Transcription
Every week, you're making real money decisions on information you can't verify. Iran escalation, a Fed pivot, AI bubble, what are the recession odds? Now, you probably have three sources giving you three different stories, all written by people who are very good at writing stories. And you still have to position your portfolio on Monday morning.
Now, here's what I've been telling my audience for years now. You're probably not going to figure out what's true, but you can figure out what's being done to you. That's the actual skill that you need to build. Retail investors underperform the market by 3 to 4% every single year. And that's not because there's a knowledge gap. It's because there's a discernment gap.
So today, I'm sitting down with Chase Hughes. He spent 20 years studying exactly how perception gets engineered in interrogations, in advertising, in media, and we built a toolkit. How to spot narrative engineering in real time, how to read the person across the table from you in a deal, and how to build a mind that can't be moved.
So, let's jump right in with Chase. Here's the world that my audience is living in, which is every week they're making real money decisions. So, they're trying to think about investing and they're hearing narratives that maybe they can't verify. You know, the Iran escalation, Fed's going to pivot, an AI bubble, recession. Three sources tell them three different things, right? And they're all written by people who are really good at writing stories, writing headlines, but my audience has to try to discern that. So, you know, I've been telling the same thing for years that you're probably not going to figure out what's true, but you could figure out what's being done to you.
So, let's start this out with maybe the most valuable piece of a toolkit. If my audience could ask one question every time, every time they encounter a piece of information, a new segment, a sales pitch, an earnings call, a tweet, what's the question they should ask?
Yeah. So, I teach this a lot and it's called narrative installation. And basically what this means is it's how a belief gets loaded into a population before anybody realizes it. So a lot of people think media is out there telling us what to think. Um, but it tells you what to feel before you think. And that is the biggest distinction that anybody could possibly make. So I'm going to preload a feeling before I give you data to change the way that you're interpreting that data. So by the time a story, let's say it hits the front page, the emotional frame has already been chosen. So the headline is engineered, the images are pre-selected. The word order is very deliberate. So a lot of people think, you know, I arrived at my opinion, uh, this way and this way. They didn't. All of this is pre-delivered and a lot of people just accept the package. And if for a lot of people listening, I know I know the feeling of like, yeah, not me, bro. I know that feeling. All of us assume that we're immune to this [ __ ] right? This is how entire populations hold beliefs that were installed in under 48 hours.
So if you look at headlines, it's never the actual story. And framing changes the meaning without changing the facts. That's the biggest thing of all time. How has this been framed? Because I can frame something with the identical facts and make you feel completely different. And the number one question, uh, that anybody could ask is, is this story, as I listen to it, is it making me angry? Not making me pissed off, none of that stuff. Is it making me feel clever?
That's the most dangerous thing because if I get you to assemble an idea in your head and you feel clever for doing it, not only will you think it's your own idea, number two, you're going to share it and spread it with other people and you'll defend it.
That's the biggest thing. Like I teach jury selection and trial science for a living. Um, all I do is I put this idea here and I put this idea here and your brain says, "Oh, I bet those two things go together." So right away you think it's your own idea. And if we have a thing that's in our mind that we think we came up with, we will never, we cannot resist something that we think came from ourselves.
Man, that that's the big. That is that is good. That that could just take the whole podcast. That was that was a great answer. Um, so ask yourself, what are they trying to get me to feel? And if I'm enraged or I'm happy or I'm entertained, it's not as dangerous. But if I feel clever, then I know that I'm being played and I have to be careful of that. And that's where you see, uh, you know, on the social media side, we think about creating content that would be sharable, right? So if if is that sort of an idea like if if I feel clever, then I want to share the content.
Yes. You feel clever, then it becomes part of your identity.
Got it. And this is a separate thing called identity capture. And identity is the deepest behavioral lever that exists on earth. So we think that, you know, all these people, they hold beliefs. It's the other way around. Beliefs are holding us. So if you, I know you talk a lot about crypto, a lot about money and investment stuff, which I know damn near nothing about, maybe as much as a first-grade child. Um, but financial decisions are always downstream of identity. I'm a saver. You know, I'm a, I'm a crypto guy. I'm not the kind of person who takes risks. If you change the identity, the financial decisions change instantly. So, this is why arguments aren't going to move people when it comes to money. Identity is what moves people. So the entire influence game, whether you're doing SCOPS on a country or you're doing financial stuff, it's identity. So everything else is surface-level tricks. And this is why you have people that are willing to die for their identities that they never even chose. You look at good brands like Apple, they sell identity instead of products. That's why you see people with Apple and Harley-Davidson tattoos. It's like the identity is where it's all at. So if for anybody that's making financial decisions, don't take my advice on finance stuff, but you always assume that even if it's someone else, even if it's the market, it's downstream of behavior. So like we look at all these market numbers and market fluctuations and people making investment decisions, it's downstream of identity and psychology every single time.
Would the identity be similar to the ideology that they sort of adhere to or prescribe to? So for example, a friend of mine, Jeff Park, wrote this paper, I don't know, six months ago, called the end of the intelligent investor. So, Warren Buffett, he followed this guy, Benjamin Graham, who wrote the book, The Intelligent Investor, you know, and he said it's the death of the intelligent investor and the rise of the ideological investor. And he cited things like Sydney Sweeney talking about Great Jeans and American Eagle stock takes off. Bud Light does the thing with Dylan Mulvaney, their stock tanks. And it's like there was no fundamental intelligent investor thesis. It was all people playing into their ideology. So, would you say those two things are similar?
Yeah, very, very similar. And for a lot of this, one thing that's really important to pay attention to is manufactured authority because that's what gives us those little things. And this is why people trust signals over substance. And we won't ever admit that, but we get very heavily influenced by these identity signals instead of the substance. And we live in a world nowadays where you can fake just about anything. And authority is becoming one of those. So authority is just something we signal like a title or production quality or language register. And you're in a big ass studio with tons of production quality. I'm sitting in mine that hasn't been built yet right now. Like production quality signals authority.
So most people's BS detector runs on these surface cues instead of the truth. That's why a guy in a $4,000 suit can steal billions of dollars and a dude in a hoodie can tell the absolute truth and get ignored. So, I would say that like if you want to get down to the dark side of this, every institution for you listening, every institution that you distrust figured out this machinery decades ago. And so they're not just more correct about any of these issues. They just look more correct. And if you look at our ancestors, and maybe I'm just spinning off the rails here, but let me just get this one thing in.
If you look at the human brain hasn't changed in 200,000 years. So we do not follow the best leader. We are not wired to follow the best leader. In times of crisis, we will follow the most followable signal, the one that's clear and loud. And that's one of the things.
Is clear and loud like it's a confident signal?
Yes. And that's why you see the like the movie Catch Me If You Can. We got this guy, Frank Abagnale, puts a pilot costume on. Can't fly the plane. Worth worth a shift. But he can kind of get all the other perks, all the other benefits, and everybody believes it because it's clear and it's very easy for the brain to take shortcuts to. It looks like a pilot. He sounds like a pilot. My brain just makes a shortcut. And we are hardwired to follow the thing that is the most followable thing.
All right, stop what you're doing right now and book your travel to come join me in Las Vegas for the Bitcoin conference. It's the biggest event of the year. The one I look forward to the most every single year. Literally, my entire year's calendar is set around it. It's the biggest event, the most culturally relevant event happening in the world. The top politicians, the top bankers, the top investors, the top entertainers, everybody's going to be there. So, come check it out, April 27th through the 29th. Use my code, Mark Moss, to save 10%. And if you use my code to save 10%, send me a message on social media or email, and I'll invite you to a private party I'm having at the event, and I'll see you there.
Yeah. And so, a lot of those things, they signal authority. There was a book that I read that was great. I'm trying to think of the name. It was written by another CIA guy. Well, I'm not saying you're CIA, but it was by a previous CIA guy. And it was, um, and I'm drawing a blank on the name of the book, but he talked about how, um, it was the death of authority. And so basically with the internet had so much information, and we used to give authority to the nightly newscaster. We used to give authority to the doctor in a smok. But now that that authority has sort of been erased because now we have so much information. Would you say there's truth to that? But you're saying we still do, we can't help but, because the way our brain is wired, we can't help but give authority. Even though now people get information, they don't look at doctors or newscasters the same way anymore.
Yeah. I would say we're at an age where there's a, we're having the highest record mistrust of any time in history.
Right. Um, and the things that used to hold authority, like the lab coat, like even anybody who's been through basic psychology has heard of the Milgram experiment, and basically where people shocked a stranger to death because a dude in a lab coat told him to do it. Um, and we've been through this thing of like the media manipulation getting exposed more and more every single day. And we're, what I call, and lots of people call, a post-truth era. And our current situation is we're hyper-responsive to things that signal authority in the way that our ancestors would respond to it. So a lot of things that are like, it looks like modern authority. This guy's got a big ass yacht. He's got a Ferrari. A really nice suit. Those are not what triggers the ancestor part of our brain. That's the thing that we really need to pay attention to because what I mean, we have some guy that was like them saying like, oh, you need your 91st booster shot before it's going to be effective and we got to lock people in their houses and do all this stuff. Like that was that woke a lot of people up. That woke normal people up, like my parents, like, what if that was the issue? That was the one thing where they became a little bit mistrustful of what we call authority figures.
Okay. And I was talking about this on Sean Ryan a couple of months ago and it was like these are the people that gave us the food pyramid.
Right?
And I mean, that's all you really need to know. Um, so we, I think we've lost trust in modern-day representations of authority. But what triggers our ancestral brains? And there's five traits when I teach this in seminars. The five traits of what triggers ancestral authority is confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. If you have those things, you will become followable to other people.
Can you walk me through those?
Yeah. Confidence is a, just a generalized belief of positive outcomes. So when I'm saying things with confidence, then people are naturally inclined to listen to me or believe me versus if I sort of use words like maybe and I think, then that sort of kind of I lose authority that way.
Yes.
Okay. So more declarative sentences, your tone goes further down, but if you go on LinkedIn or YouTube and type in how to be confident, you're going to get videos of people teaching you symptoms only and not causes. And that's like someone telling you the way to get COVID is to wrap yourself in a heating blanket and squirt water in your nose. That doesn't give you COVID. It doesn't give you confidence to sit up straight, make eye contact, use the person's name, give them a firm handshake, tap them on the shoulder, all the crap you see on LinkedIn and stuff like that. It's all about symptoms.
And our whole culture is obsessed with symptoms instead of causes. Even the medical system, that is, I don't even need to explain that.
I agree. Yeah. Um, but people focus on the symptoms of confidence instead of the cause. And the overall cause of confidence is either A, I have a generalized belief that everything is going to work out just fine and everything's going to be just fine, or B, you assign yourself a role of, I am here to do X, and that gives me this kind of permission. So confidence is way more about permission than behavior. And the permission makes the behavior a byproduct of that.
Okay. And then we have discipline. If you want to go through all five.
So the essential definition of what discipline is, it's the ability to prioritize your future self ahead of your present day self.
Okay.
That's all. So, and this, you start getting dopamine from your future self, from your past self. So instead of waking up being like, "Oh [ __ ] why did I sleep in? Why did I drink so much last night? I have final exams today." So now we look backwards with like regret and I'm angry at this past me. But the way to start doing dopamine and getting dopamine from your past self is setting yourself up to receive dopamine. So like we're starting the springtime. You're putting people are putting their winter coats in the coat closet for a while. Write a letter to yourself. Stick a $100 bill in there and put it in a pocket. You're going to forget about it and you'll find it. So you start getting these rewards from you, but it's you in the past. So set yourself up today to start setting up rewards. Even if it's like before you go to bed, you open the coffee maker, you get everything ready, you put your cup out, your clothes are laid out, you start becoming your own butler to kind of set everything up for yourself for the next day. So you get into a dopamine loop and it becomes an addictive process. It's the fastest way to make discipline an addictive behavioral habit.
So your future making prioritizing your future more than your present. And this obviously applies to everything. It certainly applies to investing. So putting money aside for the future as opposed to spending it today and thinking about and then I guess thinking about what that future will be and trying to find enjoyment and then how would in that investing framework then how would I set myself up for like that dopamine?
The fastest way to, and you got to think about like most people are prioritizing these human brain ideas. Like if I really want to brainwash you, I have to get down to the lower level of your brain, your limbic system, your mammalian response part of your brain. And that part of your brain doesn't speak English at all. So I could write all the affirmations I want. I could go look at myself in the mirror and say how handsome I am, how great I'm going to be at the TED talk or whatever. It doesn't communicate to the animal brain. So you have to think about like, how would I communicate this to a dog? How would I communicate my goals to my dog? And most of us don't think about our future self because we've never seen them. So our brain communicates, our lower brain uses imagery. So if you download like a $3 app that makes you look like an 80 or a 90-year-old and take a selfie and then print out in full color a picture of you looking 80 or 90 years old, stick it on the fridge where you're making food choices. Stick it on your desk where you're making money choices. You start developing a limbic system relationship that you can't just talk to your brain in English because the lower part has no language whatsoever.
Right.
So you have to communicate in a way like, how is my dog going to understand this? How is the lower part of the brain going to be manipulated? I'm trying to manipulate that animal part of the brain.
So it's the visualization and also probably attaching deep emotions to that.
Right. Absolutely. And the emotions are going to come automatically. And that's why we start doing these dopamine loops. So like I wake up in the morning where I usually like I'll feel like crap and then I'm worried like I got to do all these things. I've taken that stress off of my present tense self. So I've set up all this cognitive load to be reduced. I wake up in the morning, I'm like, "Oh [ __ ] wow. All the stuff's laid out. My coffee is ready to go. Everything is great." The winter time comes around. I got this thing in my pocket that I just found that I wrote for me. I start doing stuff for future me.
And that's the fastest way to start making your brain because like thinking about it, reading all these Rich Dad Poor Dad books and all this other stuff is a way to think differently about money. But you have to feel differently about money too. And that's where it comes to prioritizing your future self on a mammal level in your brain.
And then what's the third one?
Uh, in the authority.
Yeah.
Is leadership.
Okay. And this is pretty basic. Like all it is is a, is your behavior congruent and is your behavior by itself able to produce followership in other people. So the biggest way that we have a congruency detector that's built into our brain. Everybody listening to this podcast right now, you've had some time in your life where you had a conversation, they looked smart, they were confident, they had a great pitch, their haircut was great, they had a really cool suit on to look like an authority figure, but something felt off.
Everybody's felt that like, I don't know what it is, but something's just off. That is our brain's consistency and congruence detection mechanism. So, what this basically means is here's another thing that everybody's felt. Like, you go to a party and you've got, maybe it's a fancy party. You put on a really nice suit. Everything looks great, but back at home, you've got like a six-foot pile of laundry piled up. Your bathroom counter looks like this, got crap all over it.
Uh, there's a part of our brain that's dedicated to reminding us when we are not congruent. And that sends a very. So our unconscious communicates to other people's unconscious, and they're always 100% honest.
So if I behave differently off camera than when I'm on camera, that automatically produces, and I don't mean literal camera.
Yeah.
I mean like I'm at home, I'm a different person. I behave differently when nobody's around. That triggers that, I can't follow this person instinct.
If there's a difference there. So, what I encourage all of my clients to do is something that we call off-camera leadership. So, if all of your clients had cameras in your house, and they could watch you 24 hours a day, how would you behave differently?
Or if your mom, maybe it's your mom, that might change your behavior. So how would your behavior change? And that kind of gets us into that off-camera leadership role.
Got it. Okay. What are the other two?
Uh, gratitude and enjoyment. And these are pretty simple. Gratitude. There's a bazillion YouTube videos on this stuff. Um, but it's not about writing down thank you because that's again, human brain, right? It's about feeling it and just kind of being a thank you and just how can I be more of a thank you to what's going on in the present moment and just an enjoyment. And then just that enjoyment by itself is the most magnetic human trait that makes people trust you. Even going back to Catch Me If You Can, that was what really drew people in. It wasn't like he wasn't walking in there and getting over somebody. He was just enjoying himself, that allowed him to do more things than normal. You can make eye contact way longer than normal if you're smiling and enjoying yourself than if you had a straight face on. So people won't feel threat there. And the number one mistake that people make when they're thinking about authority and confidence is that this has anything to do with hierarchy or status. It's none of those things. It's never my relationship in terms to where I see myself below or above somebody else. The moment you see the world that way, you're automatically becoming or on the path to becoming a loser.
That's powerful stuff. I love that. I want to jump back into. Thanks for sharing that. That was great. Um, yeah. And I'm actually, I was going to jump into another question, but I just want to sort of reinforce for everybody listening. Um, that last one, are you enjoying yourself? Like, are you happy? Like, it makes me think, and tell me if I'm wrong, but it's like, am I genuinely happy? And if I'm happy, then I'm going to be enjoying myself. I'm going to be smiling. And then people want to be around other people that have good energy, that are being that are happy and have enjoyment. I mean, is it that simple?
I mean,
I think it is. Yeah. No one wants to be around someone miserable, right?
Yeah. And I've studied this after 25 years of studying this. It upsets people that the answer is really simple, but a lot of it is just about perspective.
Yeah.
So, if I'm upset or angry about something, it's because I'm looking at it from a different way. If I have somebody coming back from a deployment that's got PTSD, it's a perspective problem. Like the situation stays the same, but it's just like what we talked about at the beginning. How I'm framing that situation, the way I'm looking at that situation is different. So, it's not like you need to go to 15 different yoga classes and things like that. Um, it's just perspective and like how can I modify my perspective? That's the number one question.
Hey, look, you've worked hard to build your Bitcoin stack, but if it's still sitting on an exchange, it's not really yours. You see, the exchange holds the keys to your Bitcoin. Now, if they freeze withdrawals, if they get hacked, they go under, your Bitcoin could disappear overnight. Even if you've moved it into a single cold wallet, you're still exposed. Now, that would be one device, one point of failure. If anything bad were to happen, you could lose your Bitcoin. Now, that's why I use Unchained. Their collaborative custody vault gives me the best of both worlds. I hold my keys, but my security doesn't depend on just one of them. Now, this is where security and sovereignty actually meet. You see, Unchained's collaborative custody Bitcoin vaults use a two of three multi-sig model, which means that you hold two keys and Unchained holds one. That means that you own your Bitcoin, but if you ever need help, like their team is there to assist you without ever having control over your funds. And here's what I really like. Unchained isn't some offshore exchange or anonymous company. They're based in Austin, Texas. And when you call, you're not stuck with bots or scripts. You talk to a real Bitcoiner who genuinely cares about helping you get it right. Now, they've been at it since 2016 and now secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for people just like you and I. Now, that kind of trust doesn't happen overnight. So, if you're serious about long-term security and ownership, head over to unchained.com/markmoss and use code moss10 to get 10% off of your first vault. Because if you don't hold your keys, you don't hold your future.
I want to get back into the manipulation because like I said before we started recording, I was telling you where I kind of think about like this discernment piece that's a big problem. And you sort of kind of gave us one way to look at a news headline for example and try to understand what feeling we have from that. But I think a lot of my audience probably believes that they're pretty smart and that they would see manipulation, that manipulation is obvious, they'd be able to spot it. Right? But you talked about something called fractionation, which I think is something where it takes us between emotional states and it makes us sort of defenseless. And how maybe like doom scrolling on social media is actually doing something to our brain that sort of breaks that down and maybe takes away our discipline. Could you explain that concept for me?
Yeah, fractionation is originally was a hypnosis technique where you could take somebody into a trance. And hypnosis is proven time and time again to be real. It's adopted by the American Medical Association.
Is that because it cuts past our conscious brain and goes to that deeper part of the subconscious brain?
Right. Yeah, absolutely. So it puts your brain into kind of a more relaxed state. We have a flood of this chemical called GABA, which is gamma-aminobutyric acid. But it's basically the safety chemical of the brain. It tells the whole brain to kind of calm down. And it temporarily allows this one thing in your brain called the critical factor, where we criticize things, to be muted or kind of take a nap. So that you can be very, very accepting of suggestions for a temporary amount of time. And it, your brain also goes into theta brain wave state, which is about 6.9 cycles per second. And in hypnosis, if you hypnotize a person and then bring them back out just slightly, and then put them back down, and then bring them back out, and then put them back down, it's proven that they will go, I hate to use the word because it's not really real, but they'll go deeper. So the level of trance is more profound with each little up and down hill.
Okay.
And then researchers later found that we could do this with emotions. So, if I could make you feel like crap and then kind of show you one video of an animal getting rescued or something heartwarming, a soldier coming home from a deployment and hugging his kids, and then take you back down the roller coaster again, I can increase your emotional rubber band so that your bandwidth is bigger. And then after I get you upset or angry, then I can make you more fearful. And that's where you're going to see upset, upset, upset, and then feel good, and then it goes back into upset again. And then right after this little fractionation, it's you're more emotionally manipulatable. Manipulable. I'm not sure what the word is.
Yeah.
But at that point, then we get into fear. That's when you see fear instead of anger. And then you'll see fear. And right after, like this little fear response, you'll see one happy video. And then you'll see an ad. And you, and you can calculate that on whatever app you're using to scroll through. You can see that next time you see an ad, you'll be like, "Wait a second." Then you can kind of scroll backwards and you'll see this up and down emotional manipulation leading up to that ad. And it's the same thing that hypnotists have been doing for, I don't know, probably 150 years.
So the emotions go high, low, high, low, high, low, getting you a little bit deeper into the trance. And then sort of when they're breaking through that sort of critical layer, then they, then you see the ad, which then makes you in a state more ready to buy, I guess.
Yep. That's all they got to do. And it's the bypass, the critical factor is actually pretty easy in people. And there's also some manipulation of specific words and patterns. So manipulation has a kind of a vocabulary. So there's words that presuppose that something's already happened. There's words that install urgency that you can start looking out for. There's words that create commitment before decision. Then we have phrases like "most people," that's a big one, or "a lot of people," or "the polls show that," trigger a bunch of conformity. So there's another one like "imagine how you'll feel," that kind of starts to bypass logic a little bit, or "as you already know," that installs this little false agreement. And it sounds like a throwaway phrase.
So this very specific language. And once you can hear that, you won't unhear it. And every ad and political speech and sales pitch starts sounding way different. So a lot of these, these are like the top maybe top 10 covert tools that you'll see get used on people and politicians or commercials or anybody else.
We talked earlier about, you know, prioritizing our future over our current in the investing state. And I've typically thought it's about that. Um, but what I see happen in the investing world all the time is certainly that people prioritize in the short term. But markets are volatile. So we see prices going up and down, up and down, up and down. The Warren Buffett frame would be like, who cares about the stock price? Think about the company that you've bought and hold for the long term. But today, people get chopped up. So the market goes up, down, up, down, up, down. And I think about that where again, I people are prioritizing short term. Now I'm starting to think maybe it's almost this manipulation like you're talking about where I get joy from seeing the price go up and then fear it dropping and joy up and then fear coming back down. And almost that, that oscillation, that volatility in the stock price going up a couple percent here and there makes people buy at the top trying to chase that high and sell at the low. So again, I thought it was maybe prioritizing short-term over long-term, but maybe it's they're caught up in this fractionation. Would you say that could be the case?
I think so. And if I could go on a little rant here to kind of really plant people in the right place to mentally think about this, I would say there is a behavioral war under the financial war.
Okay.
So, your audience probably thinks they're fighting a money war, but it's behavioral. I would say it's behavioral. Money is the scoreboard of the behavioral stuff going on. And I want, kind of, if you look at it that way, every financial institution, the central banks, the media outlet that shapes the market sentiment is running behavioral operations on the population. So if you don't understand behavior, you're not going to understand what's actually happening.
Okay.
You're kind of watching the scoreboard and thinking the scoreboard is the game itself. And then we have emotional contagion that happens in these markets. And you just look at herd behavior of groups of people. It's kind of a mechanical thing. And emotions just spread between humans the same way that a virus does. So one panicked stock trader, keeping in mind I don't know anything about money, but one panicked little stock trader guy becomes 10. 10 becomes a thousand. So this is observable and measurable behavior that we can see. So markets move because emotions move.
And I think the, what they call a rational actor model of economics is a fantasy. I don't think there is anything rational about a human being whose amygdala, fear center of the brain, has been hijacked. So I think once you understand like the emotional contagion as a mechanism, the market looks different. It's how I view the market. Except you actually know what you're looking at.
Uh, and I don't. But this is one trader's panic becomes a whole, I think they call it like a sector selloff. And obviously social media is an emotional accelerant. This is why the crowd is always wrong at the very top and the very bottom.
So we really see that stuff. I don't know if that was even an answer to your question, but best I can do.
Yeah. No, that that was that was helpful. So it like I said, it is helpful for me to think about that. So if the fractionation is the problem, um, I guess being able to discern that is the solution to that. So, what frameworks can you give us to try to help us have that discernment instead of getting caught up in sort of that crowd, that mania?
I would definitely engineer one big word in your head and like that that word comes after every piece of content you see. If it's 5 seconds long or 5 hours long, this one word is in your head first before anything else. And that is maybe.
Maybe.
You start with that word first. And even going through.
I start with that word when I'm just thinking or like when I'm talking.
Every time I'm absorbing content, like someone is moving the needle somewhere. They say the Strait of Hormuz is about to be closed. It's going to be a nightmare for the entire world. Little do they know like that 90% of those vessels will just go through the territorial waters of Oman instead.
Right?
But they don't sell ads for making you feel comfortable.
So, every time I hear a story, and I've taught my kids this as they were growing up, it's always, maybe this is going to be a nightmare. The markets are going to go down. Oil's going bad. This is going to be a really bad problem. Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe it is. Somebody gives us financial advice. It's the same thing. And and you mentioned this fractionation thing as a big thing to be aware of. I would say the second thing is called compliance engineering.
And this is how people get moved without noticing. And there is an entire field of study dedicated to getting humans to do things without them feeling coerced or manipulated. And you've probably heard some of these. The foot-in-the-door technique, the commitment and consistency principle, the reciprocity loops, getting people to say yes all the time. But we can do this at scale with a society. And these are the tools that built every major institution's ability to move. So governments use them, corporations use them, churches, militaries, cults, sales teams. And all of these things work because they piggyback on existing human machinery that we do not have the ability to change. So it's the mammalian brain. We can't go in there and like modify or update software to like, oh, I need to update the brain to be in 2026, right?
It's still 200,000 years old. The human brain is. So at the end of the day, the biggest thing to be aware of is when your cognitive load is high. When is my emotion high? And then every time you watch an ad, this is the most important thing. If you take nothing else from watching this podcast on Mark's show here, the one thing to write down: What is the thing I just saw designed to get me to feel? What is it designed to get me to feel? If you're at a stoplight and you see a bunch of bumper stickers on the back of somebody's car, that's designed to make you feel a certain way about the driver, right? And you start processing the world through that way. How is this thing designed to make me feel a certain way? So this cognitive load is how much, how many tabs do we have open in our brain? That's like I'm running a ton of tabs. When people are cognitively loaded, they're tired. They're rushed. They're in fear, overwhelmed with a bunch of information. They stop thinking and they start defaulting to pre-installed patterns. So every super sophisticated persuasion environment engineers cognitive load on purpose, 100%. And I'm the guy, I train SCOPS. I train the actual SCOPS to do this stuff to entire communities. So cognitive load is always engineered on purpose if you're seeing it on a mass scale. And we have the 24-hour news cycle, the fine print everywhere you look, the sales rush or whatever happens in the sales market, the crisis of the week, and we load them up until we can't, you know, process and then we hand these people the decision that we want them to make.
And that's basically what it is. We load them up and then hand them a crystal clear decision. That is what did we talked about earlier? The most followable, crystal clear decision that they could possibly make. And the brain latches on to it. And this goes back to hypnosis, too. There's a technique of using confusion to make somebody go into trance of just like sitting with a client and asking a confusion statement. If the brain is confused, it acts just like you're falling off a cliff or you fell into the water. Your limbs are kind of like going all over the place trying to grab onto something. And the first solid thing that your hands come in contact with, it's going to grab onto it. Even if it's a thorn bush or a barbed wire, you're gonna grab onto it and your body will automatically snatch it up. And that's not a mistake. That's how our body works. But our brain works the same way. So when we're overloaded and we're not asking ourselves, how is this designed to make me feel? The moment we experience a little bit of confusion or cognitive stress, we'll grab on to the first logical thing we hear. So in hypnosis, this might be a statement that's delivered confidently, like, "How different would it be if the same thing started looking now like it wouldn't change if nothing else really did?" That doesn't make any sense. So it kind of throws your brain into this little confusion pattern, and then whatever I say after that statement, your brain is like 100x more likely to just accept it and then act on it because it was the first thing that made sense.
Okay, so I got to tell you what I've been doing with my money lately. I moved my cash over to River. And before you ask, yes, I still pay all my bills in dollars. Everything works the same. But here's the real difference. You see, River pays me 3.3% on my cash. And they pay it in Bitcoin. So my money that was just sitting there doing nothing at all in the bank, it's now stacking Bitcoin while I sleep. And I started thinking like, my bank takes my deposits, they loan those deposits out, they make 12, 17, 24%, and they pay me 0.04%. I mean, honestly, that's kind of a shakedown when you think about it. Now, River's FDIC insured. They use Full Reserve. They charge no fees. So, I don't know why I didn't do this sooner. So, click the link down below and get $100 in Bitcoin just for getting started.
Would you say cognitive load is sort of like decision fatigue? I think about that a lot. Some I'm trying to always protect the amount of decisions that I have to make. And, you know, I'm deep in work. I'm doing deep work blocks and I'm thinking really deeply about something and my wife's like, you know, hey, what do you want for dinner tonight? I'm like, whoa, don't throw that at me right now. It's like I'm not ready for that decision kind of a thing. Or right now, I'm actually moving and like going through boxes. I'm like at the end of the day, I'm so tired I can't make one more decision of should we keep it or pack it kind of a thing. So is that cognitive load sort of like that decision fatigue, or are they sort of similar? And that's why I'm looking for the easy answer.
Yeah, I think cognitive load is a subcategory, or decision fatigue is a subcategory of cognitive load, for sure.
Okay. All right.
And I think if you look at your portfolio, I think it's a mirror of your identity for a lot of people. And I've worked with some guys that were traders and Fortune 100 people that know a lot about money, but you invest like the person that you think you are, not the person that you actually are. And if you show me somebody's positions, you can see their self-image. The aggressive guy takes the oversized risk to prove he's still the aggressive guy. The cautious guy misses all the major moves because caution is part of his identity, how he sees himself. The smart money guy gets farmed by his need to feel smart. This is why financial advice will never work in isolation, ever.
You can't change the portfolio without changing the person that's holding it. So the deepest financial leverage you can get is identity leverage.
So, and I think the hidden currency here that we're moving into is real trust with this AI crap that we're, you don't know what's real and what's fake. Uh, and I think underneath trust is behavior. Every currency, every market, every institution, all of this stuff runs on trust. And trust in human, in the human brain, is built through observable behavior over time. And that, and that's all it really is. So the whole crisis of confidence in modern government and all this stuff that we talked about is a behavioral crisis dressed up as a financial crisis. So if people want to change their future with money and investing, they first have to start to understand what their identity is rooted in today and what their identity may need to become to be that person.
Yes.
Can you?
And it's not just how do I see myself, it's when I go out there, how do I want people to see me? What's the? And we all put on a little bit of a costume. 100% of people do. I've studied behavior for a very long time. Um, all of us wear some kind.
of a mask or costume. So, what's the costume that I wear? Am I the aggressive guy? Am I the alpha? Do I think do I want people to see me as the alpha or the caretaker? Am I always there for everybody? Am I the cautious guy? Uh, am I the friend to everybody? That's a big thing that we need to know about ourselves. It's like what is the costume that it's okay that you wear one, but a you have to admit it or you have no control over it and b you have to identify what it is because that's really going to influence your behavior. And that just naming it and pulling it out into the sunlight gives you more control over it. Yeah.
Because if it's unconscious, you have no control over it. I've seen uh athletes and other people talking about like adopting personas. So when I go to play, I'm going to be this different character. And when I'm here, I'm this different character. And then by by going into that persona or that character, it allows me to have maybe a different operating system or a different set of attributes than I would normally use and then I can apply that to that situation.
Absolutely. Okay. And so the reason is like uh like if you went in if somebody's watching right now and you don't have like 500 grand to just throw away uh if you walk into a super expensive uh store like a Hermes bag store where everything's like 15 grand plus, right? Uh you walk in there, the employees are going to look at you a certain way and you're going to feel like, "Oh, they're judging me. They know I can't get anything." You look at a few price tags, you're like, "Oh my god, I can't afford that. That sucks."
Yeah.
Then somebody comes and asks if you need some help, can I help you with anything? You hear judgment.
Um and but then take the exact same scenario, same time of day, same employees there and let's say somebody like you or me, we have somebody that's working for us and we give them the company platinum card. We say, "Hey, I've got a client coming into town. Go into the Hermes store. Give me the most expensive briefcase that they've got. I need a a gift for this client coming in from Dubai or whatever. And they walk in there with that card in their back pocket. No one can see the card, but they their behavior is way different. They don't see the same exact look from those employees. They don't see any of that judgment.
They walk straight over to the bag. Their posture is different. Their confidence is different. But it's not about confidence. It's about their role. And when we have a different role in an interaction, a role defines what per what I am permitted to do in social society. So when I change a role, it's not just the identity. It's I am here for X. So roles change permissions and the time when we can change a role like here is why I'm here and I'm allowed to be here. Roles give permission. So I mean that's a lot of like observation into why we're behaving the way we are and how to think through and I'm receiving information to make it a little bit more practical kind of getting into like now how do we now that we sort of are aware of these things how do we protect ourselves I think you have uh two different sort of models that maybe can help with that there's the PCP uh perception context permission
uh and then fate are those both for like discernment now
and if so can you teach us how to use those to like help us protect ourselves.
Yeah. So, uh the PCP and FATE were actually mission planning tools.
Okay.
Uh to plan out psychological operations.
Okay.
So, PCP is how every situation where someone makes a decision works. So, like if I'm let's say we're buying a car, I go into the car dealership and my perception has to change first about what a car is. Then the context has to become I am going to buy a car today. And that that equals the permission. So context is the most important thing. And if you can spot someone shifting the context on you, you are a master. So getting good at that I would say is absolutely number one skill you could develop in your financial life in every part of your life. to like uh as an example, I don't know if you watched the Shawn Ryan interview that I did, but Mark, both you and me are probably about a 100% we're both getting naked today, right? But we're not going to do it on a podcast,
right?
We're going to be at home. We're going to be standing in front of a shower,
right?
But we're the reason we won't do it here is the context. This is like that would be psycho to do it on a podcast, right? But it's absolutely makes sense in a different context.
And if I if I can change your perception of a situation, then I can start changing the context. And if I can make you think this is a situation where X is happening, I can make it okay for you to do anything.
And this that's why hypnosis is really powerful. I can make you think that you're at a shooting range and you're standing in the middle of a bar. if you can kind of get my drift with the words I don't want to mention on your channel.
Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. I I understand. Yeah. So, um if they can change my perception to the context that I'm in, then I'm giving them permission or then it gives me permission to act that way.
So, so they've they've they've they've they've they've uh changed my context and now I feel like I have permission to get naked on the podcast because I feel like I'm almost in the shower. Yep. Got it. Because you you think you that you are. So like right now uh if we believed that the world was about to end in a week or
let's use a real let's use a real example maybe something maybe over the last couple of weeks where you see this running at scale.
Yeah. So last couple of weeks the straight of Hormuz gets closed. Uh the IRGCN, the Iranian uh Guard Navy is starting to go out and like potentially mining the Strait of Hormuz with underwater mines that's going to destroy shipping, right? Oil crisis is about to happen. Um a a a couple, let's just imagine a random married couple. They don't make much money. They live paycheck to paycheck. They see all this crap happening. They're watching the gas prices already go up. And now they're seeing the gas prices go up. They've got $200 in their checking account. They go straight to the gas station and they spend all their money that they had saved for food on gas.
Mhm.
So this is a big deal. So the context made them ignore the desire for food, which is a basic human that's the bottom of Maslo's hierarchy of needs. So that the natural human instinct to eat goes away because a context change where this behavior became normal and I have permission to act in a way I never would have before. Got it. I pay attention to what the Fed is doing. Jerome Pal, it's not so much the meetings, it's the press conference afterwards. And I almost feel like every word has been specifically picked out. And um they the Fed changed what they do and now they do something called forward guidance. So they're sort of trying to prep people for what is going to be happening. And again, I feel like almost every word maybe means something in there. Would you say that's sort of like a PCP operation? Yes. So what what they're doing is managing your perception so that the context can be changed so that you receive permission to act in a way that you normally would not.
Okay. If you were watching that and you've self admitted that you don't know much about markets and investing, uh, but what would you be watching for? Are there like certain signs that you're looking for? Does he repeat things multiple times? Does he use uh, you know, extreme uh, language or words or would there be telltale signs?
Yes. Uh, what is the language that refers to past and what events are they trying to get me to compare this to covertly in my brain? If I can get you to compare what we're doing right now with a conversation you had to your friend, then your behavior is going to be different,
right? So, I'm changing what you're comparing this to, the category that your brain is putting this situation in. Any reference to a past event where they're saying this happened in 1976 or whatever, I'm getting you to automatically say, well, this happened in 76 and then the the market collapsed. So, your brain's already making predictions because I brought up historical events. The next thing is any kind of urgency language within two weeks, the next month, for the next 45 days, it's going to be hard times. Any language that talks about the future, you need to really be careful about because your brain, especially from an authority figure. And look at the stage. They've got this giant ass thing that's supposed to look really impressive, really dominating looking uh stage and how it's framed. It's made to trick your mamalian brain into thinking that person is smarter than they are. You wouldn't put all your money in one stock, so why have your whole life in one single country? Now, if you've thought about another passport, Italy and citizenship might just be what you've been looking for. Italy has one of the most underrated golden visas in all of Europe. Just a €250,000 euro investment threshold. And with you, you can make that investment into Bitcoin, not some risky business venture or real estate that you don't actually want. Approval times are usually about 3 to 6 months, and you don't put any money in until your visa is approved. Plus, with the Golden Visa, there's no physical residency that's required. You can get full Shen access from day one, and it's renewable forever. Now, Italy puts you at the heart of Europe. And with Shenen Access, it gives you flexibility across 29 countries. If you want another passport and you want your investment to have Bitcoin exposure like me, then citizenship may be the answer you're looking for. So, go to bitizenship.com/markmoss and check it out. Let's use uh two current uh pieces of news. Uh by the way, uh you've mentioned uh the straight up hormuz a couple times. Uh I've been glued to that. I mean, I kind of have to be. Um there's an account on X on Twitter um that's been taking all of Trump's posts on like true social and then they do like a psychological breakdown of like what he's saying and how he's doing it. And to me, it seems like he's like the master that's probably wrote some books on like the art of the deal or something like that. I mean, the way they break these down, I don't know if they're right or wrong, but it it looks it looks pretty brilliant. Uh, but here's CNBC. CNBC says, quote, as of right now, I just pulled it up. Trump threatens Iran again as ceasefire deadline looms. US gears up for peace talks. And it shows a picture of Trump sort of like with this like scowl on his face. Trump threatens Iran again as ceasefire deadline looms. US gears up for peace talks. Is there something in there?
Yeah. Threatening and looming.
Threatening and looming.
So, uh you might say Trump considering again
as as the peace talk becomes closer or as the deadline for peace talks gets closer. Uh which would be more hopeful.
Got it.
Right. So this is fear engineering as the US gears up for peace talks like we have to do a whole lot of prep and it's a lot of work that has to go into peace talks which means the peace talks are going to be difficult right so lots of fear peace is going to be a very difficult process that we have to gear up for
so it is a 100% fear engineering that's happening right there
can you tell us that just for clicks or would you say this would be adversarial to what the Trump administration is trying to do.
Exactly. Both.
Both. Okay.
Um, so I mean I mean their business is being adversarial to Trump, right? So we have to be honest about that. And what what's happening is like the mamalian brain is attracted to two things and only two things. And they've proven this with fMRI studies. That part of your brain makes a decision every one of your decisions before you realize a decision has been made. So we just take credit for making the decision. So when we are clicking on a video, our male a mamalian brain responds to two different things. A potential threat and potential value. Guess which one is more important?
The threat.
The threat.
Yeah.
Right. We have ancestors that if we were picking berries and there's a bear coming, we prioritize running from the bear over picking berries or having sex or any of the other things that we might value. So the the the negative always wins. So we've defaulted to a way we're like, "Oh, these thumbnails are working really well. These title combinations are working really well. We have to use these words and that so the title gets more clicks, the video gets more views, we get more advertiser money, we get more revenue." And I don't think it's all Everybody kind of talks about the the they are engineering this and they want us to be controlled and all that kind of crap. Uh there's no big dark room with dudes smoking cigars planning this world domination. It's just money. Like we do this, we get more money. We get more views, we get more money. That that way um Swiffer WetJet can put another ad on onto a a market spot and we can get another 50K for this little uh little ad. That's all it is. The algorithm is is not there trying to destroy your life. It's there trying to make money and it's not and I'm the guy who study I'm the brainwashing guy. Uh I do not and I've never seen evidence that there's anything out there that's malicious other than just being completely narcissistically obsessed with money and knowing full well that it's causing depression, loneliness, like a pandemic of loneliness. What do you mean you've never seen anything that you've never seen anything intentionally malicious? about the algorithms and all of that.
Okay, got it.
That that it was intent. No, there's plenty of intentionally malicious.
Okay.
But, uh, when it comes to the algorithms, like even even though they know that this is causing a pandemic level loneliness, uh, which is leading to record suicides. Yeah.
Uh, it has not mattered not one effing bit to to them.
Yeah. Uh, I know we're uh at the top of the we're kind of running out of time here. Can I give you one more headline? Do you have time?
Sure.
Okay.
So, this one's not about uh the Trump admin, but it's still from CNBC. So, this one says, "Chair nominee, so this is about the Federal Reserve. Chair nominee Kevin Worsh says Fed must stay in its lane, quote, to maintain independence." And maybe you don't know enough about the Fed to have the context, but what does that tell you? I I I know embarrassingly little about it. Um
it it just says chair nominee
Kevin Marsh say said must quote stay in its lane to maintain independence.
So that's an adversarial uh response because the the introduction and the title they gave him was that he was just nominated and not selected for anything. So, and they wouldn't say the chair of what? So, since they didn't say chair of anything, they just said chair nominee instead of his actual title, chair, federal chairman or or whatever it's called. So, they're lowering his status on purpose. So, I would venture to say, is this MSNBC?
Yeah. Uh, CNBC.
Uh, yeah. I would venture to say the guy's probably conservative.
Yeah. Well, he's Trump Trump selected him to take over Jerome Pal's position. So Jerome Pal is out. Trump has been uh very vocal about Jerome Pal um fighting against what the Trump administration wants. So Powell's out. Um the Trump ad Trump gets to select the new Fed chair which goes into place next month. I mean it's like it's not just selected a nominee, it's like he's going into position right now. My guess is again he uh Trump has been fighting Jerome Pal even the first term um because the Fed has been fighting what the Trump administration is trying to do in in regards to a whole bunch of things including you know uh re-industrializing the US uh etc. Um and my guess would be that um he's trying to say chair nominee Kevin War says Fed must stay in it lane to maintain independence. So, uh, he they're trying to seed that today because later when the Fed looks like they're working with the Trump, uh, administration, then I see that as bad. Oh, they were supposed to ma maintain independence. Now they're working together. That's a problem,
right?
Does that color help?
Yeah, it does. And that's and that goes right back to how they're they're lowering that person's status on purpose.
Okay. by not saying a title, no accomplishments in there. Um, it's not a a chairman nominee looks forward to or says we can better the country by staying in our lane and you know those kind of things. It's it's very very biased.
Yeah. Okay. Got it.
And that's where that comes. What is this the last thing I'll say on the show here? What is this content designed to make me feel? That's got to be the the hard running question in the background of everything.
What does it make me feel? And if it's making me feel clever, watch out.
Be very very suspicious. Yeah.
All right, let's wrap it up with that. That's a good place to break. Um, man, this is awesome. And uh hopefully everybody enjoyed it. They should be watching your show. I know you're launching a new show. Um, if Station One, go ahead and tell us what you got going on on YouTube, what you're building out, and how people could uh get more of more of this. This is the new show. I'm actually sitting in the studio. We're building this uh giant studio right now that looks like crap. Or I'd spin the camera around.
Yeah.
But every day we're going to have a daily news show where you, the viewer, is going to receive a something identical just about to the presidential's daily intelligence brief from the director of the CIA. Following the same format, same sourcing record, no politics. And we're going to show you how all these things the media is telling you are just disconnected stories. We're going to show you all the little things that connect them all. All the stuffs the media is refusing to report on. And then we're going to show you exactly how the media is doing scops and what scops are going on and what you're being engineered to feel. And we're going to bring the mother effing receipts every single time. And it's going to be a daily news show with we have our own anchor. We have a whole film crew here. And we're gonna be cranking this stuff out every day. I'm really super excited about this. I think it's going to change the landscape.
And when will that launch?
It's gonna launch here in probably about two or three weeks. We're not totally sure.
Okay. Well, I'm going to be uh one of the first subscribers to that. I think it's, as we talked about before we started recording, I think it's one of the most important skills you can have today. Uh I said that in light of the internet. Now with AI, if you can't learn how to spot this and control yourself outside of the manipulation, you're just never going to make it. Um, so I'm going to be subscribed. I'm going be watching. Um, and everyone else should as well. So, uh, with that being said, thanks so much for coming on and sharing this with us today.
Thanks, bro. Appreciate you.