Just to be sure everyone gets it I'll come out and say, I'm referencing a minor plot point towards the end of the movie based on him. There's a sequence where the main investigator keeps trying to get him to tell how he cheated the bar and he keeps refusing to say. Later on, as in years later, he finally reveals the trick. "I didn't cheat, I studied it."
It seemed fitting given what we now know about how little he actually cheated.
Frequently HN readers will downvote comments that don't bother to explain why the viewer should invest time in reading or watching an unexplained link.
Agreed... People also downvote people who just complain about the voting system without reading the basics on "don't talk about voting" in the guide https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. "
This is the equivalent to that Simpsons joke in which they install a robotic radio DJ that says "looks like those clowns in congress did it again. What a-bunch of clowns" and the guy getting replaced asks "how does it keep up with the news like that?".
It's a low-effort drive-by statement so generic as to be practically meaningless.
A true con artist is good at what they do because they believe everything they tell you while they're saying it, which means all the usual signals that someone is lying to you don't fire.
There is no trick that gives you information if person is lying that gives out on the spot. As much as pop-culture would like some eye movement or what not.
Only thing that gives away lies is cross examination and asking multiple times about the same thing in a slightly different way.
After asking 10 or 20 times about the same thing you might see that things don’t add up. It might be easier if you have 2 or more people making stuff up because if you separate them they will lie in a different way.
Of course there are also people so bad at lying that will give out at first interrogation…
> After asking 10 or 20 times about the same thing you might see that things don’t add up.
After answering 10 or 20 times, even a person telling the truth might start to get confused and doubt their own recollection. Like semantic satiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
See what he does when you tell him you're going to sleep on it. If that makes it look like a great deal is going to disappear, or if he doesn't want to get lost when you tell him you've had enough of him for now, you are being taken for a ride and it's time to get off - what he doesn't want is you getting a chance to compare notes, whether with someone else or yourself.
That said, the hard part is realizing it's time to say you're going to sleep on it in the first place. They don't call it a confidence trick for nothing, and faced with someone who's very good at it, it's easy to want to buy what he's selling because the guy's just so dang likeable.
I used to work with someone that I think qualifies as either a pathological liar, con man, or deeply flawed. The most distinctive sign is that they tell blatant lies which serve to distract from and cover up the longer running and more subtle lies.
Point being, if someone has been telling you something and then tells you something unrelated that you can prove to be false, then you need to exert considerable mental effort to revisit the initial thing they were telling you in order to determine whether it is true.
I can't recall any specific details, but the general gist would be akin to someone telling you that they are working on a deal with XYZ for a multi-year program and they would have told you on Thursday but their flight was delayed in Houston due to a freak snow storm.
I think this tactic works because gullible people are distracted by the idea of a freak snow storm in Houston, and more critically minded people focus their bullshit detector on the 'snow storm in Houston' story instead of the 'multi-year program' story.
There isn't one. Body language is maybe slightly better than chance but generally unreliable. Exact word choice can be a sign; if you ask them a question do they actually answer it or do they deflect? But fundamentally if you really care you need some independent confirmation.
In Abagnales the bar exam results and prison time should be verifiable, but besides that who knows. I wonder why the FBI wouldn't comment, seems like they should know whether he ever worked there or not.
I don’t know if there are specific signs to look for. I’ve spend a lot of time studying people, their inputs and outputs. There is a lot of data in body language and inflection.
People lie, evade, omit, or exaggerate all the time. For example, talking about things that make them uncomfortable. It’s one of those unconscious things that makes societies work.
This isn’t unconscious for me. I see everything and analyze it logically.
Detecting misdirection is fairly easy for me. When someone is actively lying, they are generally trying present specific body language and inflection.
What happens is they miss something and I see the mismatch between the fake and real signals. It’s very similar to reading a polygraph.
This isn’t a unique ability, most people have it and it manifests as a gut feeling. I’m neurodivergent and I’m able to give more than a gut feeling. I can usually point to what I’m seeing and explain it.
All that said, I haven’t found any general “tells” for good lairs. It’s an art, not a science. It’s one reason polygraphs aren’t allow in court and I don’t use this ability to make snap judgements. :)
I understand what you're describing, but the point I'm making is that what makes a con artist a con artist is their ability to deceive this sort of analysis. If you can fool the thing I'm emulating, you can fool my emulation, too - in fact, the better my emulation, the better the attack works.
Eh. Twenty years living in Baltimore has done a real number on my good-hearted naïveté, but that's not at all the same as saying I can no longer be played for a sucker.
Be careful with this. Some people, including me, can purposely (and falsely!) trigger your lie detector. If I believe that x=1 and if I want you to believe that I believe that x=0, I can say "x=1" while purposely displaying the tells you are looking for. People want to think that they are smart- that they are capable of reading people. It's much easier to just give them what they are looking for and move on than to leave them sitting there analyzing you for the next few minutes. They'll also think that you're a shit liar which is useful.
I’m not a lie detector. I spot inconsistencies. :)
I’ve had to learn to read people logically. I have no intuitive feeling for emotions. So I got good at analyzing and predicting people in a non-standard way. People don’t know what I’m looking at and don’t know what they need to fake.
For all of the people who have lied to me (successfully or not), I’ve seen no common patterns to look for.
You can't really evaluate your ability to detect lies accurately, because you can't count the times someone was lying and you didn't notice it. You also probably can't count the times you thought someone was lying but wasn't (people can look like they're lying when admitting something that makes them uncomfortable, or hiding something while still telling the truth), since you probably didn't prove every single case. So you have an unknown rate of false positives and an unknown rate of false negatives.
The gut feeling/discrepancy you notice in body language can only be used as a sign you should dig deeper. Just like a polygraph, it can't prove someone is lying or not. You have to cross-reference.
Maybe I misspoke. I don’t spot lying. I spot inconsistencies. I can’t say whether or not if someone is deliberately trying to deceive me without addition information.
I do have feedback because I’m continually adjusting and refining the technique as my assumptions are confirmed or disproven. It’s similar to the technique I use for reading emotions. Occasionally I run across people who don’t follow the normal pattern and I need to adjust how I read them.
Unfortunately, I hate to pull the adage "it takes one to know one", but in this case I think it's apropos. I think people with sociopathic tendencies have a higher sensitivity for being able to detect textbook narcissism, reality distortion field, and the overall faint wafting of bullshit that conmen tend to exude.
For the record I've always thought that Richard Feynman, while being an exceptional physicist, in his autobiographies it always feels like he is crafting narrative tales of how he wished he was.
Good article, but this was pretty well known and documented for years if not decades. I remember briefly looking it up not too long after having seen the movie, and being disappointed that it was all a big lie.
It being "common knowledge" that 90% of his backstory is fictional and he was actually a pretty low end forger that was frequently caught until he figured lying about the lies he told was a better grift hasn't stopped the tech industry from continuing to fawn all over him as if he's a knowledgeable and inspirational person
I used to do this. Still have a strong tendency to, and have to resist it. Everyone's lived experience is different, and I'd wager there is a large percentage of people across the globe alive now who have never, and will never, have any clue about Frank Abagnale and his story.
This reminds me of the story from A Scanner Darkly. One of the characters tells a story about a con artist who was pretending to be a famous con artist. His whole shtick was going around to talk shows recounting how he had played all these outlandish characters and conned people out of all kinds of money, in the end the only character he ever played was that of a con artist.
Maybe that story was based on the Catch Me If you Can guy, but I think possibly not because A Scanner Darkly came out before that movie.
I don't think it is. I remember looking for it in my ebook version when this connection was asked in a previous HN discussion and not finding it. I think it is unique to the movie, even if the idea does have some thematic connections to PKD's ideas. Rumors about Abagnale were circulating long before the movie so it is possible that Linklater was referencing him.
No but someone else would have made it eventually. Maybe a little bit later. Tech does not happen in a vacuum, even in earlier centuries the same invention happened around the same time in different parts of the world.
Apple invented the PDA (even the term) with the Newton in 1992. Steve wasn't with the company at the time, but given the company wouldn't have existed without him it isn't really that much of a stretch to say they wouldn't necessarily exist without his influence.
You seem to subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, while the people that disagree with you subscribe to a "human dynamics" theory of history (think Hari Sheldon's psychohistory in the Foundation books). You can point at some "great man" in history and say "if it wasn't for this person's actions history would have been different", but over long enough timelines I believe some things are inevitable, given the wider context in a point in time. If Columbus hadn't convinced the Spanish crown to seek new trade routes through the West, some other individual would have enticed another colonialist European power to so, with similar results for native Americans over the following century, for example.
> You must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. ... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.
According you Wikipedia, they started with Psion in the 80s
> The first PDA, the Organiser, was released in 1984 by Psion, followed by Psion's Series 3, in 1991. The latter began to resemble the more familiar PDA style, including a full keyboard
You’ve clearly never listened to Steve Jobs speak, or you didn’t understand what he was saying.
And it’s not just me. A lot of very respected smart people think he was way above them. That’s not a conman.
Also, conmen usually have an expiry date or they have to switch roles or disappear into new communities once they get found out. Same with psychopaths. They get found out and get rejected by society. That’s not what Steve Jobs did. He was respected to the end and built products to the end.
As a side note, I also think the obsession with UX and design in tech never would have occurred without jobs. The only reason we have fairly well designed apps and websites at this point is jobs’ influence.
Agree with you on conmen getting rooted out. I don’t think that holds for psychopaths or not nearly as much. They can cement themselves in positions of power.
The Valley of Genius is another great book and doesn't hide much about Steve Jobs and his opportunism. That said, he sure knew how to raise money, build a team, and get attention.
Side note : Well designed apps and websites represents exactly what some of us probably find unusable, I often find myself constricted when I'm in front of a windows/mac machine, and everything I use on my computer, ( no trackpad, but a trackpoint, almost no design, a shell, a term, several virtual desktop, no wallpaper or picture, nothing else than text ) is exactly what Mac/windows people find unusable.
I downvoted your comments because your comments trigger emotions, whereas good comments trigger curiosity. It sounds like you call everyone that liked that movie an idiot with no taste (I haven't seen the movie by the way). Now you even edited your second comment to say "Cowardly downvoters", which is a reason to flag it.
I also downvoted, and it’s honestly because your point comes across as not understanding any of Martin Scorsese’s direction and body of work. Nearly all of his movies (primarily, mobster and crime related) are centered around characters and stories of wealth, excess, and the blatant flouting of rules and law in order to obtain power, followed by their near immediate downfall and loss of everything that truly matters. The Wolf of Wall Street, the movie, isn’t about the glorification of wealth: it’s about the vapidity and shallowness of that component of human nature and the ultimate self destruction and meaningless of life when it’s pursued. Someone can recommend that movie because they appreciate that moral and sentiment, not because they want to be a conman investment banker (or a gangster for that matter).
Maybe I should try some more Scorsese. Which movie do you recommend? I'll make an exception to my rule for the purpose of education :-)
If he was attempting to do what you describe with TWWS, I think he missed the mark. It seemed to express a a general nihilism rather than some message about how criminals ruin their own lives.
Things that would have made the movie better, in my eyes:
- At least one female character who was more than an object (Bechdel test was failed by a mile)
- Any scene with the perspective of any of the victims (the people whose lives Belfort destroyed are totally out of frame all movie)
- If Belfort's supposedly convincing / charismatic speeches were even slightly persuasive or entertaining (he did not sell me that pen at all)
- Less time wasted with blurry camera stumbling around on drugs
The funny thing is that I loved Catch Me if You Can when I first saw it and went to see TWWS hoping for more of that. So... maybe TWWS was more real. Crime does pay, and financial criminals are not geniuses, just bog-standard douchebags, and they get a slap on the wrist when they're caught and the world keeps spinning. Perhaps THAT is the message.
I'll also say that I didn't mean to imply they were idiots with no taste -- I meant that they are people whose cinema tastes are very different from mine. It's a shortcut for finding that out.
I enjoyed the movie but I also don't treat it like it's any kind of replication of reality. Like almost anything Hollywood puts out alongside the "based on actual events" clickbait.
The funding of the movie is also incredibly interesting, I think there was an episode of Netflix's Dirty Money based on that. Worth a watch.
(I upvoted original comment because it didn't deserve the very light grey text that it was)
Its not surprising that Jobs would be included on patents that were filed by people who worked for or with him. He was known to be mean and pushy and could easily force his name to be included.
Do we know of one thing that Jobs actually invented or co-invented, or was he always the marketer?
Hundreds of things. Peyton just told you that. But you like the idea of Jobs being a “conman” better than the truth so why disabuse you of the notion?
In case you’re wondering, filing a patent with an improperly listed inventor is fraud and invalidates the patent. Every patent app includes a signed oath and declaration by the inventors that they did indeed invent it.
The idea that Jobs didn’t have direct input on the functionality of novel features of Apple products is beyond absurd.
Aside from the fact that he was notoriously hands-on, Apple has been coasting on his achievements and direction for over a decade now.
> He was known to be mean and pushy and could easily force his name to be included.
He was also very closely involved with every aspect of the products Apple was developing. Just watch any of his interviews. He knew all the details: technical, design, marketing.
So yeah, I'm not surprised he has his name on patents.
If you’re going to make that distinction, shouldn’t you also cite quotations where Jobs makes the claim to specifically be the inventor? It seems the charge in this thread depends on blurring that boundary such that marketing on behalf of the company on stage and in interviews is equated with claims of being an inventor.
I was taking the "reality distortion field" talk to refer to the cultlike status Job's fandom reached at its peak, where the "famous for being famous" effect came into play. I don't think he qualifies as a con man, and I don't think he claimed personal credit for the inventions of others (he never "took the initiative and invented the internet" like Al Gore).
* He didn't create the mouse, GUI and Ethernet, the guys at Xerox's Palo Alto research centre did it.
* He didn't really create Pixar, bought it from George Lucas. His idea and project was to have the company to make and sell hardware for CG, because that was the only thing he had ever done at Apple & Next. The movie production was an offshot from the demos and the business of creating intros for television shows.
* He didn't create the iPhone. In fact Apple's engineers had to pressure him for years before he accepted. What got him accepting the idea was the fiasco on having iTunes into a Nokia phone.
* He didn't invent the Appstore. In fact he only accepted the idea of people making apps to the iPhone because 6 months after release the sales were collapsing.
Apple was and still is a very smart company. I concede that he was good at surrounding himself with smart people, and taking merit for what those people did.
There's a big difference between "this person was a con-man, never actually did any of the things they claimed, and was outright lying in order to present a marketable persona" and "this person is commonly given more credit in the creation of some things than they deserve, but they were closely involved with all those things, and were unquestionably a major figure in their field, regardless of the extra hype that has attached to them (even if they may have encouraged some of that extra hype)".
Steve Jobs was not a con-man. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he never claimed personal credit for the things you're saying he didn't do; those were things that were attributed to him by others.
Well, I think Diego’s point was that he knew how to create and utilise a powerful “reality distortion field” such that, without claiming direct creation over any of the vast classics that Apple created, he gained the status and fame of someone who seemed to have done so.
Folks, especially humans for some reason, want to pin things on single individuals rather than groups. Even though our society and it's grand accomplishments are things that typically only groups can accomplish.
Even a person building "alone" is building something on the backs of those who came before them.
But that desire to name a single person as the "creator" leads to a lot of strife.
The iPhone and the Apple Newton before it, was stuck with a stylus. Jobs wouldn't release an iPhone that relied upon a stylus.
Multi-touch displays was the key technology Steve Jobs needed to greenlight the iPhone.
Steve was completely invested in electing products that generated an experience the customer valued. This didn't always line up with the technical merits of the product. He subordinated the company to that goal, including holding releases back to hit a specific timing.
Steve said he did this strategy because he had the scar tissue to prove that making an amazing piece of tech and trying to market it, never worked for him.
He didn't create tech. He created relationships to the customer that made Apple billions.
I'd actually argue that the engineering is the easy part and doing everything else right, to keep the company going and engineers employed, is the hard part.
He was however the catalyst that allowed many smart and dedicated engineers to develop the things they did. Giving them drive and direction, money and resources to play with and develop the toys of their dreams. I love the folklore.org website that talks a lot about this.
This means he does not fit in your list of fraudster and hucksters.
Does it though? Every single one of us have survived some life-changing childhood drama with varying degrees of severity, but not too many of us act out publicly because of it or ask to have cameras rolling when we do.
she did so well, leading a life of promotion of vanity and desolation, drug abuse and promiscuity. Should we thank her for her contribution to a hyper sexualised world as well ?
As easy as it is to disregard life choices because of trauma, I'm actually kinda unconvinced.
>Steve Jobs never really invented anything but he knew how to play the role.
You're of course getting engagement here. But the key difference is this: Abgnale outputted nothing.
Steve Jobs outputted Apple, Pixar and Next (basis of Macos and iOS).
You can quibble over what share of what credit for the specific products of each of those three companies. But there's no disputing Next wouldn't have existed without him, nor Apple, and Apple would have failed without him. Pixar had been declined by 45 other investors; only Jobs said yes. So it likely would not have got off the ground without him.
Everyone involved in the output of those companies speaks highly of him and ascribe him a vital role. Key competitors do the same.
Your argument amounts to say:
1. He had a well known reality distortion field
2. Therefore he accomplished nothing and everyone who was there on the ground is wrong, for they were subject to this field
3. All of the output of those companies happened, no thanks to Jobs.
I agree. Abagnale never outputted anything for the public, but he has outputted tremendous good for himself at the expense of others. Him and Jobs both achieved feats that no average man could have achieved.
He didn't write an autobiography. His biography had some glaring errors (people like Bill Gates are directly quoted as saying things with basic tech mistakes they couldn't have said) and of course he died before it was finished, so he couldn't have reviewed it.
Your reply seems to mistake the subject "he" for Jobs but in fact Abagnale is the subject there. G-GP suggests that (unlike Jobs) Abagnale output nothing and GP refutes that claim suggesting that Abagnale's autobiography and film are works that we can credit to him.
Point of my comment is people also accuse Jobs of outputting only a story. But it’s ludicrous to believe all the rest of the stuff is just coincidence that happens to surround Jobs, again and again and again.
I read The Greatest Hoax when it came out. Good book. What a creep Abagnale is. The book caught my eye becuase I remember seeing Abagnale give his lectures at Google, thinking, wow, this guy sure doesn't seem like a genius. We are all just gullible.
We also inherently expect most people play by similar rules as we do. For example, we anticipate other people have a conscience and feel bad when others suffer. Our interactions with others are partly based on this. However, for example a psychopath doesn’t experience those things, and therefore can do things that catch us off guard with ease.
In short, rogue agents can have a natural leg up when they are able to effectively emulate a behavior model- except here it’s social, instead of military.
Everyone here posting about how it sucks that it turns out he lied about all the cool stuff he did, when the significance and impact of those lies pale in comparison to the societal impact a Steven Spielberg directed film based on those lies had.
In a society that prized teamwork and shared goals, he would have been reviled for his exploits.
However a lot of Western society (though more American) prizes those who scam and hustle their way to the top, even if they endanger others in the process. We can't help but sit with our mouths open in wonder as the charming con man documents his free-wheeling life we would all wish to live if we only had the gusto.
You don't give a conman your confidence, he gives you his.
I saw a clip of a film some time ago (anyone idea of its name?). It has Chazz Palminteri in it. He played a conman. Him and a woman were waiting in a Western union (?) office. They got chatting, and in walks a GI. Chazz's character talks to the GI and starts to con him out of his money. The woman was aware of this. But he stops short of conning the GI. The GI leaves, and he explains how the con works.
Chazz and the woman then leave together. The point is that he was playing a long con against the woman and the aborted short con was just a ploy.
The moral of the lesson is that if someone reveals themselves to be a liar, then you should take them at their word. Having established themselves as liars, you should never trust them.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadIt seemed fitting given what we now know about how little he actually cheated.
https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI
It's a low-effort drive-by statement so generic as to be practically meaningless.
He just made one very big lie.
(Other than the obvious, which is "this sounds unrealistic")
There is no trick that gives you information if person is lying that gives out on the spot. As much as pop-culture would like some eye movement or what not.
Only thing that gives away lies is cross examination and asking multiple times about the same thing in a slightly different way.
After asking 10 or 20 times about the same thing you might see that things don’t add up. It might be easier if you have 2 or more people making stuff up because if you separate them they will lie in a different way.
Of course there are also people so bad at lying that will give out at first interrogation…
After answering 10 or 20 times, even a person telling the truth might start to get confused and doubt their own recollection. Like semantic satiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
That said, the hard part is realizing it's time to say you're going to sleep on it in the first place. They don't call it a confidence trick for nothing, and faced with someone who's very good at it, it's easy to want to buy what he's selling because the guy's just so dang likeable.
Point being, if someone has been telling you something and then tells you something unrelated that you can prove to be false, then you need to exert considerable mental effort to revisit the initial thing they were telling you in order to determine whether it is true.
I think this tactic works because gullible people are distracted by the idea of a freak snow storm in Houston, and more critically minded people focus their bullshit detector on the 'snow storm in Houston' story instead of the 'multi-year program' story.
In Abagnales the bar exam results and prison time should be verifiable, but besides that who knows. I wonder why the FBI wouldn't comment, seems like they should know whether he ever worked there or not.
People lie, evade, omit, or exaggerate all the time. For example, talking about things that make them uncomfortable. It’s one of those unconscious things that makes societies work.
This isn’t unconscious for me. I see everything and analyze it logically.
Detecting misdirection is fairly easy for me. When someone is actively lying, they are generally trying present specific body language and inflection.
What happens is they miss something and I see the mismatch between the fake and real signals. It’s very similar to reading a polygraph.
This isn’t a unique ability, most people have it and it manifests as a gut feeling. I’m neurodivergent and I’m able to give more than a gut feeling. I can usually point to what I’m seeing and explain it.
All that said, I haven’t found any general “tells” for good lairs. It’s an art, not a science. It’s one reason polygraphs aren’t allow in court and I don’t use this ability to make snap judgements. :)
I’ve had to learn to read people logically. I have no intuitive feeling for emotions. So I got good at analyzing and predicting people in a non-standard way. People don’t know what I’m looking at and don’t know what they need to fake.
For all of the people who have lied to me (successfully or not), I’ve seen no common patterns to look for.
That's why I compared it to a polygraph.
The gut feeling/discrepancy you notice in body language can only be used as a sign you should dig deeper. Just like a polygraph, it can't prove someone is lying or not. You have to cross-reference.
I do have feedback because I’m continually adjusting and refining the technique as my assumptions are confirmed or disproven. It’s similar to the technique I use for reading emotions. Occasionally I run across people who don’t follow the normal pattern and I need to adjust how I read them.
For the record I've always thought that Richard Feynman, while being an exceptional physicist, in his autobiographies it always feels like he is crafting narrative tales of how he wished he was.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
e.g
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042279
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15793045
I used to do this. Still have a strong tendency to, and have to resist it. Everyone's lived experience is different, and I'd wager there is a large percentage of people across the globe alive now who have never, and will never, have any clue about Frank Abagnale and his story.
And that's okay.
Maybe that story was based on the Catch Me If you Can guy, but I think possibly not because A Scanner Darkly came out before that movie.
Social identity being exaggeratedly fluid is a reoccurring theme in PKD's writing, so the topic fits.
Steve Jobs never really invented anything but he knew how to play the role.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" also invented most of the stuff in the movie/book but he knew how to play the role.
Buffalo Bill was just an exhibitionist showman that never did anything heroic but he knew how to pretend it.
And Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, ...
Well, you got the idea...
Would we have the iPhone if Steve Jobs were never born?
> You must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. ... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.
— Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology
> The first PDA, the Organiser, was released in 1984 by Psion, followed by Psion's Series 3, in 1991. The latter began to resemble the more familiar PDA style, including a full keyboard
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
And it’s not just me. A lot of very respected smart people think he was way above them. That’s not a conman.
Also, conmen usually have an expiry date or they have to switch roles or disappear into new communities once they get found out. Same with psychopaths. They get found out and get rejected by society. That’s not what Steve Jobs did. He was respected to the end and built products to the end.
As a side note, I also think the obsession with UX and design in tech never would have occurred without jobs. The only reason we have fairly well designed apps and websites at this point is jobs’ influence.
If he was attempting to do what you describe with TWWS, I think he missed the mark. It seemed to express a a general nihilism rather than some message about how criminals ruin their own lives.
Things that would have made the movie better, in my eyes:
- At least one female character who was more than an object (Bechdel test was failed by a mile)
- Any scene with the perspective of any of the victims (the people whose lives Belfort destroyed are totally out of frame all movie)
- If Belfort's supposedly convincing / charismatic speeches were even slightly persuasive or entertaining (he did not sell me that pen at all)
- Less time wasted with blurry camera stumbling around on drugs
The funny thing is that I loved Catch Me if You Can when I first saw it and went to see TWWS hoping for more of that. So... maybe TWWS was more real. Crime does pay, and financial criminals are not geniuses, just bog-standard douchebags, and they get a slap on the wrist when they're caught and the world keeps spinning. Perhaps THAT is the message.
The funding of the movie is also incredibly interesting, I think there was an episode of Netflix's Dirty Money based on that. Worth a watch.
(I upvoted original comment because it didn't deserve the very light grey text that it was)
this is an absurd suggestion. Steve Jobs has been a pioneer in making computing ubiquitous
Do we know of one thing that Jobs actually invented or co-invented, or was he always the marketer?
In case you’re wondering, filing a patent with an improperly listed inventor is fraud and invalidates the patent. Every patent app includes a signed oath and declaration by the inventors that they did indeed invent it.
The idea that Jobs didn’t have direct input on the functionality of novel features of Apple products is beyond absurd.
Aside from the fact that he was notoriously hands-on, Apple has been coasting on his achievements and direction for over a decade now.
He was also very closely involved with every aspect of the products Apple was developing. Just watch any of his interviews. He knew all the details: technical, design, marketing.
So yeah, I'm not surprised he has his name on patents.
Recap (paraphrased):
"Jobs never invented anything"
"He was a pioneer"
"pioneer != inventor"
"You have to show proof that he claimed he was an inventor!"
"Nobody said he claimed he was an inventor."
I was taking the "reality distortion field" talk to refer to the cultlike status Job's fandom reached at its peak, where the "famous for being famous" effect came into play. I don't think he qualifies as a con man, and I don't think he claimed personal credit for the inventions of others (he never "took the initiative and invented the internet" like Al Gore).
As far as I'm aware, Steve Jobs was, in fact, both the founder and former CEO of Apple. Unless he was pulling one HELLUVA ruse that I was unaware of.
* He didn't create the Apple II, Wozniak did.
* He didn't create the mouse, GUI and Ethernet, the guys at Xerox's Palo Alto research centre did it.
* He didn't really create Pixar, bought it from George Lucas. His idea and project was to have the company to make and sell hardware for CG, because that was the only thing he had ever done at Apple & Next. The movie production was an offshot from the demos and the business of creating intros for television shows.
* He didn't create the iPhone. In fact Apple's engineers had to pressure him for years before he accepted. What got him accepting the idea was the fiasco on having iTunes into a Nokia phone.
* He didn't invent the Appstore. In fact he only accepted the idea of people making apps to the iPhone because 6 months after release the sales were collapsing.
Apple was and still is a very smart company. I concede that he was good at surrounding himself with smart people, and taking merit for what those people did.
Steve Jobs was not a con-man. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he never claimed personal credit for the things you're saying he didn't do; those were things that were attributed to him by others.
People also assumed Bill Gates created DOS because they are misinformed, no reality distortion field required.
The Apple II would likely not have been successful without both Wozniak and Jobs.
Would the iPhone have come to fruition without Job's leadership, vision, and design + negotiation skills?
Folks, especially humans for some reason, want to pin things on single individuals rather than groups. Even though our society and it's grand accomplishments are things that typically only groups can accomplish.
Even a person building "alone" is building something on the backs of those who came before them.
But that desire to name a single person as the "creator" leads to a lot of strife.
And hiring people who can bring them to you is worth even more, especially if you're able to hear them when they keep insisting.
Something a lot of engineers fail to realize is that a successful product is not just about technology, it is about timing, cost, ecosystem, market.
Who's to say Jobs didn't think the iPhone was not a good idea, but shouldn't be done earlier? The iPhone 10-15 years before the iPhone was the Newton.
* Woz would have remained an obscure engineer working at HP
* Apple would never have happened
* The Mac would have never existed
* Pixar would have vanished without a trace
* Apple would have gone bankrupt in 1999
* OSX would never have existed
* Apple would still be wasting its time marketing 420 SKUs of beige Macintosh, along with its panoply of zero-value-add peripherals
* Apple would never have tried to make an iPod, which was, for Apple, an insanely out-of-left-field hobby project driven by Jobs
* Without the iPod, there would be no iTunes Store, which near-single-handedly pulled the music industry into its post-Napster era
* There would be no iPad, a project inspired by Jobs’ personal reaction to a dinner with Gates
* There would be no iPhone, a project spun off from iPad development and fast-tracked for earlier release
* If Apple ever did develop a phone or tablet, it probably would have been based on NewtonOS and fail to crack 1% market share
* Android would have stayed on course to be a competitor to the Blackberry
Plus, he had to make the decision ultimately.
That's way way way way way way more important than I think most people realize.
Multi-touch displays was the key technology Steve Jobs needed to greenlight the iPhone.
Steve was completely invested in electing products that generated an experience the customer valued. This didn't always line up with the technical merits of the product. He subordinated the company to that goal, including holding releases back to hit a specific timing.
Steve said he did this strategy because he had the scar tissue to prove that making an amazing piece of tech and trying to market it, never worked for him.
He didn't create tech. He created relationships to the customer that made Apple billions.
He was however the catalyst that allowed many smart and dedicated engineers to develop the things they did. Giving them drive and direction, money and resources to play with and develop the toys of their dreams. I love the folklore.org website that talks a lot about this.
This means he does not fit in your list of fraudster and hucksters.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/18/they-st...
As easy as it is to disregard life choices because of trauma, I'm actually kinda unconvinced.
You're of course getting engagement here. But the key difference is this: Abgnale outputted nothing.
Steve Jobs outputted Apple, Pixar and Next (basis of Macos and iOS).
You can quibble over what share of what credit for the specific products of each of those three companies. But there's no disputing Next wouldn't have existed without him, nor Apple, and Apple would have failed without him. Pixar had been declined by 45 other investors; only Jobs said yes. So it likely would not have got off the ground without him.
Everyone involved in the output of those companies speaks highly of him and ascribe him a vital role. Key competitors do the same.
Your argument amounts to say:
1. He had a well known reality distortion field
2. Therefore he accomplished nothing and everyone who was there on the ground is wrong, for they were subject to this field
3. All of the output of those companies happened, no thanks to Jobs.
Point of my comment is people also accuse Jobs of outputting only a story. But it’s ludicrous to believe all the rest of the stuff is just coincidence that happens to surround Jobs, again and again and again.
Do you think orchestra directors or managers of sports teams contribute nothing to their team’s success?
That’s true generally, and especially true when a celebrity is involved. Humans are great liars and terrible lie detectors.
In short, rogue agents can have a natural leg up when they are able to effectively emulate a behavior model- except here it’s social, instead of military.
Kidding aside, I think investigative journalists have been the ones to sound the alarm on the con.
It just makes it all the more impressive!
However a lot of Western society (though more American) prizes those who scam and hustle their way to the top, even if they endanger others in the process. We can't help but sit with our mouths open in wonder as the charming con man documents his free-wheeling life we would all wish to live if we only had the gusto.
I saw a clip of a film some time ago (anyone idea of its name?). It has Chazz Palminteri in it. He played a conman. Him and a woman were waiting in a Western union (?) office. They got chatting, and in walks a GI. Chazz's character talks to the GI and starts to con him out of his money. The woman was aware of this. But he stops short of conning the GI. The GI leaves, and he explains how the con works.
Chazz and the woman then leave together. The point is that he was playing a long con against the woman and the aborted short con was just a ploy.
The moral of the lesson is that if someone reveals themselves to be a liar, then you should take them at their word. Having established themselves as liars, you should never trust them.
You’re thinking of Joe Mantegna in House of Games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Games
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Riy4God934c
Fraud runs in the family.