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CONVERSATION LESSON

PSYCHICS, COWARDS AND CON ARTISTS

Dan: Hey AC, how you doing?

Aaron: I’m doing pretty good. How about you?

Dan: I’m doing all right. What are we talking about today?

Aaron: We’re talking about all kinds of good things.

Dan: Gullibility?

Aaron: Gullibility is one of them. Yeah.

Dan: Are you gullible? Are you a believer?

Aaron: I can be gullible.

Dan: Are you easy to hoodwink?

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can be gullible. I tend to be a bit too positive and accepting of things, so I can easily be swayed sometimes, or tricked. As I get older, I just get a little bit wiser each year. Not much more, just a little.

Dan: When I was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two maybe, I was living in Nepal for about half a year and some Nepali guy, I think he was Nepali, convinced me that he was a Tibetan refugee and he had a sick mother and a three-legged dog back at home … I mean he didn’t say a threelegged dog, but he had a sob story. Yeah, I gave him some money.

Aaron: That happened to me once. I was abroad and a guy approached me in the street, real friendly. We walked around and had some coffee and what not, and then he started giving me a story about how he needed money, and I ended up giving him some money just because …

But then I saw him talking the next day to different people, other travelers.

Dan: I think that’s what happened with this Tibetan.

Aaron: Then I realized that’s his shtick.

Dan: Yeah, that’s his shtick. Yeah, gullible. I don’t know if the first story … If Alex, the British woman … I don’t know if she was so gullible…

Aaron: No, I don’t think so. I think that was just…

Dan: But her fiancé thought she was gullible.

Aaron: Perhaps so. Yeah. That seems like a pretty crazy thing to do. It seems like there’s no way that he could actually get away with that. She would find out pretty quickly.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. What would be his motivation to be that much of a coward?

Aaron: What makes you think he’s a coward? Why do you label him that?

Dan: I guess I’m just trying to think what kind of motivation you would have. Why wouldn’t you just tell the truth?

Aaron: Yeah. It does suggest that he was just so scared of just normally saying, “Listen, we can’t go through with this.” Why would he do that? I don’t know.

Dan: I guess the assumption I’m making is that he was afraid of conflict.

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: Maybe not? Maybe he was just a pathological liar. We’ve known some pathological liars.

Aaron: We’ve met a few over the years. Sure. There’s apparently one running for President of the United States right now.

Dan: When we used to teach together at that American University, do you remember the pathological liar we had?

Aaron: Yeah. She spoke fluent…..like eight languages with complete fluency? Yeah.

Dan: What happened when you tried to test her so-called Chinese?

Aaron: She just…

Dan: Did she just run away or…

Aaron: No. She just kind of laughed and smiled and didn’t say anything. That’s all.

Dan: I can’t remember all of her stories, but I know she definitely had lots of them.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: She seemed like somebody who was compelled to make up stories about things that didn’t matter.

Aaron: Right. Right.

Dan: Anyhow, back to this story of Alex and Tucker. Maybe he was a pathological liar or… Aaron: Yeah. I think it’s more likely your first

Dan: Maybe he was afraid of conflict, or maybe like Alex is really terrifying.

Aaron: Oh, you mean … Oh, that could be it. Yeah.

Dan: What if she was really like a kick-boxer and that part of the story got left out?

Aaron: Or that she had like a very dark, threatening side where he was really afraid that she wouldDan: Yeah. Or her family is in the Mafia.

Aaron: Yeah. Right. There could be a missing element to the story, but anyway… Dan: Yeah. How did think he was going to get away with that?

Aaron: I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?

Dan: Surely…

Aaron: She would come to his funeral, right?

Dan: Yeah. I mean was he planning this setup of having a funeral orAaron: Yeah. That’s pretty wild.

Dan: Yeah. That’s a crazy story.

Aaron: Right.

Dan: The second story was about James. James was his name, right?

Aaron: Yeah. He had some health problems and no money to really take care of them.

Dan: He was down on his luck, no job, no insuranc…-

Aaron: Which is a huge problem in the United States.

Dan: Right. I think the story happened in 2011 I want to say, and that was before Obamacare or the form of subsidized medicine that we have in the US since around 2014.

Aaron: Something like that.

Dan: What I learned … You know, we haven’t lived in the US for a very long time, but this story made me look into what Obamacare does. I thought the main purpose of this new medical system in the US was to take care of poor people, but apparently in a lot of the country if you don’t have any money you’re not eligible. Well, you’re eligible but it’s not free, and if you don’t have money…

Aaron: If you don’t have money, you can’t pay for it.

Dan: Yeah, and medicine is crazy expensive in the US.

Aaron: Right. Yeah. Even minor procedures can cost a lot of money. I went in about six or seven years ago when I was visiting … I went into the emergency room. I had some back spasms and they gave me a shot of morphine and sent me home, and then later sent me a bill that was like one thousand seven hundred dollars or something, and I was onlyDan: You didn’t call an ambulance? You went there yourself?

Aaron: No, I just went there. My father drove me. The total amount of time I spent with the doctor was less than five minutes. All the other time was just with people filling out paperwork and with a nurse giving me an injection, and that was it. I was out within an hour, and that’s how expensive it was.

Dan: Right. That’s crazy.

Aaron: Unbelievable. Yeah.

Dan: Recently in the news was the receipt somebody got for giving birth. This couple, the woman of course gave birth and right after she gave birth the nurse said, “Do you want to hold your baby?”

Aaron: Hold you’re baby.

Dan: You saw this already?

Aaron: Yeah. I just read about it. Yeah.

Dan: It was itemized on the bill as a thirty-nine dollar charge for holding her baby.

Aaron: Can you imagine?

Dan: Nickel and diming.

Aaron: That’s the epitome of insanity. It’s just crazy.

Dan: I don’t know what the full bill was, but I mean it must have been five or ten thousand dollars. They couldn’t just bundle in their crazy idea?

Aaron: If you want to hold your baby it’s forty dollars?

Dan: A friend of mine recently had his spleen removed here in Japan and his bill was about three thousand dollars. That was before insurance.

Aaron: You’re talking about here in Japan?

Dan: Yeah. To get his spleen removed before insurance … The insurance covered a lot of this, but the total price was three thousand dollars.

Aaron: About three grand? Yeah.

Dan: The doctor said in the US this operation would cost fifty thousand dollars.

Aaron: Same operation?

Dan: Same operation, fifteen times the cost.

Aaron: Wow.

Dan: He’s somebody who’s sick and he can’t … He’s American and he can’t afford to live there because he doesn’t have insurance.

Aaron: If he went back or if he had to go back he wouldn’t be able to afford the surgery and he would die?

Dan: Yes. Yes. He’s stuck here.

Aaron: Wow, that’s prohibitive.

Dan: Yeah. The guy in the story, he says I’m a logical person and I made a logical choice, and as crazy as that story is Aaron: It’s logically true.

Dan: In that situation, that was the thing to do.

Aaron: Yeah. I would have done it if I were him, and I thought that he did it in a very … Kind of a peaceful, kind sort of way. He went in and wrote on … He didn’t have like a gun or he didn’t threaten anybody.

Dan: Yeah. You know, he’s not the only person to do this. I read about three or four other cases of people who needed medical attention who did the same thing. For a completely different purpose, we actually did a mini listening fluency lesson a few weeks agoAaron: Right, about the guy that tried to get arrested so he could get away from his wife? Was that what it was?

Dan: Yeah. His relationship was so bad that he had to go to … He decided to go into prison, which was better than staying with his wife.

Aaron: Couldn’t he just walk away and like move to a different city or something?

Dan: Maybe he was related to Alex, or Tucker … Sorry, Tucker, he was the guy.

Aaron: Making some crazy decisions.

Dan: The last story was that wild story about these two World War I soldiers, Jones and Hill. Hill was the Australian telepath and Jones was the British psychic. They both spent time in apparently a pretty desolate place.

Aaron: They were captured, right, in what’s now Iraq?

Dan: I don’t know where Hill was captured, but Jones was … I think he was actually living in Burma around the time that the war broke out with his family. I’m not sure exactly what he was doing there. He sent his family back and he enlisted as an officer in the Indian Army, and I guess their regiment was sent to what is now Iraq.

Aaron: Right, the whole Euphrates Valley area.

Dan: Yeah. They were fighting against the Turks there and they got captured. That’s how Jones made it to that prison camp. It’s not clear how Hill made it there. Apparently there were allied soldiers from all over in that prison camp.

Aaron: Right. Apparently he got like a postcard from his aunt or something andDan: Yeah. They were allowed to send and receive mail, even though that guy, Moise, apparently stole a lot of packages, which didn’t win him many friends among the prisoners.

Aaron: Right. People didn’t trust him very much.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: He took bribes too.

Dan: Yeah. He demanded bribes for little things.

Aaron: He was a prison guard?

Dan: Yeah. He worked for the camp. He was I imagine some sort ofAaron: Yeah. That’s what it sounded like in the story.

Dan: Yeah, but his job was as interpreter, so he had a lot of contact with the prisoners.

Aaron: I see.

Dan: It’s a pretty funny story. He was super gullible guy, and Hill and Jones, they were pretty clever con artists.

Aaron: Yeah, you’d have to be in that situation, to get out, because it’s not a quick con. It takes time to build up…

Dan: What I thought was funny is they didn’t even realize in the beginning that this was their ticket freedom. They just thought this looks like a good chance to mess with this guy that we don’t like.

Aaron: When you’re in prison I’m sure you get pretty bored.

Dan: Yeah. They were constantly telling this guy, Moise, that the spirits were angry at him and that he had messed up. One time they found an old broken gun on the prison grounds, because before these soldiers were imprisoned there it was all Armenian prisoners who apparently were killed, and a lot of them had buried certain things around the camp, including rumored to be that rich Armenian’s gold.

They happened to find a broken gun, which they could see was no good, but they just held onto it. Then when they were trying to think about how to convince Moise of their powers, they thought let’s bury this gun and tell Moise that the spirits are saying to dig here to find treasure.

Moise starts digging and he finds the gun and he thinks I’m onto something here and he keeps digging. Then Jones and Hill yell at him, “Moise, you shouldn’t have done that. The spirits are really angry. They didn’t tell you to keep digging. Now they won’t tell you anything.”

Aaron: I guess what would maybe drive this guy, Moise, to be so gullible would be his greed, right?

Dan: Yeah. I think people who are either desperate or greedy make the easiest marks for con artists. In this situation it was greed. They wanted to get rich and they thought that the spirits were there to help them and Jones and Hill were happy to oblige.

Aaron: Yeah, I bet they were. Their ultimate goal eventually was to escape?

Dan: Yeah. Well, I mean theyAaron: They had to twist the con or shape the con in a way that would make it look like they actually were … Had to leave the prison against their wishes.

Dan: Yeah, and they had to make it look like it was Moise’s idea, not their idea.

Aaron: Exactly.

Dan: Even though the spirits had told them that the key to the treasure was in Constantinople, they had to pretend like they had no interest in going there and it was Moise that demanded that they travel there.

Aaron: So conveniently.

Dan: Yeah. What I left out of the story is … The story is that there are three clues, there are three people and that each know the location of three different clues, and when these clues are put together, then you’ll know where this rich guy’s gold is.

Aaron: The clues were also written messages, right?

Dan: The clues were written messages in Armenian

Aaron: Which means that they had to…

Dan: They learned Armenian, at least some basic Armenian, to pull this off.

Aaron: How? How would they do that? I wonder like…

Dan: I don’t know, but apparently they had for a while … This is a very long con. They had themselves put in the solitary confinement together to plot all this out away from the other prisoners, so the other prisoners wouldn’t know all the details. It was said in the story at that time they got some Armenian books and they learned some basic Armenian in able to write… Aaron: Okay, so they had access to books then?

Dan: Yeah. It sounds like a lot of the prisoners, even though at that time supposedly they were in solitary confinement, that the prisoners did have freedom in that prison camp. Apparently it was in this really desolate area, surrounded by desert and mountains, and in the desert around them there was an estimated three hundred thousand brigands, armed brigands and Army deserters, and that even the Turks wouldn’t … It was safe for them to go through if they were in small numbers because there were so many armed men in the area, so they allowed the prisoners some freedom.

Apparently they even allowed them to go skiing, which I imagine was cross-country skiing, because if they got too far away, they knew that they would be killed. It was while they were skiing … Again I’m imagining this is cross-country skiing.

Aaron: Not downhill racing.

Dan: During one of those times when they went off on skis is when they buried the clues. The clues was a little piece of paper in a tin box written in Armenian.

Aaron: How about that?

Dan: They planted two of these clues and they said the third clue is in the mind of this business man. He’s alive, so the spirits can’t tell us where it is. You have to tap into his mind with telepathy … Oh…

Aaron: Too far away.

Dan: The range is not good enough, I guess we’re going to have to give up Moise. Moise says no, no, no, no, no. We need to get closer and I need to help you think of a plan to get over there.

Aaron: So you got to act like you’re crazy.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Moise was in on that, right? He was in on that.

Dan: Right. Moise helped them fool the camp doctors. Yeah, so they go there and before they even leave the camp they tell … They’ve got it all planned out. They tell one of the other prisoners, “Okay, we’re going to go there and then we’re going to tell Moise the location of the third buried clue, and when Moise comes back to dig it up you tell him that you already found it, but you lost it.” They already had it all planned out.

They really were thinking five steps ahead. Not only did they do that, but when Moise and the commandant and the guards were digging up the second clue, Hill surreptitiously took a photo of the commander of the camp and the guards digging alongside the other prisoners to make some proof, some evidence that the commander was working with the prisoners to try to find treasure, just in case any of the prisoners got in trouble, they would have something that they could use against the commander, and they gave that photo to one of the prisoners before they left on this trip with Moise.

Aaron: That makes me wonder how would a prisoner

Dan: Have a camera?

Aaron: Even in those days, in World War I, the cameras were not like the ones we have now.

They had to be huge, these monsters.

Dan: I don’t think we’re talking like 1800s cameras where it’s got to be on a stand with a blanket over your head.

Aaron: Yeah, but still … In the World War I era, right, after World War I?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah, I wonder about that.

Dan: World War I time. Apparently … This is all documented, you know, from multiple sources.

That photo … After Jones and Hill and Moise left, a bunch of the prisoners escaped. They got caught and they came back and they were going to be punished and one of the prisoners took that photo and sent it to the commander’s commander, so the commander’s superior, and that got the commander court martialed so that photo actually proved useful and got them out of trouble. These guys, Jones and Hill, the were real cunning guys.

Aaron: I wonder what ever happened to them?

Dan: I think that Jones … Well, they both went to England on that boat, and here’s a funny thing. This was a real long con. First of all, they were six months in that mental hospital in Constantinople…

Aaron: Pretending that they were crazy the entire time?

Dan: One of them lost like … Just to act as crazy as possible, I guess he stopped eating. He lost twenty stone. How much is a stone?

Aaron: I have no idea.

Dan: It sounds like a lot, twenty stone.

Aaron: It sounds like a lot. One stone is enough.

Dan: They had to act crazy for six months before they got on that boat. Who knows how long this con went on in the camp? It was really a long time.

Aaron: How about that.

Dan: Then when finally did get released they got sent to England, but I think before they even arrived in England a treaty was signed and all the prisoners were released. If they had just stayed in Turkey, it would have only been two weeks later that they would have been released anyhow.

Aaron: So they did all that to save two weeks?

Dan: Yeah, but they got a great story out of it though.

Aaron: That’s true.

Dan: I’m sure they were milking that story until they were old men. I think that Hill went on to join the Royal Air Force and Jones also continued in the military for a little while and then he worked as some sort of peace activist for a while, and then he worked for a university until his death.

Aaron: How about that.

Dan: Yeah, a wild story, two gullible camp guards, two greedy, greedy gullible camp guards.

Most of the times that you hear about con artists conning people for something ridiculous is when they’re desperate.

Aaron: Yeah, like elderly people and…

Dan: Some of it is greedy but some of it is desperate.

Aaron: Or they could just take advantage of someone who just doesn’t have full mental awareness too.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: That happens to a lot of elderly people.

Dan: That actually happened to my mother’s friend who is in her early eighties. She got a phone call one day late at night from somebody saying, “Grandma, it’s me.” It turned out it was just some con artist pretending to be her grandson, and then the phone was passed to somebody claiming to be a police officer and said you need to send us this money and we’ll release your grandson and don’t tell anybody, because if this gets into the newspapers then the charges is going to be worse for your grandson. Don’t ask any question to anybody.

She went to a money transfer place, Western Union, and at Western Union they’re used to like elderly people coming, sending money, who are getting scammed, okay, like this is suspicious.

They said to my mother’s friend, “Do you know who you’re sending this money to?” She said, “Yes, yes, I know.” They said, “Well who is this person?” She said, “I can’t tell you.”

Aaron: That’s a red flag.

Dan: Western Union, they really tried to convince her to not send the money, but she was just so desperate, so afraid, that she refused any help and she demanded to send the money. Yeah, that kind of thing happens every day.

Aaron: That’s terrible.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. You ever been scammed?

Aaron: Not recently, no. Not recently. I’m sure when I was younger I was victims of minor scams, but nothing major. No.

Dan: You ever left anybody at the altar?

Aaron: No, but I know someone that did that.

Dan: Yeah?

Aaron: Yeah. This guy … It was a big wedding. It was like a really expensive, big wedding and both sides of the families, they got their plane tickets and their hotels and people were flying from all over the country and he backed out like the night before.

Dan: One night before?

Aaron: Yeah, it was one night before.

Dan: Were you invited to this wedding?

Aaron: No. I had nothing to do with it. It was like the older brother of one of my friends.

Dan: Was this you?

Aaron: No.

Dan: The older brother of one of your friends?

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: That’s terrible. That’s terrible.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: On that terrible note…

Aaron: Okay…

Dan: I think we’ve reached an end until next month.

Aaron: Okay. Talk to you later.