WT: Never Fooled w/ Dr. Daniel Simons

The episode is a conversation with Dan Simons about his book Nobody's Fool and the general ways people get deceived. The discussion moves through examples from chess cheating, fraudulent research data, social media sharing, and everyday scams to show how suspicious regularity, incentives, and expectation bias can hide deception or honest mistakes. Evidence includes the chess tournament anecdote, the odometer study fraud case, and the repeated emphasis on truth bias and confirmation bias (L33-L34, L41-L49, L77-L85, L109-L110, L169-L170). A second major thread is practical skepticism: when it is worth checking carefully, when it is impossible or undesirable to distrust everything, and what kinds of controls can help. The speakers use the Van Halen brown M&M story as a positive control, discuss allergies and expensive purchases as high-stakes cases, and end by recommending the book and bookshop.org. Evidence includes the trust/limits discussion, the positive-control example, the allergy and art examples, and the closing promotional exchange (L169-L170, L179-L189, L199-L201, L211-L213, L347-L357, L359-L373). Key topics Suspicious regularity as a fraud signal: The episode repeatedly highlights that fake or manipulated activity often leaves patterns that do not match real-world behavior, such as odd chess timing, flat mileage distributions, or duplicated spreadsheet data. Confirmation bias and truth bias: The guests stress that people tend to accept claims that fit what they alread