on renewables contrasts with China’s pragmatic blending of coal and renewables—a tension often missed by green idealists ([35:05]-[36:27]).
  • Quote:
    • “Solar and wind are complements to fossil fuels. They go together. If you build a solar, if you install a solar panel, you’ve now created the need for a backup for when the sun is not shining.” — Kiko Toro ([36:27])

• The Role of Nuclear Energy

  • Toro advocates for embracing nuclear energy as the only feasible path to a reliable, zero-carbon future ([36:27]-[38:40]).

• Dangers of Politicizing Climate Policy

  • Making climate a left-right issue hampers policy continuity and effective action ([39:59]).
  • Quote:
    • “They’ve created a situation where now it's impossible to have policy continuity… because as soon as Donald Trump comes into power, well, he undoes a previous administration’s policy.” — Kiko Toro ([39:59])

6. Empathy Toward Victims and the Need for Awareness

• Self-Compassion for Charlatan Victims
  • Motivation to believe is human and sometimes necessary for societal progress, even if it introduces vulnerability ([31:18]-[32:32]).
  • Recognizing the symptom not as stupidity but as a result of normal, healthy desire for progress or relief.
  • Quote:
    • “There needs to be some self compassion and some moment of realizing is like, yeah, this happened to you because you believed in something. And believing in something is what normal, well adjusted people do.” — Kiko Toro ([32:32])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the difference between charlatan and scammer:

  “Charlatans establish relationships that are lasting... they just burrow into your life and they don’t leave.”
  — Kiko Toro ([27:52])

• On societal susceptibility:

  “If you don’t know how to spot a charlatan, you will be victimized. So this is becoming... a kind of survival skill for the 21st century.”
  — Kiko Toro ([24:35])

• On McKibben and climate advocacy:

  “I don’t think Bill McKibben wakes up every morning trying to think what angle he can play to separate people from their cash... The person that McKibben has really swindled is Bill McKibben.”
  — Kiko Toro ([32:41])

• On the personal risk of believing:

  “If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t get up every day and like work at my climate job. Right? Like this is what brings society forward.”
  — Kiko Toro ([31:54])

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Key Timestamps

• 09:23 — Introduction to Kiko Toro and charlatans
• 09:53-14:05 — Trump University dissection
• 15:44 — Early history of charlatanism; psychological underpinnings
• 17:53 — Societal decline or growth and susceptibility
• 18:41 — Role of loneliness and social media
• 19:11-20:41 — New age cults, online echo chambers
• 22:21-23:38 — Gray area between business vision and fraud
• 27:52-29:31 — Typological differences: scammer vs. charlatan
• 31:18-32:32 — Empathy, dreaming, and the victim’s psychology
• 32:41-34:19 — Bill McKibben, climate hope vs. delusion
• 35:05-38:40 — The energy transition: China, renewables, nuclear
• 39:59 — The cost of politicizing the climate issue
• 41:11 — Conclusion, book plug

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Episode Takeaways

• Charlatans thrive by targeting people’s deepest hopes and exploiting social or psychological gaps, especially exacerbated by modern technology.
• Distinguishing ambition from manipulation is nuanced; real harm marks the line into charlatanism.
• Empathy for victims is crucial—our capacity to dream also makes us vulnerable.
• Critical thinking, diverse social connections, and broader policy empathy are necessary defenses against manipulation, especially in an increasingly online, polarized world.

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For more on Kiko Toro:

• Read his Persuasion pieces and Substack: 1% Brighter
• Book: Charlatans (with Moises Naim)
• Follow The Gist for further reasonable, provocative discussion

Transcript

[Mike Pesca]

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[Mrs. Claus's Younger Sister]

Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.

[Zoe]

Zoe. This thing weighs a ton.

[Kiko Toro]

Drew Ski, live with your legs, man. Santa.

[Mike Pesca]

Santa, did you get my letter?

[Zoe]

He's talking to you, Bridges.

[Kiko Toro]

I'm not.

[Mrs. Claus's Younger Sister]

Of course he did.

[Kiko Toro]

Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list.

[Zoe]

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[Mrs. Claus's Younger Sister]

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[Kiko Toro]

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[Mrs. Claus's Younger Sister]

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[Mike Pesca]

Nice.

[Zoe]

My side of the tree is slipping.

[Kiko Toro]

Kimber.

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[Mike Pesca]

It's Monday, December 22, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and today on the show I am going to talk about a guy who's been on or with a guy who's been on many times, talking about what he usually writes about, which is the environment, a lot about Latin America. His name is Kiko Toro. He contributes to Persuasion, some other publications. I'll plug his substack when I say what he usually writes about. I didn't know, but he was writing a book on the side about charlatans, which very much is about what's going on right now everywhere in the world. But Kiko, who I adore. And actually I was looking at the slate of guests who are on this week and it's Kiko and we have Thomas Chatterton Williams and then on Christmas and the day before and the day after we're going to do some of the best funny you should mentions. It's really all guys I adore. I don't know Roy Wood Jr. That well. I don't have interaction beyond the one interview we did. But everyone else are people I adore and they look at the world differently and they say the things that they see. And that's what I love about them. So Kiko and this. There is a part in the interview where I pull in the idea of charlatanism and environmentalism. And Kiko is not one of these global warming quote deniers. He is the kind of person who is even more realistic, I think, than the people who are most doomerish about global warming. I don't think that's particularly realistic. And one of the guys that I wanted to talk to him about was on the show, Bill McKibben. He's a seer of the environmental movement. But it was always wrapped as McKibben put a lot of our concerns like global warming on the map. It was always wrapped in this concern about how we continue as a species without massive changes, that we need to look at ourselves and look at our souls and look at our consumption patterns. But we have, and this is something McKibben would always talk about in the beginning of his writings, which went on for, you know, tens of thousands of words in the New Yorker. We had a defiant reflex. We were obstinate. We wouldn't change the way, the immoral way that we conducted ourselves. And therefore we must be doomed to fail something like a death wish or. It was research and science married with an almost millennial. And I mean that in the religious sense, an almost doomsday profit contesting of how we as a species have conducted ourselves. All right, from what I see, however we conducted ourselves depended on the burning of fossil fuels, thus enriching ourselves to get more calories, to live better lives, to work harder. We've had many people on the show who talk about this, that just the calorie deficit or that for millennia we were getting enough calories as species to actually do enough work to create enough wealth. Anyway, my point is that yes, carbon emissions have harmed and will continue to harm the planet, but without them we could never have prospered to the place we are today. And looking at carbon emissions as mostly something that we've done wrong is not just a not useful way of looking at it going forward. But if we hold on to that, we're not going to solve the problems. And Kiko writes about the problems but he also, as you will hear in this interview, writes about Charlatans, which is the name of his new book, get to It All. Kiko Toro up next, According to the National Institutes of Health, as many as 30 million men in the US experience something called ED. Imagine the number of men in that category who are also named in ed. It must be horrifyingly compounding for them. But it's really not great for everyone because confidence can be shot and your confidence is important. It shouldn't be this complicated. 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Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. I'm very pleased to be sponsored by GiveWell because when you choose a nonprofit and maybe Giving Tuesday, which happened or around the end of the year, and you perhaps want to get some tax savings or you're just a good person but you want it to go the furthest. How do you know that you're engaged in efficient fundraising? Low overhead costs? Enter GiveWell, which is sponsoring the episode. They focus on impact and it's really important because as we've covered on the show, cuts to USAID and especially PEPFAR programs have made headlines and this has of course raised real legit concerns. GiveWell does not claim to have all the answers, but what they do is they make sure their fundraising goes the furthest. They identify highly cost effective ways to improve lives. 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Kiko Toro has been on this show before. I love talking about the environment and everything he writes about on his substack 1% brighter with persuasion. Now he is out with a new book that is and we'll get into the relationship between all the environmental stuff he's put out. But it is about, oh, a topic that sadly dominates our consciousness and life. It is about the phenomenon of charlatans. In fact the name of the book is in fact charlatans. It is co written by Moises Naim. Hello, welcome back to the Gist, Kiko.

[Kiko Toro]

Hi Mike.

[Mike Pesca]

So why I said it sadly dominates my life is obviously the most powerful man in the world is just flat out a charlatan. Trump University's in the book and as you say, it's not because you're trying to make a point. If you're doing the definitive work on charlatans, you're really doing a disservice if you don't have Trump University in there. How is Trump University typical But also what, what gave it its particular flair to set it out from other charlatan excursions?

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah, so they, they want to make sure that they just connect with things that people really want to be true about the world. And Trump had this reputation as a real estate genius and he figured out that he could make quite a bit of money by telling people that he was going to teach them their his real estate investment secrets. And it turned out that it was just a constant upsell. So you would get invited to these like one day seminars which would just be there to qualify the people that they were going to upsell to the $2,000 two day seminar. And then there they were just going to try to figure out who they were going to be able to upsell to their 30 or $50,000 three day seminar. And at no point were you actually ever being taught anything that would be useful in launching a real estate career. We've looked like we really did look. Many people have looked. Nobody has ever identified anyone who had a successful real estate career on the basis of Trump University. And the cases that arose out of this were settled in 2015. And the reason we like that is that it shows the pre political Trump. If Donald Trump had died peacefully in his sleep the night before that escalator ride in 2015, we still would have had plenty of material to put him in the book for because he was just doing the thing that charlatans always do and he was particularly good at.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And it is the case that Trump. Well, there are several things that, that are interesting about that. It is the case that Trump could have done something close to a useful or quasi useful or just like a garden variety real estate seminar that might have had some value. Right. He does. He could have done this in a non charlatan way. So his actual real estate holdings have made money and made money for investors. And if you bought a Trump apartment, I mean you buy any real estate in New York City, it has Trump's name on it. A lot of those apartments have gone up in value, although he has been sued by other people who he's lied to. So in a way, this Trump University was more like a Ponzi scheme in that there was no exit strategy that legitimate. It, it was built on itself and built on bilking investors who came in on the ground floor. Now, it wasn't a Ponzi scheme. Right. It wasn't technically that structure, but it was designed to cheat people from the beginning, not to give them something of relatively low value like a Trump steak or a Trump vodka and say, oh, I glad, I hope you're happy because it has the word Trump on it. It was designed to scam.

[Kiko Toro]

Right, Right. And you know, in the book we set out this kind of harm standard for what counts as a charlatan. You know, charlatans are people who burrow their way into their interior life and cause real harm. You know, we see in all the cases that we looked at, we look at 25 cases in the book and we keep seeing just stories of lives turned upside down, families ripped apart and trumping adversity. Was that the reason it ended up settling out of court Is that now hundreds of people who were taken in by this effectively scam lost collectively millions of dollars, often life savings on this false promise. So the really sad and crazy thing about Trump University is that in its very earliest iteration, it was something like a legitimate. It was supposed to be something like a legitimate real estate investment course. It was just that very early on, within the first year of launching it, management realized that that was going to be too slow, that providing actually use useful education was going to be too expensive. And so they switch to this model. That's actually what is. What is modeled on. Are these timeshare upsell schemes. Yeah. And there's plenty of. There's plenty of precedent for that. It's a proven. It's a proven sort of method for bilking people out of their money.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. So much of Trump University, let's not dwell on him. Typifies the typography you lay out. From time immemorial scams, charlatans have honed in on two goals. I want to make you well or I want to make you rich. This was I want to make you rich. I think the earliest guy you talk about is the official alchemist of Venice, Mamunga.

[Kiko Toro]

Mamunya. Mamuna.

[Mike Pesca]

Mamunya. So in Italian, the GN would be Nya, like lasagna Mamunya. Marco Bragadino. Which is. Why is that a name you have to change? That's a great name.

[Kiko Toro]

It was just his nickname, actually. People called him Mamunya. He was very exotic because he was from Cyprus. He was from like the exotic East. Did he wear a headdress? Probably. We don't have really a detailed physical description of the guy. We have lots of descriptions of the parties at his palazzo that were apparently quite wild and paid by the Venetian state for years. Actually, this guy kept stringing along Venice's patriarchs to pay for his parties. But he was doing the same thing that all these guys are. He had identified a thing that they needed to be true. They needed it to be true that Venice could return to being a superpower in the Mediterranean, which is what it had been for 500 years. It had lost its status. A lot of these families that had been very rich and powerful for a long time were no longer that. And so he found a set of easy marks because he. It was very easy to connect with a belief that they had that Venice could be great again. If I could put it down.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Kiko Toro]

So, yeah. But I think if you go farther back, the guy who invented that golden calf in the Old Testament. That looks like a charlatan story in the nub there. I think this is as old as human society because we are suckers for things that like we want to believe, right?

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. But the fact that Venice had to appoint an official alchemist indicates that there were unofficial alchemists who were maybe operating without the imprimatur of the state. I'm going to suggest just that alone tells me that it's a society prone to be fleeced. Speaking of things that are golden. But I don't know, I don't think.

[Kiko Toro]

We should be that quick to judge because, you know, in the 16th century, modern chemistry hadn't really arisen. They people just knew that if you mix different, like compounds and things under heat, like weird things would happen. And we're just starting to piece it together. Isaac Newton spent more time of his life messing around with alchemy than developing calculus and the laws of motion. So this was sort of legitimate science in the same way that like cryptocurrency is sort of a legitimate financial product these days. But there's always this edge because it's kind of esoteric and not everybody understands it. And as long as there's that edge, there's going to be room for people to get in there and just cheat. People who like don't really understand it and, and just want to believe a little bit too hard.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. I would say, though I guess they also putting aside the science of turning lead into gold, which from what I understand can be done, it's just the process itself is much more expensive than the price of gold. They don't understand commodity theory. Like if you could do that, the price of gold would plummet. Like the inherent store. Gold is an inherent store of value is mostly about how rare it is. But what I wanted to ask you about Venice is is it true that societies in upheaval or on decline, formerly big societies on decline, are more prone to charlatanism?

[Kiko Toro]

I don't know that I can say that as a fact because we saw like plenty of like up and coming societies where charlatans like, do very well. Like India is growing like gangbusters now and in Costa Rica we found people. If I made Brazil, in Turkey like this, like developing countries that are developing quite fast. I don't think it's so much about that. We tend to think more that the main thing that changes your risk profile now is just loneliness and the disconnection that we have now that we mediate so much of our social lives. By a screen. Because one thing that does protect you from a charlatan is having people near and dear to you who can tap you on the shoulder and pull you back when you're about to make a real bad decision.

[Mike Pesca]

And also people not within your entire ideological circle, people who don't share. Because if it's all motivated reasoning, if someone without that motivation, you check in with them, someone who doesn't think like you think, they say, what the hell are you talking about? Which brings us, you know, maybe Joseph Mercola. Is that how he says his name? His who's a Covid influencer. Like I'm sure most of the people he was influencing were in somewhat crazy circle of COVID denialism.

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah, I think so. I mean a lot of the cases we look at, they generate their own little communities online. And this is why it's so important that you have some kind of in person face to face community. You're much less likely to end up in this kind of resonance chamber situation if you're actually talking to people in your life. But yeah, I mean some of these get really, really bad. We look at these sort of new age cults that have developed entirely from the start on the Internet. Things like Bentino Masado. If anybody wants to go through a truly dark YouTube hole, just like YouTube, that search term, you'll find this like strange sort of alien like UFO cult that this guy has, has launched in his pajamas apparently from, from his house and now has, you know, followers all over the world. People pitching you money and lots of like good looking young women flying all over the world, desperate to sleep with them apparently. You know, this is. And so yeah, charlatans are motivated by different things. But the interesting thing that that also is very new now is that because we have the Internet and the Internet is so good at identifying people's niche interests, you're just in a much more like target rich environment for charlatan to go out and say, okay, I can, I can connect with people, I want to connect with people who. This very niche thing and they can just pick them out and find them and ruin their lives.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, and I always get very concerned about UFO cults. They're less benign because I remember Hell Bop, which was a cult where they all committed suicide. The Heaven's Gate cult over the Hell Bob comment. Yeah, I even had a college professor who was the kind of intellectual guru behind that cult, this guy named Courtney Brown, who it's just a triumph of, of the academy where they won't fire him for his beliefs. Even if he thought that he could project himself onto a comet. So he just got to teach me as an undergraduate but not do any public facing work. So I was thinking about this empire in decline and it is tempting to maybe overfit some theories and to see everyone who you are one is suspicious about as a charlatan. And you're right up and coming societies. Look, Aaron Burr was at least trying to rip people off, I don't know out now charlatan, would you. Rasputin was maybe successful charlatan. I don't know if the czar was in decline then. But here's the interesting, really, really interesting thing. There's such a fine line between the charlatan and the legitimate businessman who is an engine of capitalism. And in fact the guys running, you know, Jensen and Sam and all the guys running Nvidia and the AI companies, do they have a touch of the charlatan about them? Do they have a touch of the showman? Or is Nvidia at this valuation the product of a charlatan? But if it comes down by 2/3 and does change the world, what do we consider it then?

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah, I mean when you get to edge cases, it can get really, really tricky. I mean, we certainly find some people in the book who didn't seem to start out as charlatans but kind of went that way because at a certain point begin to lie and cheat and swindle people a lot, which is the quickest way to solve their problems. So maybe if you see, I mean, Sam Bankman Fried seems to be a case in point. But also guys like this guy Arif Naqvi, who ran the biggest private equity fund in the developing world for many years and had $14 billion under management and had taken in everyone from like the Gates foundation to the US Government and the British government at the time, you know, you had some like big legitimate players who at a certain point get into financial trouble and find that it's embarrassing to go out and tell your investors, well now I'm in a hole and you lost a bunch of money and start to get creative about their accounting. So I, we're not even saying that every charlatan begins life as a charlatan. There are even some people who think that Charles Ponzi, who we get the word Ponzi scheme from, started out with a legitimate business idea. I don't think the evidence for that is very convincing. But some people have argued that case.

[Mike Pesca]

Now, why Charlotte's Head and not Mount a Bank? I like the Mount A Bank Word.

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah. Tad obscure.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. But grifter is, I think, overused. You've probably been called a grifter. I've been called a grifter. Who's not been called a grifter there?

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we are. We were trying to get away from a lot of these nomenclature debates because I just don't think they're that interesting. But what's interesting to us is that there is this thing that had always been around and suddenly it's just much more present in everybody's lives. And, you know, I'm sure, like, I don't know if you maybe, Mike, but I'm sure somebody close to you in your life has been taken in by a charlatan at some point. And it's really, really painful. And it used to be that before we had these new algorithmic methods for matching people with their interests that charlatans had to just really stick to just a couple of main get rich quick or get well if you're sick scams. But now we're just exposed to many, many more types of them. And so we just had this feeling that this is. Understanding these dynamics is really becoming a kind of survival skill for the 21st century. If you don't know kids don't know how to spot a charlatan, they will be victimized. If you don't know how to spot a charlatan, you will be victimized. So this is becoming no longer nice to have. And let's just gawk at these weirdos who. Who swindle other people. But that's something people kind of need to know.

[Mike Pesca]

And we'll be back with more of Kiko Toro right after this.

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[Mike Pesca]

We're back with Kiko Toro and we're talking charlatans. We're talking in some cases, I don't know if you're familiar with, you're probably with the Economist podcast, Scam Inc. It's excellent. You're probably familiar with the underlying cases. We're talking in some cases about international quasi state sponsored scamming and charlatanism. And this is an excellent podcast because it shows exactly how the structure is set up. But you do, but you are introduced to the scam through the scammed. And in some cases they're unbelievably sympathetic. And you say to yourself, not exactly there but for the grace of God. But I could see where a mostly reasonable person will get taken in by some of them.

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah, I mean, I do think scammers and charlatans are a little bit different in that scammers are often just anonymous, like you don't know or they have a fake identity. You know.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. What you're doing is putting out the typography and you're diagnosing what makes the charlatan. So many scammers are charlatans, but not all Charlotte or all charlatans are executing a scam. But there are a bunch of scammers who maybe aren't part of the dark triad. They're in a third. They're in a desperate situation or this a situation where they see this as the best way of making money. Yeah, I understand.

[Kiko Toro]

But the thing I find really interesting about Charlotte is that they're operating under their own names. They're not hiding depressing, they're establishing like scammers, shapeshift and they come in and out of your life. Charlatans establish relationships that are lasting. And we see that with Trump and we see that with Dr. Mercola and other people. They just burrow into your life and they don't leave.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. Or. Who is the Brazilian politician?

[Kiko Toro]

Oh my God. Edir Macedo. He's a minister, he's a pastor. More than a politician. He has tens of millions of followers. He's very scammy. Pentecostal church that burrows into the lives of the poorest people in the world. They have a presence throughout Sub Saharan Africa and all through Latin America and in the poorest neighborhoods of all the rich countries. All I saw them here in Japan. They're absolutely everywhere. And it's like a parasite. It's not like a one off transaction. It's like, oh, I Got scammed. When you've been scammed, when the scam is over, you know you've been scammed. Charlatan's victims don't know they've been scammed. They continue to defend the charlatan over time because their identity ends up so tied up in the identity of the charlotte and the promise of the charlotte. Right, right. So I just think it's different and deeper and it's like a more lasting kind and more damag kind of parasocial relationship.

[Mike Pesca]

Right, right. The scammer will do something, the blow off where you're ashamed and maybe don't go to the authorities. But the charlatan has the better long game, which is that you not only don't think that you've been taken in, you become their biggest offender.

[Kiko Toro]

Yeah. When Idirmacedo got very briefly in the 90s when he was much smaller than he is now, he was put in jail by the Brazilian police for fraud. And they let him go after a couple of weeks because there were hundreds of his supporters on the street picketing the police station and having all night prayer vigils and just created this, like, amount of public pressure where they just couldn't keep him in.

[Mike Pesca]

Wow. Was Adam Newman of Wework a charlatan?

[Kiko Toro]

You know, I don't want to go too deep into. Into cases that we didn't study in detail for the book in Parkinson's. I don't want to get sued. But also because I genuinely don't know the details of all this. I mean, there are hundreds of charlottes that we could have gone into.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. So I would say, knowing what I know, it's an interesting case because I'm always interested in the ambiguities, whatever. He had a certain personality type. It's all well documented. Reeves Weidman wrote a very good book about it. It was grandiose. He thought big. But this is what capitalism selects for. He got so much backing. I mean, we work was a very legitimate business that could have made millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the age of the unicorn, not good enough. And all the incentives. And I'm not saying he was a victim. He was definitely the person who took it there. But all the incentives were, well, if you could say you can make 100 million, why not say you can make 100 billion? And then this is the ambiguity. This is the gray area. What charlatan, charlatanism and what's capitalism? And this gets to the thing that you talk about in your book. You don't want to have 100% lockdown charlatan proofed mind because then essentially you lose the capacity to dream.

[Kiko Toro]

You wouldn't want that. Charlatans are threatening to normal people because normal people are like, let their enthusiasms run away with us. You know, there are things that I want to believe. Like, you know, I write about climate. I like really want to believe that we can solve the climate crisis and that if we do it right, this is something that future generations will have to deal with. That probably makes me prone to some charlatanism, but you know what? If I didn't have that, I wouldn't get up every day and like work at my climate job. Right? Like this is what brings society forward. So the fact that you are, you know, you develop a lot of sympathy and empathy for the victims of charlatanism when you spend like two years researching these, these stories because you realize that they're, they're just like you. The people who are not like you are the Charlottes. I mean they're psychologically weird and messed up and like scary. But if you've been, if you've been taken in by a charlatan or if you know someone who's been taken in by a charlatan, there needs to be some self compassion and some moment of realizing is like, yeah, this happened to you because you believed in something. And believing in something is what normal, well adjusted people.

[Mike Pesca]

What aspects of the charlatan would apply to Bill McKibben?

[Kiko Toro]

I feel like I've walked into a landmine here. Now I. Look, I don't think Bill McKibben is trying to.

[Mike Pesca]

He's been on the show, he's, he's a climate scientist and early warner about global warming and you've written about his latest book and other things he says, here comes the sun. He was on my show. I think I gave him a pretty hard interview based on how wrong he got it in the 80s and doesn't acknowledge it now. But. Sorry to interrupt. That's just level setting.

[Kiko Toro]

Look, I fully understand, I have a different understanding of what we need to do about the climate crisis, but I don't, I don't think Bill McKibben wakes up every morning trying to think what angle he can play to separate people from their cash or from, or to get them to sleep with him. I don't, you know, there, there is an aspect of manipulative destructiveness to charlatanism that I'm not going to accuse Bill McKibben of. I just think he's wrong. And I think he's, he's deceived himself. And so he's, he's showing some of these same psychological tendencies that charlatans point to towards other people. He's pointing it at himself. He has. The person that McGibben has really swindled is Bill McKibben.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, except that, you know, he's still like unbelievably respected. I'm sure his latest book deal was pretty good. Right? Still writes long pieces for the New Yorker and still is very influential. And people think he's right. And there's a lot of motivated reasoning among his followers and himself. Look, let's not call him a charlatan.

[Kiko Toro]

Elite misinformation, it's a different thing. It's, it's, it's a green hail, you know. So McKibben believes that we can have a 100% or near 100% solar and wind grid power system, which I think is a fantasy. I don't think that's technically possible. But, but the reason he believes that is that there is this green halo around solar and wind that makes people feel good and makes people feel virtuous. And there is this, I mean, this is wanting to believe aspect is definitely there in the, and in the discourse that people like Bill McKibben have created. But you know, I don't want to accuse the guy of being exploitative in the way that Edir Macedo or Joseph Mercola is.

[Mike Pesca]

Right, good. That was a provocation and I agree with you and you answered it well. But since I think a lot about Bill McKibben and you write better about him than others and that what he thinks. I just want to lay out one or two things that we've written about lately, which is we have to realize that even if air, sorry, wind and solar are clean energies and virtuous energies. Okay, asterisk. Look at China, which is an unbelievably impressive innovator in terms of battery production and using these virtuous energies to the extent that they use them, but they also use a lot of coal. Tons of coal. Why do they use tons of coal? Because the energies that are weather dependent are just that. And they understand as people who see things not through a moral lens, maybe in a practical lens. I was going to say amoral, that to actually, to actually run a grid you need both dirty energy and clean energy. And this is just not a concept that a lot of environmentalists in the west have embraced. I'll stop there. You fill in what I've left out. But maybe you could say, do you think it will always be the case or can we truly transition, what is the China example tell us about truly transitioning off of coal into only wind and solar?

[Kiko Toro]

Look, we need to start by understanding something that sounds really weird to us because guys like Bill McKibben has spent 30 years campaigning against this idea. But the reality is that solar and wind are complements to fossil fuels. They go together. If you build a solar, if you install a solar panel, you've now created the need for a backup for when the sun is not shining. If you install a wind turbine, you've now created the need for a backup for when the wind isn't blowing. Right? So, so these, these, these energy sources are portrayed as, as being in competition with each other, but it's just not true. And that's what we see in China. So what we need is a zero carbon, safe, environmentally benign source of power that we can always rely on. And that's not going to break the bank and that's not going to spike up and down in price. And we have, that is called nuclear energy. If we got serious about nuclear, if we got serious about fourth generation nuclear and the new nuclear technologies that are fundamentally safer and fundamentally produce less nuclear waste than the old 1950s reactors that were, that we're still building these days absurdly because of, because we're, we're stuck in this inertial path once we start to realize the potential for, for new generation nuclear or it's going to become relatively obvious early on, I think that this is the actual way to decarbonize grid in, in the lasting way. It's going to take some time. It sounds a little bit woo woo because even though There are about 100 companies now developing next generation nuclear reactors, none of them are actually in production yet. You know, the regulatory path should be onerous, but it's way too onerous. And so it's made the rollout quite slow. But you know, within the next 10, 15 years we are going to get to the adoption of new nuclear reactor technologies and hopefully at that point we'll be able to actually decarbonize because we'll have a clean zero carbon energy that we can actually rely on 24 hours a day.

[Mike Pesca]

So it's not fair to call him a charlatan. But the aspects of McKibben, and he doesn't just exemplify this way of thinking, he invented it. That chafe for me is marrying some correct science and predictions about the trends of global warming to what we have to do about it, which was he would write about the defiant impulse or should we embrace this humble way of living? We look at what happened with the world and global warming and this to him is a message that we've been essentially immoral, that we think we can control nature. And what we need to do is sort of give up our goals and aspirations for economic growth. What we need to do is give up technology, like entirely the wrong way of thinking. And maybe his is honestly come by, but it becomes cultish, I think, and really does get in the way of true progress. So don't call it charlatanism. But it is so much motivated reasoning. It is so cultish and it is so frustrating to someone like me who has no stock in nuclear or fossil fuels. I just want our leaders to light a light on the best policies for our people.

[Kiko Toro]

But it's worse than all that, actually, because the other thing that it's managed to do is to turn climate change into a partisan issue, which it really shouldn't be. We're used to seeing it in the west, we're used to seeing it as a left right thing, but there's no right wing people, conservative people don't want an out of control climate sphere any more than anybody else does. It's like this is not fundamentally an ideological battle, or it should not be, but they've made it into one. And so they've created a situation where now it's impossible to have policy continuity between left and right wing administrations because as soon as Donald Trump comes into power, well, he undoes a previous administration's policy. And so now next time there's a Democrat in the White House, nobody's going to want to invest in climate mitigation technologies because they're going to correctly assume that that'll last four, maybe eight years, but eventually those credits won't be there. So you've created a situation where left wing policies can't work either because you've sucked climate into a polarization logic where it never belonged, it never made sense to put it in the first place.

[Mike Pesca]

And I have sucked you into talking about climate. I want to recommend to the audience the book that you and Moises Naim have spent many years chronicling. It's called Charlatans, How Grifters, Swindlers and Hucksters Bamboozled the media, the markets and the masses. You are. I am saying this for the benefit of the audience, of course, because you know it. You are Kiko Toro. You write for Persuasion, your substack is 1% brighter. And you have a lovely cat who I met during this interview. Thank you very much, Kiko.

[Kiko Toro]

Thanks Mike.

[Mike Pesca]

And that's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the gist list. Text Mike to 33777 for a discount on the gist list. Leah Yane is the production coordinator. Jeff Craig does all things visual. He's a visual guy. I've seen him move in 22 or 24 frames per second. And Michelle Pesca is COO of Peach Fish Productions in Peru. G Peru do Peru and thanks for listening.

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