How to Instantly Read People & Protect Yourself from Manipulation w/ Chase Hughes (WiM577)

This knowledge has been used for a really long time by some humans to socially engineer other humans. But people are waking up. I'm the guy that teaches scops, telling you that we are in a scop 1,000%. Most people, they're just going to be governed by these unconscious patterns to the grave. And then navigating that accordingly. Everything that I'm judging in another person is me. It's all me. We are all one. If you think this comes down to like left versus right, you are a victim of SCP. Politics is a puppet show. It's all here to distract you.

When we were talking earlier about a loneliness epidemic, your head was nodding the whole time. Who talks about it? But the thing that is keeping most people back that you will never see in these courses and books online is carrying shame. Concealed shame. Okay, so that sounds like something that's probably pretty widespread. If I can find a woman that's like my mom, I can put myself in the situation so that my open loop from childhood, I can figure out how to close it. Wow. So that's when you see people getting all these toxic relationships. You and I shook hands out in the driveway. Yeah. Um, you didn't smile. Oh, really? I didn't smile. Was 2 seconds into our interaction and I had like the, "Okay, he's a type seven." We can stop there if you want. By the way, I don't, I don't want to go deep, but if there was something else you want to say, please go ahead. You're obviously a psychopath, but uh, damn it. Damn it.

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So you began your career in the Navy? Yes. But then you've shifted at some point into studying behavioral science. Um, how, how do those two things dovetail together? How did you go from being in the Navy to being a behavioral scientist? I, uh, I joined the Navy when I was 17. Like, my parents had to sign like a permission slip for me to join, and I stayed in the Navy for 20 years. So I retired. I, I did a full retirement from the Navy. But I got obsessed with human behavior and kind of what makes people tick when I was 19. And I was in Wiki Beach. I was stationed in Pearl Harbor. And I was at this Irish pub and I got turned down by a girl. And I went home and I typed in "how to tell when girls like you" onto the internet. And I, I got really good at, at reading people. And it was just because like I didn't want to face rejection again. I wanted to like, I wanted to have this big list of, here's what to look for. Uh, and, and I got kind of obsessed with this because I got, I started seeing people's weaknesses, their fears, their insecurities that I always thought were, you know, private data. Like, you can't see that stuff. And it's a lot more on public display than you would ever realize. And I, I think I got addicted to it because I had some level of maybe social anxiety or something. And the more that I could see like, "Oh, everybody else is screwed up. It's not just me. I'm not the only person that's that's screwed up here."

So you started seeing in other people what you were experiencing? Yeah. Okay. So like little insecurities and little fears that they had and, and seeing like, they're human beings, uh, as well. And I think just seeing the, the like, the delicate side of people became addictive because it just destroyed my social anxiety. So I got addicted to doing that over time. And then right as I was kind of getting good at that stuff, at the body language part, my friend was killed on USS Cole, uh, the attack that happened on 9/11, uh, in the Gulf of Yemen. Craig Weberly is his name. And I read all these intel reports. The assets that we had, the agents that like, the intelligence Jason Bourne dudes that we had over there, didn't get all the intel that we needed from the agents that were on the ground. And, and stuff like that could have been prevented, uh, if we had people there. So I thought, "Let me just teach this to the government. Let me develop this system." Like, this is stuff that I could teach. And then I went to some of these government trainings. I went to government interrogation training and interview and all this other stuff. And I thought, you know, it's the government. It's going to be like the best. It's going to be the best in the world. And it was like, "Hey, shake somebody's hand firmly, make some eye contact, use their name a little bit, touch them on the shoulder." And like, that was it. Like, that's the, that was US government spy training was about at that level. So I, I started getting all of this, uh, other stuff in because I'm looking at in the interrogation operations that are happening over in the Middle East. Mhm. How can we do those better? So I, I just went rabbit hole down into extreme hypnosis and brainwashing and how mind control works and like every possible thing. I spent weeks on end with cult recruiters in California, uh, and, uh, in San Bernardino. I've spent weeks with dudes that their whole job was talking young girls into doing adult movies. Wow. Uh, so like, I wanted to figure out because like, if, if you're, if you're a foreign national, right? And I want you to give secrets of your country to me, you're, you're agreeing to face the death penalty. Mhm. So I, all of this was about talking someone into doing something that's not in their best interest. And I, I really honed in on that and did a whole lot of study. We came up with this system called NCI, which we teach now. It's neurocognitive intelligence. Is the system that, uh, the DIA gets trained in and all these, uh, intelligence dudes. And I even train SCOPS. Mhm. That was a long answer to your question. Wow. No, no, it's a great intro. I want to.

So the social anxiety piece is interesting to me because I don't think I realized I suffered from it until retrospectives. Like, as I got older, I realized I was much more anxious and nervous in social settings. Yeah. Um, and partly through this job, partly through public speaking, these things, you kind of, like, I don't know, I did enough reps to maybe sort of get out of it. I feel like it's still there to some extent. Yeah. But now looking back in my early 20s, I would be like unnecessarily nervous in a social setting, right? Just out at a party or whatever. What is it? Why do we have that? Why do people? That doesn't seem, I mean, it seems like most people really enjoy social situations. Yeah. Why would, why are we? I don't know. How are we programmed to have this? Is this something culturally we develop? Like, where does social anxiety come from? How on a one to 10 scale, how deep do you want to go on this? Well, this is a deep show. So, uh, let's go deep. Let's go deep.

So if, if we rewind history, pick a number, thousands, 10, 20, 50,000 years. Um, and our species is about 220,000 years old. Um, if we did something, uh, that made our tribe, and the average group of people was 110, 115 people, everybody hated us, everybody made fun of us, or we got like, a whole lot of social judgment, no sex. Mhm. Pro, maybe no food, no preferential treatment, and my DNA stops existing. Death penalty. Yeah. Yeah. So everything meant, like, every mistake our ancestors made was like, either no food or no sex, right? And the cool thing is that everyone that's listening to this right now, none of your ancestors died a virgin. Yeah. They all banged somebody. They're all winners. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why you, you hear this popular thing that you hear, uh, when people say public speaking is the number one fear. It's the, the biggest fear. It's higher than death. On on this, but it's not the speaking that's, uh, causing the fear. It's the fear of social judgment. Right? So when I train, uh, anybody, I train all kinds of people all around the country, have all these courses and stuff, but the first thing that we teach these people, number one, is a complete openness to being socially injured. Okay. So a fear of social injury is, is always there. Which is embarrassment? Is that what social injury is? Yeah. Maybe, uh, embarrassment or public judgment? Maybe lots of people are talking about you or laughing at you. Yeah. Yeah. Which means may not have sex, right? Mhm. So at the end of the day, we have ancestor stuff that we inherited, like from birth. And even we inherit facial expressions. We have seven facial expressions when we're born that are just pre-programmed in our brain, ready for us to launch. Um, and then there's some we inherit in our lifetime. So elementary school, middle school, those formative years, we get made fun of, we get kicked in the balls in front of a cafeteria full of kids. That happened to me. Uh, and, and that stuff is, changes you. Mhm. So the, the cool thing is that, and what might be reassuring for anybody that's listening that that feels any social anxiety, those little voices that say, "They're going to laugh at you. You're not enough. Uh, you're, you're faking it." I'm rated as the number one expert in the world in my field. I have three number one bestselling books in my field. Number one bestselling book in hypnosis. I have the number one bestselling book in behavioral psychology. And I feel like I'm, I'm faking it sometimes. And that voice is still there. So here's the, like, the key difference between somebody who's like a king on the chessboard and somebody who's afraid to like step into a room full of people or has social anxiety, is how you're hearing that voice. Because both of them hear the same voice, right? It's how you respond to it. Yeah. Well, it's how you understand what it is. Okay. So, like, if we're at your house right now, and if I was coming to pick you up and we're, let's say you and I were going to lunch, and as I was coming to get you, uh, I'm listening to a really cool audiobook. And in this audiobook, there's a fake news broadcast. Mhm. And it's a news broadcast about this nuclear war starting. Russia's launching missiles, US is launching missiles. And as I'm picking you up, I'm in the middle of this fake news broadcast. You open the door, you get in, freak out. And, and I'm driving, my heart rate's fine. Yeah. I'm looking around, I'm looking at the trees, I'm watching somebody walk their dog by. I'm, I'm completely relaxed and totally comfortable. And you are freaking out. Your heart rate's going up, your cortisol levels are, are going up. You're, you're freaking out because your Maslow's pyramid is like, you're falling down to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. Yes. We're both hearing an identical thing. We're hearing the exact same thing. But I am fully aware that I'm hearing fiction. Yeah. So that's the, that's the only switch that needs to get flipped. Is you have the right context. Yeah. Do I have the, do I have the context? So, and I think most people, when, if you spend a little bit of time, you'll realize that that's probably not your voice. Mhm. If you had to spend some time like, "Oh, I have these little thoughts that come to my head." Like, what does that voice sound like? That's a child telling you those things. So like, if, if a six-year-old tried to tell you that, you know, "You don't look good today. Nobody's going to like your hair," or, you know, something like that. It's funny. It's cute. Mhm. So we're hearing fiction. Once we, we understand the context of where those voices are coming from, man. Um, so we all have voices in our head. Yeah. That's kind of one thing you could probably just say and get it out there so it's people aren't feeling crazy, perhaps. But the, so the, the fear that the inbuilt fear of being socially ostracized is what's giving us the natural anxiety in social settings. But what about not everyone suffers from social anxiety? A lot of people thrive in social settings. So what is, are they just interpreting those voices differently? Or like, Yeah. So they have a different upbringing. But there's still a fear of social judgment. Okay. But the, the difference between those people and others is that they have a lifetime of evidence. So like, they were lucky that like, no big things happened. They didn't have to overcome obstacles. So they have evidence in their back pocket that says, "Nothing's going to happen. Things are going to be okay. I may not know precisely how this night is going to end, but I know everything's going to work out fine because it always has before." And that's usually the difference. Those people that seem natural at it. Okay. Uh, but everybody that's, that's gotten to be good at it. I'm an extreme introvert. So like, I speak on stages all over the country, doing book signings, I'm on TV a lot. And like, in the middle of all the, every time we have a breakout, like I'll go hide in the bathroom just to have some like, like recharge a little bit. And I think at the end of the day, what we're really looking at is, do I, what's, if I can get that voice to sound like fiction in my head, and I understand that I'm not fighting that voice. That's the, I'll say that's a huge problem. That's not an enemy. That voice became that voice to protect you. It had your best interest at heart at one time. You were probably eight years old, but it had your best interest at heart. And you can't be at battle with that. It's a child that that developed that. And the second layer of this is, do I have permission to behave a certain way? Because we're trained, especially in in Western countries, like, do I have permission to act a certain way? Yeah. So one of the stories I tell all the time is the, the average person who makes like $50k a year, they walk into a, what's that expensive, uh, handbag store? Hermes. They walk into an Hermes store. The bags are like $10, $15K for like a purse or something. But the moment they walk in there and the employees like turn their head to look who's walking in, those neutral facial expressions, they're, they're not neutral to them. They look judgmental. Interesting. They look a little threatening, right? Like, "Oh, they know." Yeah. So that person's walking around the store, "I don't have, I don't belong here. I don't have permission to be here. I can't afford anything in here." So these neutral behaviors of the employees are threatening, judgmental, interesting. All that happens. And then you, you take the same person, let's say I give them my company platinum card and I say, "Hey, I've got a client flying in from Dubai, uh, this evening. Go to Hermes. Give me the most expensive badass, uh, briefcase that they've got." That same exact person, card is in their pocket. They push that door open completely differently. The facial expressions are different. Their posture is different. They make good eye contact with people. They smile. They're in a better mood. And not one person knew that the card was in their pocket. And that's our permission. So permission, that's interesting. And roles are the same. Like that person that I gave the card to, they have a role. My job is to go in here and do this. That's fascinating.

So you use the word permission there, but it sounds like, I mean, if it, it's just the money that was in their pocket that enabled them to walk in there confidently. Yeah. Uh, for lack of a better term. Is, is it the, the first thing that came to mind was limiting beliefs. You know, like we often, people suffer from limiting beliefs. It sounds like they had these limiting beliefs going into that situation. But then by virtue of their material resources actually changing, in this case, having the platinum card, yeah, that, that's the change in their material circumstances changed their limiting beliefs. Is that correct? I don't think it changes their limiting beliefs. What the platinum card in the back pocket changes is their level of permission in a certain way of capability. Okay. So it's, it's the, the belief of "I'm walking in here" is two things. It's capability and likely outcome. Okay. So my capability, can I buy anything I want in the store right now? Absolutely. The outcome is going to be absolutely great because I'm going to swipe Chase's card and it's going to go through, and I walk out of here with a fancy bag of leather, whatever. Got it. So capability could be, could be also skill set, right? Like, if I sat in the cockpit of an F-16 fighter jet, like, I don't know what I'm doing, yeah. But if I was trained to do it, I'd feel confident because I'm competent, basically. Yes. So is that what we're saying? It's like, it's something about the capability, confidence, competence. Yes. And it's that outcome. Like, if I believe in the outcome more than the other person, then I will always win the situation. And I need less from the other person than they need from me. Okay. Uh, so as a counter to that, to to make sure no one thinks like, "Oh, I need to study 10 years before I have this feeling of permission in my body." If you watch the movie, uh, Catch Me If You Can, great movie. It's about that dude, Frank Abagnale. And if you put him in a cockpit to fly a plane, everyone's dead. Yeah. He had zero competence and a thousand percent confidence in everything. I concur. I remember that. I concur. Yeah. And he, he did it because he believed in the outcome. Like, he didn't have a specific outcome, but the outcome was, "Things are going to be good. I'm going to do this. I believe more. I need less from the other person than they need from me." And that, that final piece of that is reactivity. Like, whoever is reacting to the other person the most is not in charge. Interesting. So he caused other people to react to his behavior. That reminds me when I used to box, I would always say that whoever set the pace of the fight would win the fight. Yeah. So like, you get, and it's, I don't know, it's like your rhythm, basically. You want them to fight and according to your rhythm, rather than you trying to react to their rhythm, because then that put makes you susceptible, basically. It's the same thing. What? Okay.

So that sort of sounds like you would be an advocate for fake it. Not you're an advocate. Fake it till you make it can work. Now, of course, Abagnale, by the end of that movie, was, you know, I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone, but it doesn't completely work out for him, right? Works for him for a long time, but then it eventually doesn't. So like, how should people be thinking about fake it till you make it? And then also, I guess we should blend in the larger version of that, which is like manifestation, right? Where people say, "You just sit there and you believe until, poof, it happens." So I, unless you're a con man, then nobody has to fake anything. Okay. The, the confidence is not about, because the confidence is there already. You had confidence. Uh, all of us had confidence when we were three, four years old. No fear of judgment, no fear of anything. We're just very confident in everything. And like, even we're thinking, you know what? One of these days, if I jump off this, uh, playhouse in the right way, I might be able to fly. You know, we just had this crazy confidence. We weren't faking anything. So it's not just that. It's realizing that no one is going to come tap you on the shoulder and give you permission to feel confident. It's never going to happen. And most of us, uh, we don't have to fake anything unless we're like, if you're, if you're not an O.R. surgeon, uh, you, you can't fake that until you make it. But feeling comfortable in social settings, there's no faking. The permission is already there. The evidence is already there. It, so you're not having to fake like you're confident. You're just changing your beliefs about what's going on. So there's so many people that say, "Fake it till you make it" to where the person, "Can I go off on a tangent here?" Of course. So like, if we, if we both pulled our phones out right now and typed in "how to be confident," you could type it in anywhere, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn, whatever. You're going to have probably the first whole page of results is going to be, "15 Ways Confident People Command Their Presence in a Room," "Six Ways That, uh, Steve Jobs Commanded Respect," "How to, how to Ace the Job Interview with Ultimate Confidence." Every one of those things is going to say, "Really good posture, good eye contact, use a, a better voice, be comfortable with yourself, give a firm handshake." All of this stuff. Those are symptoms of confidence. What we've been just talking about are the cause of confidence. And people don't talk about that. Like, our our culture, from the medical industry to probably your sector, into the financial stuff, is obsessed with symptoms. I'm going to get the symptoms of something. But like, if I wrapped you in a heating blanket right now and squirted water in your nose, you don't have COVID, right? I give you symptoms, but it doesn't give you the cause of that. Got it.

So there's, sounds like the conflation with correlation and causation to some extent, too, right? That wet streets don't cause rain, kind of thing. Um, so the confidence is there. It's like almost the natural state, as you said, when we're three or four years old, but then we start to put on these limiting beliefs as we get older. And what is this? Are we assimilating ourselves to the culture? And we're maybe also learning to take other people's perspective, right? So like, as we judge someone, then we think, "Oh yeah, they could also judge me back." And then if you're in front of a large group of people, that whole process or dynamic is amplified. Is that what's happening? That we're going from like the natural confident state to this culturally, I don't know what we call this, culturally encoded state of self-judgment? Yeah. Based on fear of judgment by the other? Yeah. I, I think you worded that brilliantly. And to add to what you're saying, we have a genetic programming to fear judgment, and we have a lifetime programming from childhood. And if you think about this, what, how do we get it from child? How did you and I, we didn't have the internet growing up, I would assume we're about the same age. And we, the way that we learned is elementary school. "Oh, Jimmy wore that hot pink tie-dye shirt to to third grade and everybody called him all kinds of names." And it, we had a little thing that went in our head like, "Note to self. Don't wear hot pink [ __ ] to school anymore." Um, so that was, that was just in our lifetime, in our experience. So we had 8, 10, 15 little examples that stuck in our head that are still stuck in our heads. Nowadays, we're seeing social judgment play out in mass by the millions of people. So social anxiety and loneliness because of that fear is at an all-time high. We're more connected, and there's this pandemic of of loneliness around the entire world right now. And you think that's technology-driven largely? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Because what did that do? That brought down the walls. Just it allows people to see into other people's lives more easily. So social judgment flows more easily. So therefore, people have more of that amplification. Yes. But we're also seeing social punishment come out, like cancel culture and all of those. And we're even kids that are like, my son is, uh, 16 right now, and like the comments like on his social media is just unbelievable how mean, uh, teenagers are to each other. Mhm. And it's, it's amazing that he just developed a thick skin. Other people are like, "I'm deleting my account." Other people go do violent stuff because of it. Yeah. Um, but we're seeing that play out in mass. But the, the catch to this, the kicker here, yeah, is that if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's like just basic survival and some safety, then belonging. Yeah. I need belonging. When we look at social media, Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitter, whatever, Um, that cannot replace the third layer of Maslow's pyramid, right? So what we're getting is a placebo. Yeah. It's not real. We're getting a, yeah. So it's not actually fulfilling that. So the problem that most people have is like, "Oh, I'm, I've got this little belonging because I'm in this Facebook group or, you know, fill in the blank." And then we keep trying to go to these other things. And we're falling down to level two of Maslow's pyramid. When I think I'm like, "I need to look at hustle culture. I need to learn to be confident. I need to learn to sell. I need high ticket sales." All this stuff. We're shooting for the very top. We haven't achieved level three yet. H. So you have these people that have a placebo of level three, and they're going to continue pursuing all this other stuff, and it's just rampant loneliness. Right. Right. So they're, as they try to ascend further up that hierarchy, they're building on kind of an un-firm foundation, basically. Absolutely.

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I wanted to ask again about social anxiety because one of the things that helped me most, I think I heard this secondhand. I think I heard it from Jordan Peterson, and I don't know where he heard it from, someone that in a setting, if you're ever feeling anxious in a social setting, just focus all of your attention and energy on the other person that you're having a conversation with. Like, like over-the-top focus, right? Like their features, their, their micro-expressions, their clothes, just like, really commit all of your attention faculties. And then that basically leaves you no bandwidth or horsepower to have that voice. It's like, you know, concerned, I guess. And that actually seemed to be pretty useful, like when I first heard that and really started, I was already, like, I guess I was late 20s, early 30s, and so I was already kind of coming out of the, maybe just through repetitions of being in social settings, I was feeling less anxious. But that was also helpful. Is that accurate? And then, and if so, why? Yeah. So it's very accurate. And then, I mean, Jordan Peterson took it from this guy who took it from that guy. This dates back to Plato. We're all nodes on the network. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it, it dates back to Plato's Republic, actually. Okay. So it's like pre-Christianity. And what the way that a lot of people are wording this nowadays, they'll use the word mindfulness, which has lost its meaning. It's so, right? It's so everywhere pervasive that it's lost its meaning. But the way that I describe this every time is, if you're in a conversation, you have to live in front of your eyes. You have to have conversations in front of your eyes. Your awareness, it has to be out here. It can't be back here. Mhm. So forcing yourself to pay attention, um, to the other person and all of, like, their story, their life, their eyebrow hair, whatever you're looking at, forces your awareness out in front of your eyes as much as possible, where you're not considering and weighing, um, how this is going to go. Are they judging me? Because a lot of that, the moment we worry about social judgment, we, we engage in what's called perception management. Am I sitting up the right way? Am I looking the right way? Um, do I look stupid? Should I say this sentence? I'm going to go through it in my head before I say it, make sure it doesn't sound stupid. So we, it's perception management that we get into, which is way back here behind our eyes. So that's the way that I personally describe it. It's like just living in front of your eyes when you're with other people. That's a great way to put it. And then even as you're describing that, like that's exactly what it feels like, almost like literally getting out of your head and having your attentional energies on someone else. But then also back of my mind, I'm like, as we're doing this podcast, you're giving me this answer, but I'm also trying to queue up the next thing, right? So I want to be fully focused on you, but at the same time, I want to know what I'm going to say to you next. So like, there's always this kind of dynamic tension. Yeah. And it can definitely go too far. One of the most frustrating things I've had with people in the, in podcast world is like those people that you talk to off camera, you know, they'll talk like this. They're just like, "Hey, how you doing?" And then they get on camera and it's, I'm just like, "That is so weird. Why do you do that?" Um, why, why do people judge that? What is the, we just prefer that people be the same in all settings? Or like, what, what's going on with that? We do. So let me, this is another rabbit hole. Let's dig into it. So, uh, well, you've probably had this experience before. You don't have to admit it, but most people have. I'll do my best. So you, you put on like your best suit, maybe you're in your early 20s, mid-20s, or whatever, like super nice clothes, hair is done up, like everything looks good. And like, you've got a 9-foot pile of laundry in your bedroom, bathroom counter just covered in [ __ ] like dishes piled up, unpaid bills on the kitchen counter. Uh, so, and let's say you read one of those confidence articles that we talked about. Oh, so you, you're going to, you're going to knock it out of the park. If you do all of that stuff, well, you've got all that stuff back at home that's that's not really lining up. If you do all of that well, it'll look good from the outside, but the person that's speaking with you will have a gut feeling. They're not a behavior profiler, not a body language expert. They're going to get this feeling like, "Something was off. I don't know what it was, right? Something just gave me this weird feeling." And in reality, we are manufacturing gut feelings in other people all day long. And we, we get really good when we learn how to do it on purpose. So that's, that's incongruent behind behavior. Mhm. So when my behavior is congruent, that makes other people have that gut feeling of, "Everything is lining up right. There's integration." Yeah. Yeah. So we have that, like, "Am I the same person off camera as I am on camera? Am I willing to invite my clients to my house? Am I willing to, uh, go on a podcast and then somebody meets me for dinner later tonight? Am I the same, same dude in, in both situations?" And when we see congruence, uh, it automatically makes us flip a little switch in our head that says, "Trustable or trustworthy." Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. And that is huge in business, of course, or parenting or leadership. Yeah. Any human relation, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Because people want to know that, well, you're not duplicitous, right? Like, you're not going to say and do one thing now and then say and do another thing another time. That's not congruent, as you said, right? Um, what is it? Okay. But I agree and appreciate that. But at the same time, even in myself, I, I'm def, I don't think any of us are perfect at it. Nope. And the, the interesting thing with the podcast is like, there's not even any additional people in the room, but it's like, once the camera's on and once you're recording, there's like always at least a slight change. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe some people are really good at this and they're just, maybe Joe Rogan's been doing it for so long, he's just the same guy. No, Joe, Joe, there's a slight change in Joe. Okay. So why, what is that? The same dynamic you're describing earlier? It's like the anticipation of social judgment, even through, even if it's mediated through technology. I think so. That like camera, I, I work with a guy on on our YouTube channel, uh, his name is Scott Rouse, and he calls this "extra face." M. So like, when you're in Hollywood shooting a movie or something, and there's extras in the background, and like, they don't even have any lines, but they're just kind of hanging out like this, and then they say "action," and the extras are like, "Oh, yeah." Like, there's all of that tension comes up. Yeah. It's such a perfect description of it. Uh, but it's like, the knowledge, this is the way it was explained to me. The knowledge that something will become permanent and eternal about your behavior changes your behavior. That's so funny. But I would imagine the Romans did that. Like, they're chilling out, they're hanging out, they're, and then the scribe comes in to write down all the [ __ ] they're talking about. It's funny you brought up the Romans because I immediately went to the beginning of the movie Gladiator where he says, "What we do in life echoes in eternity." And so like, that is kind of, I mean, that is the reality, obviously. Whatever you do, I mean, that's what happened, and that's what was, is now, and will be, was, if that makes sense. But when it's recorded, it adds that extra layer of realness to the future, right? So therein lies the additional anticipation of social judgment. Yes. Or future social judgment. Future social judgment. Yeah. 20 years down the road.

I want to go back to your, your son because you said he kind of got lambasted online and then just developed a thick skin and went going forward. Um, maybe we're, we're cut from the same cloth because I've been lambasted online pretty significantly myself. And at first, I mean, I, I would like to think in the beginning, I had been, you know, reading a lot of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius and all this, like, "It doesn't matter, precious words." But over time, it got to me. But after I went through three of these basically getting canceled three times, the third time, I think I finally felt like, "I don't, this is just how people are. People just do this [ __ ]." And like, it actually doesn't mean anything. Like, what actually means something? It's like, well, do I have loving relationships at home? Like, am I being good to my wife? Am I being good to my daughter? Like, am I good to my friends? Yeah, that's what I actually care about. And so I won't say that I've like completely detached from it. There's still some part of you that engages on social media, but I've definitely progressed, regressed, I'm not sure which one. I've just detached from concern about people's opinions of me online. Is that, I don't know, is that healthy? Is that not healthy? Like, how should we be thinking about that? I think it's absolutely healthy. Incredibly healthy because that's a placebo. It's not. You have to treat it like it's just a bunch of NPCs, like it's not real. Mhm. Um, and I think Eddie Murphy said this the best, and I'll never forget. I watched this live. He was on Johnny Carson, and Johnny Carson's cheering him on. He's saying like, "This new movie you did, I don't remember what it was, but is getting these rave reviews." And Eddie Murphy says, "I don't ever read any of the critical reviews." M. He said, "If I open a, a door to let that make me feel good, that's the same door that lets the negative things make me feel bad." Bingo. And Carl Jung wrote a lot about this, but this is about our concept of self. And does my concept of who I am and how important, successful, you know, what, what my character is, where is, where does that definition come from? Who's the one writing that definition? If it's not me, it's a problem. That's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I, I've never, as a second note, I've never seen a successful person who is also a hater on on the internet. Not once. Yeah. Um, man, there was something Denzel Washington said. He's like, "You'll never be criticized by someone doing more than you." Something like that. It's like, those, those were useful words during those times. Um, all right.

So let's talk about, like, it's kind of a strange thing to talk about in a way. Like, everyone's different, obviously. We're all unique, you know, different genes, different experiences. Yeah. It's the one thing about reality that's constant is that every moment's different than every other moment, right, in some way. Yet, we need to be able to decomplexify all of that to deal with it, you know? And so, and pro, probably the most complex thing we deal with as humans are other humans. So how do we, how do you think about, I guess the term you use here is like behavioral coding or or behavioral science? Maybe that's more broad, but like trying to systematically understand how people behave and I assume why they behave, yeah, that way. How, how do we go from this hyper-complex world into more of this like, kind of rigorous scientific decomplexification of it? Okay. So, uh, human behavior can be broken down into all kinds of different boxes. On, we'd make a giant Excel spreadsheet that would be really cool looking and also meaningless and and not help very much. But when, if we can get to a point of understanding other people or other groups, uh, we gain a tremendous advantage. And no matter what AI does, if you just look back through the industrial revolution, the computers, all of the Bronze Age, if you want to go back that far, uh, knowledge of human behavior and self-mastery, those two things determine who's on top. They determine who makes money, who gets elected, who leads countries, who writes history. So if we get to a point where we can understand that individually, not like, "Oh, let's, let's educate our society," but I mean individually, if I understand how people work, my communication with them is going to be different, and I'm going to start seeing who they are as a reason. So a second ago, you said, "Well, I, I got to a point where I realized people are just that way." That's a level in these four levels that I teach. And there's four different ways that you can view other human beings. M. And the first one, so if we imagine a scenario where, uh, you're driving down the road and somebody in, uh, some sports car or something like, pulls up, deliberately pulls right in front of your bumper, Mhm, and cuts you off, then sticks their arm out of the sunroof and flips you off. Flips you the bird. After I've actually experienced something similar to that. Yeah. Yeah. Not fun. Yeah. And so level one person is broken. So I'm viewing other people as this level one stage. This person that that cut me off is broken. What do we do with things that are broken? Our instinct is to fix it. Mhm. So I need to rectify the situation. I'm going to go do the same thing to him. I'm going to maybe pull out a gun if I'm some weirdo. I'm going to pull up beside him, flip him off, curse him out, do something. I need to reset the balance of power because that person's broken and I'm going to fix this situation. Level two, same situation is different. So I might still get a little emotional response. I might get really pissed off. I might secretly hope that he's going to swerve off and maybe t-bone into a, a telephone pole or something, but I'm not doing anything about it. Like, he's an [ __ ]. Mhm. Um, but I'm still getting this emotional reaction because I, all anger is like a secret desire to change something. Interesting. Okay. Which brings us to level three, which is facts. So none of us get mad at storms or hurricanes or natural things that happen because we know there's there's no desire to change that in our head because we can't. Mhm. So the anger at level three, the anger goes away because that's exactly what you said earlier. It's a fact. That's just how people are. Mhm. Mhm. And somebody asked, like, I'm in the military, I ran a unit of like 149 people before I retired. And somebody came up complaining of this guy and saying, "Oh, he's a, he just lies all the time. He's and he won't ever tell the truth." And this is like a 19-year-old kid or something that was new to the Navy. Mhm. And I said, "Well, what do you want him to do?" And they were like, "Well, he needs to tell the truth. He needs to be honest to everybody." And I said, "He can't do that." They're like, "Why?" I said, "He's a liar. That's what liars are supposed to do. They're supposed to lie. That's what they do." So I'm like trying to escalate him, you know, up to this seeing people as facts. Like, why is that guy an [ __ ]? Because he's an [ __ ]. That's what they're supposed to do. That's their job. So there's a percentage of society that just does that. So above facts, then we get to reasons. So I view them as a fact. No big deal. My emotional reaction is pretty much gone. I have no anger about the situation. It means nothing about me anymore. People are just facts. And then I get to the, the level four is reasons. So now I understand that every negative behavior, everything I might judge in another person, is some kind of reason in that person's life. And now I get to understand this thing called the childhood development triangle that we teach at in NCI. It's what did I do when I was like, eight, eightish years old? What did I do to earn a feeling of safety? What did I do to earn friends or keep friends? Mhm. And then what did I do to get rewards from authority figures, parents, or teachers? Those three things guarantee you, you see these people doing this in adult life. That's what they didn't when they were eight. Wow. So we see all these little conflict management patterns and how we like worm through social situations and we see weird behavior. Yeah. When they, uh, don't feel safe, or when they get into a relationship with somebody. Yeah. That's that triangle at work. Wow. So most of us are eight years old, putting all of these little behavioral patterns into this backpack, and we're carrying this backpack without knowing it into adulthood. Wow. And those become unconscious patterns of behavior. Yeah. Obviously. Right? So until you make them conscious. Until you make them. And that's one of my, I guess it's my favorite quote by Carl Jung at this point, but until you make the unconscious conscious, it.

will continue to direct your life and you'll call it fate. So the importance of trying to put words around these feelings or childhood traumas. I don't know if they're traumas or just experiences to bring them into conscious awareness so that you can then modify them. Yeah, seems to be kind of the name of this game.

But then also understanding at the same time that most people, most, some, I don't know, aren't going to do that, right? They're just going to be governed by these unconscious patterns to the grave. Yeah, to the grave. And then navigating that accordingly. Yeah. So which gets us into the reasons part. Yeah.

The guy cuts me off, flips me the bird out of the sunroof. And I'm not seeing, if if I'm viewing, if I'm a level four, I'm viewing this person as a reason. Mhm. And that's that's my natural way of being. And my wife doesn't like it because she wants to get angry. She's like, "Oh, you need to do all that." I'm seeing an injured little 8-year-old boy there that got made fun of or something. And he had this agreement of, "I will never be hurt again. No one's ever going to hurt me again. I will always be the aggressor." Mhm. Um, and I see an 8-year-old boy driving that car. Mhm. Or at least an 8-year-old boy who made an agreement to carry behaviors into this grown-up's life without this grown-up even knowing that it happened. So that's level four.

You get to level five, it's a whole another story. But that's reflections. That's more of the Alan Watts side of everything. Like everything that I'm judging in another person, uh, is me, part of you. It's all me. We are all right. Right? Right. Yes. And that that kind of wisdom goes back way before Plato and and before Christianity even. And my grandfather had the best quote about this when I was growing up. He said, "There's something about that guy I don't like about me." There you go. Yeah. And that's that's just a perfect way to describe it. Like we're, I'm gonna judge someone else to prove to my little shadow that I don't have that thing.

That's so interesting. I've also heard there's kind of like the flip to that too. I think this was Buddha said, like, "What you say about me says more about you than it does me." Something like that, right? Where it's like, as people comment on you negatively or positively, I guess that they're actually, it's their interpretive framework that they're kind of imposing on reality. Man, it gets so complex though, because you also need feedback from people to modify your own, you know, like your blind spots, for instance. I call their blind spots for a reason. Yes. You need the mirror of relationship to see, quote unquote, see your blind spots and then change over time. So like, how does, how do we filter all of this? Yeah.

Self-worth should never be come from feedback from other people. Okay? Um, and I would say that you're going to see all this stuff online if you go look up, "How do I feel confident? How do I get rid of social anxiety? How do I influence people?" All of this stuff. The thing that's going to hold you back. Like if you gave me, if you wrote me a check today for $10 million, and I teach sales and influence and persuasion and all this, and you said, "I want you to develop the most badass, kick-ass sales script that's ever been written in the history of humanity." And I was like, "All right, let's do it." And finally, let's say a year goes by and I finally got this one one-pager printed on gold paper, right? And I bring it to you. I'm like, "Dude, I've got, I've got this for you. I'm, I'm really excited about it." And you're like, "All right, great." And and then you take it and hand it to somebody on your sales team that has severe social anxiety. It's now the worst script in the world. Right? Of course. So it's all about us. And and who we are is is more important than influence.

So when that happens, is I'm, I'm making self-worth statements out of this. Mhm. Which we shouldn't be doing. Mhm. But the thing that is keeping most people back, that you'll never see in these courses and books online, is carrying shame. Yeah. Concealed shame. Cuz we don't talk about it. And you like when we were talking earlier about a loneliness epidemic, your head was nodding the whole time. Who talks about it? Mhm. How many, like, even our closest friends, we're not going to go sit down and hang out together, go to a hot tub or go to the pool, go play golf, and they're going to be like, "Dude, I'm really lonely." We can't talk about that. So we carry concealed shame. Yeah. About things.

Can you define shame? I'm sure it has a technical definition. Shame is, "I shouldn't have done that thing. I wish I would have acted another way and I could have changed an outcome about something." Or, "I should not enjoy X in my life. I shouldn't have money because of this behavior when I was younger." So this "should" was in all of those. I, I've always had problems with the word "should." Yeah. It seems to be well used sparingly. Yeah.

But everything you just described, I mean, that's part of being alive, right? I, I could have done this, handled this situation differently, right? We make mistakes every day. Yes. Could have. Yeah. I could have, not should have. Okay. Those are different. Okay. So I, I tell everybody in my life, and I even told my son this, like, you need to treat yourself like a golden retriever forever and be so self-forgiving of everything that's ever occurred in your past, no matter what happened, that you are a psychopath, almost like that you are delusional self-forgiving. It's only going to make your life better. Apologize when you need to. If you do something stupid, own up to it, obviously own up to it. Yeah. Uh, I don't know if the other person's going to forgive you, but you forgive yourself immediately. It's done. We can't. There's nothing you can do about it.

That's interesting. As you said, treat yourself like a golden retriever. I thought you were going to go into training, like, you should be training yourself. But you went to the self-forgiveness. Totally go in there aspect. But there's also a training aspect, I would assume, because you, well, as you just said, own up to it. But we were talking about this on our mastermind call yesterday, how we metaphorize maturity with ownership, right? We talked about like, oh, you know, if someone makes fun of you online, like own it. Or if you did something wrong and you get caught, like own up to it, right? That we're using the these words "own" as in, you know, possess or control an asset, but it's ourselves. Like possess, be in possession and control of yourself. And confess when you've done wrong in the past. Yeah.

So, um, what, what's going on there? Like, what is it? Is so are we, we need to train ourselves to be owned by ourselves? Like, which part of ourselves owns the other part of ourselves? I think there's one self. And I think when it, when it comes to owning things, there's one way to own. There, you can own it with shame. You can own it with fear. You can own it with obligation. You can own it with guilt. Those are like the, the big four: shame, fear, obligation, guilt. Mhm. Or you can own it with just, "It is what it is," and see yourself as a fact. Mhm. Instead of all the other people, like those layers of how we see people. Can I be able to see myself as a fact? Like, that's just what happened. Wow. That's just something that happened. I'll definitely work to make this better in the future. I'm in charge of the future. I'm not in charge of the past. Right now. Yeah. Um, but once you get to that delusional self-forgiving, you get into the mode of viewing life, almost, not, not in a bizarre way, but like a video game. Okay. Like, "Well, that sucked. Let's, let's try to do better this next week or this next month." Getting into that mindset. We're just dripping back into Alan Watts again. But we're getting into that, like, "This might be a video game. Who knows?" Sure. Um, and if I treat it like it's a video game, and still I'm good to people, I'm good-natured, I have great intentions, I'm not hurting anybody, I'm not trying to hurt anybody, Um, then I think we tend to enjoy our lives more. Yeah.

And like this, this, these are the regrets of the dying for the last 2,000 years. These are the regrets of the dying. Yes. No, that's a great point. I've heard many studies have been done around that, right? Where people talk about the regrets of the dying often like spent more time with family, loved more, you know, did the thing they wanted to always do but always scared to do. Burn the good candles, eat off the good china. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Um, okay. The delusional self-forgiveness. Like, I don't know if I'm connecting these dots correctly, but tell me if where I might be wrong. Yeah. The factual reality of being human is that we mess up all the time, right? Like, we're making our, our outcomes diverge from our intentions or our aims all the time, right? Like, whatever. There's countless examples. If you want a fun, fun exercise, I've done this, like, just count the number of times throughout the day like you make mistakes. You know, leave your phone in the other room or whatever. Like, they're just hundreds a day, probably. By becoming delusionally self-forgiving, you're coming to terms with the factual reality of what you are, which is this, like, mistakerone human being. Is that correct? Okay. And so you're, it's funny because you're, this is very scientific, I guess. We're like, getting beneath all the "shoulds" and "woulds" and "should have," "would have," "could have," and like, "what is?" Yeah. And coming to terms with that.

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I guess I'll ask a question that's sort of personal. On my own journey, I came to realize that in basically all human relationships, specifically romantic, like I had a lot, I had romantic relationships that would, they would not persist very long, right? So I was like in and out of romantic relationships. And I always thought, "It's just, oh, I'm picky. I can't find anyone. Whatever." Um, inspired by a number of people, I started practicing radical truth in my relationships where it's like, you know, pre-radical truth, I would go into a dating situation with a woman and I'm like, "Oh, you know, here's my highlight reel. Let me play up all my strengths and then let me not talk about all my weaknesses and problems and all that." Right? Like that was the, the dating strategy, basically. Yeah. But once I started practicing radical truth, I maybe I didn't do it correctly, but I basically inverted those two things. Like I went into dating settings was like, "Look, here are my problems. Here's my baggage. Here's this. Here's how I act. Here's what past partners would complain about." And just like dumped it all on them right at the beginning. Yeah. Then that became, those became my best relationships ever. And like, now I'm married to a woman. Like, we, we, we have reverence for radical truth in our relationship. Like, we try to have, you know, weekly sit-down sacred spaces to do all this. How, um, what's the question here? Is that okay? I guess, well, is there anything else we're missing in trying to establish really good relationships with human beings, or is it just trying to be radically truthful? Are there other pieces to it? Yeah.

So let me touch one more point on shame because shame, yeah, please. Is contagious. Okay. If I'm in a relationship and man, if somebody's out there that that might have hit a chord for you, please write that down. Yeah. It is, it is contagious. Um, if you, I, I'll tell you what I, I heard before when I was complaining to my mentor. Mhm. About something that I was ashamed about, and I was saying like, "I feel bad." And he's like, "Why do you feel bad?" "Because I should feel bad because that was a negative thing that I did." "Well, why should you feel bad?" "Because I shouldn't have done that and I made a choice." A lot of this. And he's like, "Well, that's the most narcissistic thing I've ever heard." And I was like, "What?" He's like, "You believe that feeling bad now can change the past. Like you are that powerful." Wow. So you're a narcissist. You think you're in control of past behavior and carrying around this little bag makes you feel like a better person. So you're only doing it for yourself, which is also narcissistic. Wow. It's so powerful. Uh, so that, that day, shame in my mind was narcissism. Shame became narcissism in my head. Mhm. And that was a big turning point for me. Wow. That's a great connection to make. Um, yeah.

Okay, I want to share a little more about shame because it has been relevant to my life and then in my work with my therapists and whatnot. Um, I didn't know this. I mean, it's kind of like an unconscious thing again, until you try to do the work and figure it out. But I can say at this point that, um, well, my mom was an alcoholic when I grew up. And so that presented a lot of problems in my life. And most of my friends had non-alcoholic parents. So as a kid, I think I was, I, it felt unfair, felt upset, you know, like, why do they have good parents and I don't have all that stuff? And that became shame that I carried into my adult life. I was ashamed of where I came from, in a way. I didn't want to disclose it and share it with people. And it, you know, I had probably blocked it in myself. How should, and that, as you said, you said is contagious too. So like, how should people, because if it's unconscious, it's difficult to access. So like, how do people make efforts to access shame or sources of shame, perhaps, that are unconscious? You mean access the source? Well, I don't know which one. Which one do we access? I'm not really sure. Um, I don't think you need a lot of access to the source. It's just like, you're carrying around shame and you don't know why, but you want to do something about it. What do you do? Yeah.

Um, and this is my opinion, and I've never said this before, but I think people are carrying around shame and they don't know where to put it because they haven't found where it belongs in this hero's journey of their life. So it, the shame is not like, "Oh, I had to go through this to become this." The shame was, "I don't deserve. I shouldn't have had. Other people had this." Comparing myself to other people. It's more narcissism. More narcissism. Yeah. "I should have had access to more. I should have had a better life. Look at me. Look at me. Let me compare myself to other people." Or was that part of this little, uh, Bruce Wayne origin story that I had to kind of dip through this thing to get this next little arc in my character arc for this for the show? And then you get back into being the main character without narcissism. That's interesting. Um, yeah. I heard it said once that the origin story of every hero and villain is the same. It's just they respond differently. You know, it's like, um, like the Joker. Damn, that was good. Yeah, it's a good, good movie. Um, okay. What, what do I want to go with this now? So, yeah, the shame. You know, what it was, I think now I'm trying to like reflect on this honestly, but I think it, the self, I don't know, self-limiting belief, I guess, that came from that shame for me in romantic relationships was, "I am too strange of a person and I just need to be alone." Like, and I actually was good on my own. Like, I'm a pretty hyper-independent person for, had to grow up fast for that, you know, my, my mom being an alcoholic and other reasons, I had to grow up pretty quick. So I was like a very hyper-independent type guy. And so I'm good on my own. And then I keep having these romantic relationships that aren't working out. So that reinforced my belief. And so I guess that shame became like the kernel of a self-reinforcing, self-limiting belief. Yeah. But then ultimately, I was able to do something about that through, well, a lot through therapy. Um, psychedelics. Um, is that sound right? Is that connection? Like, do people get the shame kernel and then build something around it? Yeah. And we call this, uh, behavioral magnets. Okay. So something bad happens to me, I can be a mirror for it. So I'm going to kind of reflect that, imitating. Yeah. I'm going to kind of imitate. Or I can be an echo of that. Kind of the opposite. Okay. Yeah. So like instead of imitating, I'm going to be the most, I'm going to be the opposite person of that. I'm going to be, start this campaign of, "No, you should never drink." I'm going to start sobrietyacademy.com. That may be a website. I just made that up. But, or we become the other thing. So like, I'm going to become the opposite of what was in control of me when I was younger so that I can predict it. And the final thing is, I'm going to be the repeat. So if I can repeat, if I can find a woman that's like my mom, I can put myself in the situation so that my open loop from childhood, I can figure out how to close it. Wow. So that's when people, you see people getting all these toxic relationships. They're like, "I have all these unsolved hero's journeys." Wow. So if I can just plug that villain in again, I can redo that battle and figure out how to complete this little story. Okay. So that sounds like something that's probably pretty widespread. People in these toxic relationships unconsciously repeating mother wounds or father wounds or whatever the thing is. What, like, do you have directional advice for those people? Like, what if, if you think you're in that, these three steps will kind of lead you in the right direction? Yeah, it's, it's going to be more complex than that. What I'll do is I'll send you a thing that they can fill out. It's a few pages long that will give you every single detail that they need to go. You can put it in a PDF down in the description. Put in the show notes. Okay, great. Fantastic.

Um, okay. Let me ask you, we had manipulation on here. I think it was number four that had an interesting little equation. Manipulation equals influence plus deception. Yeah. So how do we protect ourselves from manipulation? I guess that would be the first question. And then the second question is, like, well, how do we not manipulate other people? Because influence is, well, it matters, right? If you're trying to sell anything or build a business or do anything, it's like, well, you need to have influence and be open to influence to some extent, but there's some boundaries there that need to be maintained. Yeah. And that it's always going to be a, a gray area. Yeah. But am I being, am I concealing intent that's bad? So that's step one. Like, are you concealing intent? Okay. That if we can check that off, no, I'm not. Okay, let's go to step two. Uh, step two is, am I worried about doing this? Like, do I have ethical? Do I feel extremely good like I'm helping someone or like I'm not helping someone? I feel like I'm helping them. Okay. Then we go to step three. If the other person could see inside of your head, Mhm, and they could see the outcome, would they most likely still take the same action? H That's preventing you from manipulating other people. Yeah. Right? Right. Because I mean, like, influence and persuasion is a tool, like a scalpel. You can murder somebody with it. You can save somebody's life. So the ethics are never in the tool. The ethics are in the user. But those are the kind of the three things that when people start training with me online or or in person, we go through those three questions and say, if the ultimately, if the other person could see inside of your head, would they be terrified? Right? Okay. So then how do you, that's how you try practice not manipulating other people. Yeah.

How do you guard against manipulation from other people or by other people? That's very tough. I don't think I'm immune in any way, and I, I'm the guy writing books on this stuff. Yeah. But I think it's exactly what we were talking about earlier. Getting it into the sunlight and getting the making it a conscious process of understanding what all of these things are. Yeah. Helps you to the moment that this stuff starts happening, you're like, "Whoa, that thing that I learned about just got triggered in my head because I've studied it or I felt it." Yeah. The awareness of not the tactics, not like, "Oh, he's using the technique number 17B or something." Yeah. But the awareness of what governs manipulation and influence. And it's the four things that govern the mammalian brain, not the human brain, but mammalian brain that's in our heads too, is focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Can I learn to spot how someone's capturing and leading my focus, pretending to be or signaling that they have authority, pretending that all this tribe agrees with some kind of decision, or triggering emotional stuff in me? I mean, if you look at focus, authority, tribe, and emotion, you can manipulate humans that way. Fate. It spells FATE because it becomes our fate. Uh, or you can train a. If you watch Caesar Milan, Dog Whisperer, it's focus in that order, authority, then tribe, then emotion, then the reward at the end. Right? The way is in training was one of my favorite quotes by Miyamoto Musashi, and it has so many different meanings, but there's an entrainment process here too. So if you're aware of the FATE acronym, then you could at least, you at least have conscious awareness. If someone, I mean, it's still probably hard to detect, but you're more likely to detect it. Yeah. If you have that conscious awareness. Yeah. But if someone's triggering those things and you're not very well-versed, um, if you do a survey of like, if and go ask everybody on the street, like, "Are you easily manipulated?" 100% of people are going to say no. "Of course, I'm good, dude. I'm going to know when it's coming." Yeah. And then you go see the psychological research, like the Milgram experiment, where people thought that they were shocking someone to death. 67% of people went all the way to the end. Yeah. That was just the authority, right? Mostly. Yeah. And focus. Yeah. Because novelty triggers focus. And they were all in a building they'd never been in, people they'd never seen, doing stuff they'd never done. Um, but just. But if those people got education and like, "Here's your focus. Here's how authority is tripwired. The tribe, the emotion." The mammalian brain was hacked. Yes. So 250 volts is enough to kill you. Mhm. 100% went up to that level. Wow. 100%. Crazy. And imagine if you surveyed all those people. They, 100% of them would say, "No, I would never do anything like that. Stupid. You'd have to be a psychopath." Right? Right. Right. So, so those are the four things that that influence the mammal. And there's six things outside of that little ring. Um, maybe I'll send you a graphic that you can put in the notes. Yeah, please. We'll put it on the screen. Uh, and that is focus. And there's two types of focus. We have animal focus, which is like novelty, new information, stick breaking behind the bush at night kind of focus. Then we have human focus. And the human brain focuses on social gain or like social hierarchy of some kind of value socially to you or a social threat. That's human focus. Then we have openness, like vulnerability and stuff, connection. Mhm. Suggestibility, compliance, and expectancy. Mhm. The cool thing is, you only need, if you get three of those six, you will, you can manipulate a human being. You don't even need all six. You just need three. H So if I just get you extremely focused, I level up your level of compliance like crazy, and I get your suggestibility up high, I'll get, I can get you to do anything. I don't need to feel a connection with you. I don't need any kind of rapport. Wow. Look at the, if you look at the Milgram experiment, where they, as a quick 10-second recap, they had these people that they thought they were shocking someone else at Yale University up to 450 volts, and it was crazy. But there was no connection. There was no openness. They were separated by rooms, right? Yeah. Like a piece of drywall. But they could hear the screaming. They could hear the screaming. Yeah. And around 350 volts, there was no more screaming and no more answers on the test. It was dead silence. And the experimenter, the dude in the lab coat, was like, "Any non-answer must be treated as an incorrect answer. Please continue." Kept on going, which is frightening. But this was, this was during the, the Nuremberg trials after Nazi Germany and stuff. And Dr. Uh, Stanley Milgram, his parents were Jewish. They fled the Nazis. And he, all these Nazis are on trial saying, "I was just following orders, right? Just following orders." So he kind of tried to recreate this, this environment. But that, if you look at the Milgram experiment, there was no openness. There's no connection. There's, they just had the focus. They had compliance and they had suggestibility. Yeah. That was it. And there was no expectancy, which was the final item. Right? Right. Right. Where does authority play into the six, then? The guy in the lab coat. Yes. That's the suggestibility or where does So that authority levels up, uh, focus because there's an authority figure there. Yeah. And it levels up the suggestibility. And from the very beginning here, "Have a seat right here. Take this pen. Put your name down right here. Come in this room." Compliance. Ritual. Yeah. Right? It's compliance escalation. Yeah. This is what the pandemic was all about, as far as I can tell, just getting people habituated to following whatever the arbitrary decree is. Um, that's a whole another tangent. But, um, I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, concealment of intent. Right? To make, if you want to ensure I'm not being manipulative consciously, the first box I needed to check, I think you said, was, "Am I concealing any intent in in this interaction?" It doesn't mean do I have to be openly talking about it sure the whole time, but it's instead of you're not misleading them consciously, basically. Yeah. So it's like, "Here, here's a flyer. We're doing a seminar tonight. And if you stick around for the whole thing, we're going to teach you about these time shares. And I'm going to give you a free toaster oven." And nobody tells you you're getting a sales pitch. Right? Right. That's that's that kind of stuff where there's the manipulation. Okay. So that was that concealing intent because it sounded like she was saying everything that she's going to do. No, she said, "We're going to teach you about this stuff." Okay. But the intent is to sell you the content. I don't know what the sales pitch is. Yeah. I know that like that's really very concealed. Got it. Guy knocks on your door and says, "I'd like to demonstrate how good this Kirby vacuum cleaner is." Very open, straightforward. Got it. Okay. And very successful. Still very successful. Yes. Yes. Okay.

So the question I wanted to ask about that is that sounds perfectly correct, but then I think of what Sun Tzu said, something like, "All warfare is based on deception." Yep. And so this is a problem I've struggled with philosophically. It's like, every other human is a potential threat or enemy at all times because people can do whatever and in a moment, right? Yeah. So how do we, and maybe this goes all the way to Christ, because I was going to say, the philosophical question is like, how do you decide, are you dealing with a friend or foe? But then the Christic answer is, "Love thy enemy," which I think is probably one of the most difficult commands or or suggestions he gave us. He never said, "Get shot by the enemy." Correct. Right? So I think, um, the military has a very clear pathway to determine, uh, is this a friend or a foe? It's, do I, does that person have the capability to kill me? Check. Okay. Do they have the opportunity to kill me? So like, if I had a gun on my hip right now, do I have capability and opportunity? Mhm. Third, third thing on the triangle is intent. I know that's the hardest one, right? Okay. But if I, if I say, "I'm going to kill you," and then I stand up and start drawing my weapon, that's intent. Sure. I've demonstrated intent. Yeah. Um, here you were talking about like concealing our intent. Yeah. The difference between war and life and blurring the lines. I've been on nine deployments, man. It's hard. It's really hard. Sure. Yeah. And I firmly believe it is. Like, I will give you the phone number of every one of my clients. Uh, I firmly live the value of, "We rise by lifting other people." Sure. But there are moments where me taking down one person is going to help other people. Sure. Rise up. That's got to be the most difficult. Still, the difficulty remains. All right. Is this the most difficult thing in human experience is making that particular decision? Because you're still dealing with the intent, which can be concealed, and you're still dealing with kind of the utilitarian-esque calculus of like, "Is taking this one person down going to lift other people up?" That's not an, typically, typically not an objective math problem, right? That's a lot of subjectivity. The trolley problem comes to mind. Like, Yeah. Can you say some more like how do we deal with that? It's like, it seems to me like it's irreducibly complex. It is. But I think what we were speaking about at the beginning was a psychological problem, and we've drifted into a philosophical problem. Mhm. Okay. Okay. Which I think I'm, I don't, can't tread that water. Got it. Okay. I don't consider myself an expert at all. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that one's tough. Um, it is. Where's the line? Where's the line between psychological and philosophical? If we're psychological creatures, I think when we start asking like, "How do I define something in a millisecond?" it becomes philosophical. Got it. And how do I define the undefinable aspects of life, right? Is is when we get into philosophical. And, uh, maybe that line is drawn by the sound of one hand clapping. Yeah. Yeah. Very paradoxical concept. Got it. Okay. Um, I'll carry that philosophical problem on with me into my. I wish I could have unloaded it long thinking future. Uh, okay. I want. Okay, going back to something you talked about earlier. We're talking about behavioral science. People are very complex critters. However, we need to decomplexify and sort of categorize people to deal with them. Is this where typology frameworks come into play? Like the Myers-Briggs framework, the Big Five personality test? Even astrology. I know astrology is sort of poo-pooed on today in the modern age, but like Carl Jung said something about astrology was like the culmination of all of our knowledge of psychology up until a certain point, you know? So like, it's not, I don't know if it's, whatever. I don't know your opinion on astrology, but these types of frameworks. I think all models are wrong. Okay. Some models are helpful. Yes. Fair enough. How do we then, do you just kind of use all of the models and synthesize them and get the approximation we have when it comes to dealing with an individual person? We have our own system that's very efficient. Like, you can run it on me in less than six minutes with just us talking about work or vacation or whatever, and you people will reveal all of those pieces. Okay. And this is a profiling system I developed for the government called Six-Minute X-Ray. That's even an Amazon book called Six-Minute X-Ray. And it's just listening to the language to figure out what does this person need from other human beings? How do they need to be to feel? Do they need to feel significant? Do they need approval? Do they need to feel like they're accepted into a group of people? Those are typically your big three. The power might be another one, but there's six total that we teach. And then how do they make decisions based on their clothing, their behavior, their past, the patterns that I can see, how do they typically make decisions? There's six ways, six decision types that you can profile in a person within six minutes. And then finally, is the values. Like, at the end of their life, what are they really seeking as a result of making choices? Is it like growth, or connections, or freedom, or sometimes information, or recognition? So like, the end goal of those people, and that will define your values. And when people say, "Oh, the sales script is 30% effective," that means that the sales script is written for 30% of those types of people. Okay. So if you just change the words around to understand how the person needs to feel, how they make decisions, and their ultimate, ultimate goal, then everything completely changes. Okay. So this is like curating the message for the audience. Yeah. Okay. And and developing empathy at the same time. Especially if we're at the point of seeing people as reasons. Yes. Like this person keeps doing some annoying thing at work that pisses me off, right? I'm seeing the reason first. I don't have to go say, "Hey, come in here, my office. Let's talk about third grade. Tell me about your teacher." We don't have to do any of that. But I can, I can tell like there's a situation that happened here that made this behavior. So I know the root of of what's happening, and it makes me a thousand percent more effective as a leader.

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It is absolutely horrible. Um, governments in their pyramid schemes, they really seem to love them. Yeah, it's often the way I describe fiat currencies. It's just a pyramid scheme, basically. If you're close to the money printer, you get rich. If you're far from it, you get poor at the expense of those close to it. Wow. Um, so help me to understand, since we're on, and you can, yeah, let's leave it in the show. Help me to understand Bitcoin and all of this. I'm ignorant to a lot of this stuff, but what do you think is the psychology behind some of this? Why is it so powerful? Why is it now? Let me explain the problem. Like, Bitcoin is the solution to the problem of money, but I think a lot of people don't understand the problem of money. And there's a lot of different ways to come at it, but I'm going to try to give you the way that's hopefully relevant to what we've been talking about. And a newer way I've been thinking about money myself recently is like, okay, you have an organization called the central bank. It uses the force of law to prevent any other business from getting into the currency production game. Right? So it's a, it's a centrally planned institution. Imagine if we only had one business that could make cars, and anyone else trying to get in the car-making game got shut down by the force of law, you know, with coercion or violence. Well, you wouldn't have free market capitalism. You would have Soviet-style economy, basically, right? Yeah. More accurately, a dis economy, and its long-term consequences that it, it fails, as the USSR showed us. That's the, we have the central bank in every modern economy. So if money is one half of every transaction, then one half, we're 50% communist, basically, or Marxist. Wow. And this is not, I'm not embellishing. This is in Marx's 1848 manifesto of the Communist Party, measure number five was the central bank. It's like, this scheme only works if we have a state monopoly on cash and credit. Right? So we have centrally planned money in an otherwise free market world. Although, things free market things tend to fall apart in a world with centrally planned money. Now, here's that's kind of just the rough institutional description of it. And is this all, were we running this way pre-Federal Reserve? So the first central bank, uh, I think it's Bank of, I hope I'm saying this right, Bank of Antwerp, may have been the Bank of Amsterdam. One of the two was like the first central bank, 500, 600ish years ago, but the same shareholders of those central banks. Then the Bank of England is the one that came after that, which was the real big one. Uh, the Rothschilds are the big famous name that are known to own this bank, but there's a handful of other families that also own it. And apparently, they own all the central banks in the world. So they have, you know, there's 300 people, more or less, that have like 50% of the world's wealth. Okay. I didn't know any of this, by the way. Yeah. Through this institution called the central bank, basically. Now, if you wanted to read about it, this book here, "The Creature from Jekyll Island," is fantastic. Um, I would start there. There's a lot of other books that that go into the central banking rabbit hole. Okay. What I'd like to tie into the context of our conversation, though, is I've recently been thinking about the power to print money is sort of like a pseudo form of mind control. Because if you can just print money, well, then you can, you know, print money out of thin air, basically, right? So, and to be more specific, I call it counterfeiting currency. So if you or I counterfeit a $100 bill, well, then we get in trouble, right? That activity is the exact same activity that the Federal Reserve is doing by the trillion, right? There's no economic distinction whatsoever. There's just a legal distinction. I like to say it's, which way the guns are pointed, right? Like they're pointed at us telling us we can't do them. But inside the central bank and the shareholders of the central bank, they do get to profit at infinite item from currency counterfeiting. Okay. So if you can print money out of thin air, and money is the thing that can be used to acquire any good or service in the marketplace, well, then you can print goods and services out of thin air, up to and including media institutions, social media influence, fake research, fake science, fake news, propaganda, like all of these things, all of these lies. Yeah. These lies, which the money, the counterfeited currency is a lie in and of itself, like it's a debt-based money, which if money is the final extinguisher of debt, how can money be debt-based? That doesn't make any sense. You can never use it to settle with finality. So the money is a lie, but then it leads to the generation or it funds the generation of all these other institutionalized lies. And so what happened during the pandemic? We printed $8 trillion in the United States. We printed $8 trillion. So the Federal Reserve is founded in 1913. Pandemic starts in 2020. So it's 107 years. I think we increased the dollar supply like 40% in a year. So 107 years of dollar production, almost, you know, one, whatever that is, 40% of every dollar in circulation was printed within that 12 to 18-month period. Whoa. And the other half of the dollars were printed over 1070 years. So it's like this. And this wasn't like a Republican Democrat thing. This was like, No, no, no. The central bank is privately owned. Yeah. Politics is a puppet show. It's all here to distract you. This is what I keep telling people, like, if you, if you think this comes down to like left versus right, you, you are a victim. You are a victim. Amen. Exactly. So this is where that, and that's where it's a frame. Like money has a lot of different definitions. That's what's made this show, like, that's been kind of the backbone of the show, is like, we try to define money. And there are strict economic definitions, but then there's all these other definitions that people have brought from different perspectives. And this is one of them, like, it's kind of, I would have never thought of that. I would have thought like, oh, I want to define money, I'm just going to go look in a dictionary. Yeah. But there's, there's like a, there's a challenge there to this. There's a, there is a challenge. There's a mental side of money. Yes. Okay. I interrupted you though, because Well, but you're on to what I'm saying here, because it is a language. Money is, it's often called the language.

Of value, or the language of power, or the language of human action, right? We're communicating through money. When we price things in money, when we negotiate deals in money, when we think about, we do our plan, our own financial affairs, we're thinking through money, right? We're using the, we're using it's like, it's like numeracy or literacy, right? It's basically numeracy, but it's applied to economic reality.

And so if you corrupt a language, right? If, and this is what many aspiring dictators do, right? They take over the media and they'll say, "Oh, these are the stories you'll print. You're not going to use these words. Label these people as this thing so we can, you know, justify this atrocity against them." I think it was said that the purpose of propaganda is to make one group of people forget that another group of people are human, right? So during the pandemic, we had antivaxers. Yeah. Okay. Round up the antivaxers and put them in the camps and take their jobs. You know, it's like, by just by switching the label from people to antivaxers. I remember seeing an ad during that, that time in my life. Um, I don't remember what news outlet it was on, but it's like, if you haven't been vaccinated, it's time for end-of-life planning. Yeah. Yeah. And people were calling for the death of, of people who, of the unvaccinated.

Do you remember the White House statement they put out, like before Christmas break? I do. Contrary to what people think, I do not watch the news. Yeah. I don't follow hardly anything. I also don't watch the news or follow any of that [ __ ]. But this was circulating on social media at the time. The White House had put, I guess it was just their, their website, their press statement, whatever. And it was like, if you haven't been vaccinated, you better get vaccinated now. And if you decide to not get vaccinated, you can look forward to a long and cold winter full of death. Yes. It was like something out of a comedy movie. I'm like, is that really what they put on their [ __ ] website? And weird times, dude. Weird. That was Orwellian. Yes. Uh, and I thought it was a joke. Yeah. I had, because I saw, I remember seeing on social media and I was like, nah. I also thought it was a joke. And I went, like, let me go to whitehouse.gov to make sure this is real. Yes.

The other one that, that really just clobbered me, "Nobody's safe until everybody's safe." I mean, it just, it basically like thematically rhymed with "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." It was just like, you're, you're conflating how, what does that mean? Nobody's safe until everybody's safe. Safe from what? Safe with prosperous? Yes. Or, or whatever you like. No matter what word you put in there, it's just nonsense. Oh, man.

And I think the, the propaganda. So propaganda as a whole started with this guy named Edward Bernays. Yeah. Sigmund Freud's nephew, which I didn't know. A lot of people don't know. I didn't know that. Um, but he was the guy for anybody listening. He changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense. He did this big, uh, let's get women smoking little skinny cute cigarettes, Virginia Slims. Uh, he's the reason that margarine has died yellow. He's the reason that we eat bacon as part of our breakfast, uh, here in the United States. Million other things, but he was kind of the, the father of this modern-day thing. And this, this leads into SCOPEs. And if, if I just, the, the first thing I need, like, if I'm at Caesar Milan and I want to take control of the dog, I need to get that leash first. And that, that leash is the control of information. Mhm. And the one thing I've said to, for, for everybody in every situation, if, if opinions have to be suppressed in order for your idea to flourish, your idea sucks. Yes. Your idea is stupid. Absolutely. If people can't disagree with it, or we need to silence some people. And I, I'm always saying, uh, as much as I possibly can, look for any kind of suppression of opposing views. Mhm. And if you just look at the people doing the oppos, the suppression, then you can, you can find out what the, the right way forward is. Yes. Almost every time in just about every circumstance.

That's a fantastic point. I would wonder if it's not even worse than your idea sucks. It's almost like your idea is evil. If your idea requires coercion. Yeah. Well, I mean, you use the word suppression, which is like, that's a, that quickly becomes coercion, right? If someone's, if you're trying to suppress an idea and some person won't stop talking about it, well, they're going to get clobbered eventually, or canceled, or canceled, suppressed, censored, all the things. Um, their account gets hacked. Yes. This, by the way, that dynamic, I really think it's the entire basis of Keynesian economics, which is what's taught in schools and universities across the world. It is a completely inconsistent with all economic science prior to the age of central banking. Really? Yeah. It just totally, like, forked academic reality. And one of the, you know, there's kind of the libertarian school of thought where it's like, you want low to no government, life, liberty, property, markets solve almost everything, which is the one I subscribe to. And then there's this other version, Keynesian economics, where it's like, no, government is God. Government controls everything. We fix anytime there's an economic problem, we print money. And it's this whole alternate reality. But I think it is re, it's exactly what you just said. It's like, look who's, look where the voices are being suppressed to see the shitty idea. Yeah. It's like they've suppressed all of economic, the whole history of economic science, and they've promoted this pseudoscience in its place to justify the government's monopoly on money.

So was this, I maybe don't, let me divert you from what you want to talk about, but this is sounding to me like when we brought in the Department of Education and we kind of copy-pasted this Prussian education system. What year was that? I have no idea. I think 1880 something. Okay. So this would have been slightly. I mean, there were three attempts to get the central bank into the United States, and it finally stuck on the third attempt, which was 1913, the Federal Reserve. Shortly after that, we got the income tax system, passports, um, individual liberty started to crumble very quickly. We had the Great Depression shortly after that, which, uh, you know, the mainstream narrative is gold caused the Great Depression, like they didn't print money fast enough. But the true story is there was a giant credit bubble blown by the Fed, and then it was collapsed. And if you wanted to read about that, you could read Rothbard's book, America's Great Depression. Wow. Um, but it's this same, it's this weird psychosocial dynamic where, yeah, if you suppress dissenting voices, or even if you are going to, like, live a lie, right? You have to sort of put, you have to suppress things. And it, you know, it's like the same thing just at different levels, either the individual. So it's like cognitive dissonance at scale. Yes. Exactly. And that's the first thing I teach, uh, when I teach government people, I teach civilian people, whatever it is, is like, 90% of influence is weaponizing cognitive dissonance. Wow. And no one ever says it. Wow.

Can you expand on what does that mean? Weaponizing cognitive dissonance. What does that mean? So, uh, and take a super basic example here, and, and you can, the moment I say this, your mind's going to kind of extrapolate from all of this, okay? Is I get you to agree to a little piece of identity, and I guarantee your behavior in the future. And the moment I get you to agree to a little piece of identity, I can get you, I can increase the chances by like 90% you're going to agree to this next little small piece. M. So, like, we talked about compliance escalation. This is identity escalation. Okay. So if I walked, if, if I walked in here and I was like, "Dude, I got a question for you. Have you always been this open with other people, or is this something you had to work on?" The moment you answered that question, Mhm, you had made, you have now made an agreement to act a certain way with me. Uh, open. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And you've also made an agreement that most people are not interesting. Or I don't even have to talk about your identity. I can get you to agree that most people live in these prisons of worrying about what people think. They live in these prisons of self-doubt. I see. And you're like, "Yeah." And the moment I get you to agree that that's those other people, I'm, I'm covertly getting you to agree to behave a certain way in this conversation. Wow.

That's fascinating. It reminds me of salespeople talking about, you know, getting little "yeses." It's like they try to just get the customer to say yeah, like to anything. Like, "Do you enjoy the sunshine?" It's like, "Yes." And they just like, kind of work their way up. That's kind of a rudimentary way to do it. Yeah. Um, and it, I just trained a real estate person a few months ago, and she was like, "I have this problem and this problem and this problem. These people have all these beliefs, they have, they come in with all of these objections and all this other stuff." And I was like, "What's the main pro, main thing that keeps people from buying?" And she says, "Um, well, it's, they do this one thing." And I said, "Oh, great. The only thing you have to do is start your conversations with, 'When I first started learning about real estate, I, I knew nothing about the market.' I made a self-admission, right? An admission that I didn't know something at one point in time. It makes you more likely to believe the next thing I'm going to say." M. And then I met this mentor, and this mentor told me, "You're only ever going to deal with three types of clients in real estate." And I'm telling you, I'm your real estate agent telling you about these three types of real estate clients. I said, "The first ones are going to be worried about this. They have great intentions, but they don't do this. They don't do their checks, and they, they sit on their hands. They do this." So, like, I'll describe two bad ones that kind of have good qualities to them. Mhm. Then I'm going to describe one type, uh, that has maybe some little reservations, like they, they don't take action immediately, cuz like, they like to look at details, they like to consider the information, but they, and then I'll just describe the type that I want you to be, and you'll automatically agree to be that type. You don't even have to say, "Yes, I am." You'll mentally agree that that's, that's the type that you are.

Back to the social judgment thing, like you're trying to be judged favorably in the eyes of the other. Is that why they're doing that sort of? But you're also saying because I gave you authority, I gave this guy that gave that told me about these three types. Yeah. He's this mentor. I'm going to build him up. He's 75 years old. He'd been doing real estate for 90,000 people or, you know, whatever, how many homes. I mean, he was like one of the top guys in the country. And he told me something absolutely profound. Totally changed my life. So now I've built up the authority of the information, which makes you believe it, which also makes you pick one of those identities. M.

This is all, man. I remember when my daughter was like, you know, threeish years old, maybe younger, maybe two. And you, you naturally as a parent start to use these subtle manipulation tactics where it's like, "Oh, she refuses to eat." And you're like, "Okay, she's a very disagreeable young lady. I don't know where she got that." Um, and you're like, "Okay, well, you know, you can have blueberries or strawberries." And then once you introduce the element of choice, then she's like, "Okay, I choose one." And then she'll eat. Yeah. And so, is that what this is, but just like a higher level of sophistication? No. So, uh, what you described is called a double bind. Okay. A double bind, a decision that you're giving somebody, like, "Do you want to brush your teeth now or in five minutes before you go to bed?" M. So I got you to agree to go to bed, and I got you to agree to brush your teeth, right? M. Um, so that's a double bind. It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to choose something that gives me the illusion of freedom. That's kind of what a double bind is. Okay. You have no freedom if you agree to my question. Yeah. Right. Uh, so what we're doing with this other thing is, I like to call identity hacking. So we're hacking a psychological principle called the consistency and commitment principle. Mhm. If I can get you to say or agree that you are, you typically behave this type of way, then later on in the conversation, I can call you in on that and be like, "Hey, I'm not going to out loud say it, but I'll be like, 'Bro, you remember when you said this? What about this? Let's do this.'" Mhm. So you'll go, you'll be very congruent.

The study Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book, and Oh, yeah. Influence. What was his book? Yeah. Influence. Yeah. Yeah. Another one is called Persuasion. Persuasion. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. He and I, uh, spoke on stage in LA, uh, probably last year or during the pandemic. But all of all of this study, and I think it's fascinating to, to just kind of go through this briefly. Let's say you have these two neighborhoods, and they're identical. Same median income. Everybody's got the same little Lexus, same khakis, same sweater vest, same country club membership, and all that. You go to one neighborhood and you ask them, "Would you be willing to put this sign in your yard that says 'Drive Safe'?" And it's big. It's like a four-foot sign. It's ugly looking. Mhm. Uh, and like 1% says yes. And you go to this other neighborhood and you ask them, "Will you jam this sign in your yard, this ugly ass sign?" And like 90% say yes. The difference is, in this 90% neighborhood, a week beforehand, they went door-to-door and asked them only one question: "Do you support safe driving?" Yes or no. Who's going to say no to that, right? Yeah. They said, "Yeah, yeah, I support safe driving." So now they got an identity agreement out of that person. Then the person flips to the back of the little clipboard and peels a sticker off a thing. It's like this big, and it just says, "I support safe driving." And the person with the clipboard said, "Do me just one favor. Will you just leave this sticking on your front window for one week? Just stick it out so it can be visible from the street." So then a week later, they went and they saw all those stickers. Every one of them wanted to stick a sign in their yard because of who they agreed that they were. Wow.

So interesting. So what is identity then? It's just this narrative construct, like a story we're telling ourselves about ourselves. And then if someone, it's a story we're telling others about ourselves. Telling others about ourselves. So, and then if someone prompts us to elaborate on that identity, was with the safe, supporting the safe driving, then we have made a commitment of some kind that we're now willing to double down on more easily. Yeah. Wow. So it's, it's the principle of commitment and consistency. Yeah. So I get you to make a small commitment about what kind of person you are, and then you'll be consistent with it throughout and and continuing. But we do have this internal identity. But whether the thing that we're doing is external or internal, if we start doing something that conflicts with that, we have tremendous psychological pressure. Right. Okay. So let's say, to prevent cognitive dissonance. Well, the pressure is the dissonance. So when things are not adding up. Yes. I was saying, so if you're inconsistent, that's the dissonance, right? Okay. So let's say, um, someone hates a certain person in a company. They hate, they hate their boss, but the board of directors elects this guy to be the next CEO. So this person has a belief of, "I don't like this person because of this, this, and this, and I am right." And I, what, that's not their identity. Their identity isn't, "I don't like this person." Their identity is, "I'm smart." That's the identity that you're competing with. Not the whether or not they're a good person, the other guy. So he gets elected, board picks him as CEO, and what does this person do? They're like, either A, they have to say, "I'm dumb, and the board actually knows what they're doing, and I probably missed something." Or B, they say, "The board's stupid." Mhm. It's very easy. Yeah. Yeah. And we saw it like with when Joe Biden got elected. We saw it when Donald Trump got elected. We saw it on the right when Biden was elected. We saw on the left when Trump got elected. Yeah. It's with every, everything. It's either, "I didn't know all the facts," or "I didn't, I wasn't able to really see what's going on," or "I'm a dummy." Yeah. Or, "They're stupid." And it's always, it's your brain's going to default to the, whatever is the easiest thing to do. Right.

I was going to say, path of least resistance, and, and sort of like some maybe Darwinian self-preservation built into that. Yeah. Or it's like, whatever identity you've established. Uh, again, I think this was seen a lot during and after the pandemic, right? Where people got the jab, had negative consequences, and then rationalized why it was something else that gave them those, that adverse reaction. Because they would prefer to keep their identity intact rather than modify their belief structure or admit to mistakes. Is that what's, is that what's going on? Yeah. And I don't know about, I don't, I don't know about the research behind any of that, but if, if people were having complications, but they viewed getting a jab as part of who they were, "I'm a good person, so I will." Mhm. Nobody who, who advertises that they went out and got a flu shot. Nobody. No. Yeah. Because it's not about identity, right? So a lot of these people that were doing some of this, was it not everybody, obviously, but it was about identity. So when, if any, they saw a news article or something happened, they're like, "Oh, it's causation versus correlation." So they have these little things they go through in their head that's not, they're not connected. They probably had pre-existing conditions. They probably had all this other stuff going on. Yeah. Yeah.

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Okay. In your, the opening to the video you just shared with us earlier, you were describing how a lot of, well, these tactics, this knowledge has been used for a really long time. Yeah. By some humans to manipulate, slash socially engineer other humans. But at some point in that opening of the video, is you said, "But people are waking up." Yeah. What, what does it mean to wake up? To is it just doing what we're doing now and just talking about it and becoming aware of it, and then kind of like you said earlier, if you have this framework in mind, you, you're more resistant to manipulation, or is there something deeper going on? I think the powers that be, and this, I've never said this out loud, at least on the internet before, but I think the powers that be are trying to speed up a timeline that was made to take another 60, 70 years because they don't have that time to be around for it. And I think it's either that, or it's, it's getting so blatant that they no longer care. They think they're so guaranteed with a success that they don't care. And I'm, I'm not saying that I can write you a list right now of who they is. Sure. But there's always a they, you know, that they have been there a while. But I think that it's gotten, they're trying to speed up some kind of a timeline. And I, I teach SCOPEs. I'm the guy that teaches SCOPEs. Mhm. Telling you that we are in a SCOPE, 1,000%. We are in a big time SCOPE. And it, that does not mean that I have some kind of X-ray vision and I can see the puppet masters up above the stage. I don't. I'm not saying I, I don't research that stuff, right? But I do research these techniques. Uh, and they're definitely here. And it looks like this is the same process that's happened all over the world where SCOPEs were sped up, uh, and weren't allowed to mature before the next phase began. And I think people are seeing what this is bonkers, or this is ridiculous, just crazy. Like in your, it's just in your face. Yeah. Uh, it's from the left, from the right, from, from everywhere. Yeah. Uh, and it has nothing to do with left or right. And I think that is in itself a whole another discussion. Yes. But we're seeing a timeline being sped up. We're seeing things done more and more in the open because there's probably not time for the, the previous step to mature to get our minds ready to receive the next one. I see. That's what it is.

And any inclination as to what caused that acceleration? Like they lost control of something at some point? I don't know, but it seems like the people there wanted to do this because they want the outcome faster. Yeah. And they thought that speeding this plan up might make the outcome happen faster. I'm speculating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that sounds about right. The only addition I would have is the "they" that people often invoke. The version of that we like to use on the show is shareholders of central banks. Like, it might not only be the shareholders of central banks, but those are definitely the guys at the tippity top, right, that profit from all the money printing. And again, if you control the money, you control the world. There's a famous quote from, um, I think it was Amstel Rothschild. He said, "Give me the power to issue a nation's currency, and I care not who makes its laws." Right? You can, well, through the lobbying mechanism, you can rewrite laws. If you can print money, why do you even need to concern yourself with controlling the legal system as long as you control the money? That's terrifying. So, yeah, I, there's definitely some opposing forces going on here, and I, I'm not super clear on what they are either, but, um, I do think the, the economic vein is, is very important to it all. Seems like a spiritual and non-spiritual, uh, kind of vibe around the world. Yeah. And you don't have to include that. You can edit that out if you want to. No, no, no. I, no, I very much like talking about spirit.

Um, I was going to, before we went to the break earlier, I was going to ask you about empathy, actually. Yeah. And that seems like, you know, you say you were saying spiritual versus non-spiritual, you could also say, like, people that have empathy for other people. Yeah. And people that don't, right? You treat people as a means to an end rather than ends in themselves. And, you know, that's not entirely maybe crisp, because I think it's also okay if we're a means to an end for one another, so as long as we agree to it, right? Like, you're a guest on my show right now, right? You're a means to me making a podcast, but you agreed to come here. I mean, I didn't coerce you, hopefully, right? And there's no invoice or anything. Yeah. There's no invoice. Like, we're just doing this to hopefully spread ideas that are useful for people, but it's also in your interest, right? Like, sure, it's to some extent. I mean, you've been on much bigger and better podcasts than this one, but I don't know. This is a, a much better conversation. Okay. Thank you. Um, anyways, like, I don't know if it's just empathy, per se, but if you have empathy for other people, you tend to treat them better, right? If we're defining empathy as, I hope I'm doing this correctly, it's like me putting myself in your shoes, right? Whereas sympathy is different. I don't know. I'll let you maybe answer that one. I'm not entirely sure. Um, but empathy is also this, the, the one thing I was going to mention earlier, too, is I can't remember his name. It was a particle physicist, and he was saying, like, to understand how the subatomic particles moved and acted, like he actually had to empathize with the particle and imagine himself in its position, and he was like, one of these, you know, breakthrough theoretical physicists. Wow. I should really check that in. But so it's like, it's not just a human thing. Like, there's, it's somehow, uh, an ingredient to, or maybe even instrumental to rationality and gaining a cognitive grip on the world. So could we talk about that? Like, what, what is empathy? How is it different than sympathy? And is the lack of empathy this spiritual versus non-spiritual thing you were alluding to? Yeah.

In short, sympathy is feeling something with someone. Empathy is feeling for for them. Okay. Okay. And true empathy is, if you are telling me something, I can imagine what that would feel like in my own life, and it would create some degree of emotional recollection in myself. Even if you're telling me like, "Dude, we just went to Six Flags," or "I took my kids to Disney World. You should have seen my daughter's face." I have empathy for that. So empathy is not just like, "Can I feel sad when someone else is sad?" It's, "Can I feel good when they feel good?" I teach classes all the time to women on how to spot narcissists really quickly on on a first date or a, I did one where it was like a speed dating, like where they have like three minutes or something in between these table rotations. U, but one of the biggest things is, if I am telling you something that I'm genuinely excited about, I'm like, "Dude, you gotta even if I'm saying, 'You got to come look at my new truck I just got,' and and I'm describing it to you, your eyebrow should go up. If I'm saying something sad, like, 'One of my family members got sick,' I should see that that expression start matching on your face. Even if your face isn't really showing it yet, I can kind of feel where the story is going and I'm like, 'Oh my god, what's going on? Tell me. Tell me what's going on.'" That looking for that in people's faces has proven to be one of the smartest business decisions I've ever made when people want to work with my company, and people want to do business with me or partnerships with me and stuff. That is bar none. I would say if I could just teach my son one thing in life, it's like, can I spot empathy or a lack of empathy in other people? Wow. Will get you out of like 95% of fires that you're going to have to put out later in life.

Is that like scientific? Like when you're saying teach your son to detect these things? Is there some, is there, is it pure science or is there an art to it as well? I'd say there's plenty of art. Okay. Plenty of art there to it. Uh, because when you're talking about behavioral science, we work in likelihood. Sure. Sure. Sure. So it's, it's more like meteorology. I'll give you a 70. We might have a 77% chance of rain. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. So it's a likelihood deal. But then the meteorologists also, well, there's AI now, but back in the day, meteorologist was an art form. "I'm going to, I've been doing this a long time. There's a lot of experience. I've been doing this for 25 years. It's definitely going to rain tomorrow. It's definitely going to be sunny tomorrow." So when it comes to empathy, um, there was the third part of your question was something about spirituality? Is that right? Yeah. If, if it was the absence of empathy, like people that don't have empathy or choose not to engage their empathy, can actually, I don't know, even as I'm asking the question, I was going to say, those tend to be more of the, they like the evil people, whereas most normal people seem to be relatively empathic with one another. I was asking if that was the distinction, but now I'm doubting it. So there's, I don't think empathy is, is the defining factor. Otherwise, that everybody in Washington D.C. would be a sociopath. They're all narcissists. Most of them are narcissists. But all nar, or all sociopaths are narcissists, but all, not all narcissists are sociopaths. Got it. I think that if you, if you've ever read Kafka, one of his famous quotes is, "Every man must be the hero of his own story." Okay. Yeah. If you were to sit Darth Vader down onto a therapy couch, he's not going to sit there and say, "I, I just wish I could kill more people." Yes. Right? He's going to say, "I want to save this." I don't know much about Star Wars, but "I want to save this society. I want to preserve this one thing." Yeah. So I think in a lot of evil people in real life, these people who are for like depopulating, populating, depopulating. Yeah. Yeah. Depopulating our planet, they have a, a tremendous amount of empathy, it seems, but for future, unidentified, Yes, timelines and people, and based on a faulty understanding of economics, for instance, like they think too many people are going to eat all the resources. But like, if you actually study economics, the more product, the larger the population, the more free they are, the more productive they are, right? But that's their hero's journey, right? And that, then that's their identity. So in their little hero's journey, it's, "I'm doing all these things. It's going to look bad. And people are going to call me bad, but that's part of the process of doing something bold and taking this huge action." But after I do that, all of these good things are going to happen. And then the, the end of this hero's journey is, I kind of come back. I might be dead, but they're going to build statues of me, and they're going to recognize me, and I will gain that notoriety after it's done. This goes all the way back to Plato, too, where like, this is us having empathy for the evil people so we can understand that they are reasons. Yeah. Like that level of understanding, and that everyone's in a hero's journey somewhere. Everybody. Yes. Every man's the hero of his own story. That, that lands.

I was going to say, it goes back to Plato, too, that, you know, all human action is aimed at what we deem to be good. You know, like, even the most evil, whatever, like Hitler is often held up as like the stereotypical evil guy. I think there's some weird things around that, too. But anyways, there's been a lot of evil people that have committed atrocities. Hitler's one of them, Mao, Stalin, etc. Yeah. But, you know, the Platonic perspective on that is something like, they actually thought that was for the good of someone, right? They thought they were doing good, like in their heart of hearts, otherwise they wouldn't do it, right? Um, I, it gets very fuzzy down there, too, because the other thing about empathy, and the reason I wanted to walk it back as I was saying it, is because it seems like you need empathy even as a tool to do evil, right? Like, I need to know, if I know something, if I know freezing my arm and then breaking it with a hammer would hurt me, well, then I can extrapolate onto you and assume it would do the same for you, right? Like, I'm kind of using empathy in a way. Sort of. What you're kind of using is a knowledge. Uh, and if you're talking about someone that totally lacks empathy, Mhm, you're using a knowledge of witnessed behavior, not felt. "I don't understand they're going to feel that. I understand that that's going to cause some pain, but it's not like I'm processing what they might be feeling in my head." Okay.

So have you heard of Dr. Robert Hare? No. He's the guy. And I'm going to derail this conversation again. Perfect. He's the guy who invented the, the psychopath checklist. Oh, is this the psychopath test? I, I read the book about that. Yeah. Yeah. So that was Robert Hare. Yeah. Uh, he's still alive, actually. I think he's about 90.

I have a really important question about this, but go ahead. Okay. So Robert Hare, I'm going to paraphrase a story out of his book. So in Hare's book, he's trying to get you in to understand like how the mind of a psychopath and how do they, or a sociopath, and how they think. So if you're a psychopath, you are sitting in your house one day, or let's say you're in a, probably in an apartment building because you're more attracted to the center of major cities where you can blend in. Um, so you're in your apartment, you're, you're thinking, "You know what? I really want fish tacos. I want fish tacos. That's really going to hit the spot right now." So you're like, "All right, I'm going to go down to the store that's two blocks over." So you go down, you get down to street level, you start walking, and you walk by this car accident that just happened a few seconds ago. This mom is maybe holding her, maybe a four-year-old baby that, uh, may have made it, maybe not. She's screaming. All these onlookers in the crowd are crying, and like, there's these people that are even stopped on the street crying and, and for this mom. And you look at the scene, and as you're looking at it, you take a minute and go, "Yeah, definitely fish tacos." And you turn and you go pick up your food. And you get home at the end of the night, clean out the fish tacos. You're getting ready for bed, and you go in front of the bathroom mirror, and you find yourself standing in front of that mirror going like this, practicing all of the faces that you saw on the street from that day. Wow. That's how you know that you're a psychopath. That's a psychopath. Holy [ __ ].

So what are they missing? What is that? Well, there's a few. Is it a mirror neuron or something? Sort of. Uh, there's some parts of the, of the brain that recognizes emotion in other people called the locus ceruleus, which is connected directly to our amygdala, which helps us to process fear and all kinds of emotional stuff. And so the amygdala is screwed up, and the locus ceruleus is really screwed up. There's some other, it's not just single pieces of the brain. It's like rewiring, and there's some genetic aspects to it. And then, like, you could be genetically have predisposition for psychopathy. Yeah. But then, like, you grow up in a perfect life, nothing really bad happens, and you're fine. Or vice versa. You could have a genetic predisposition to psychopathy, and your mom gets a really bad flu right before you're born, and that triggers the gene. Wow. Which is why we see a lot of these, uh, cases where psychopaths are born in the winter time. Okay. The mother's more likely to get sick. Wow. I can't remember who did the research, but fascinating stuff.

Is there a nurture element too, where they could be born normal, but then, you know, get abused or whatever, and? Okay, everybody says, like, are they, are they made or are they created? Are they born that way? It's, right, it's everything. There's no bright line. Everything factor. Is it true that 4% of populations typically are psychopathic, or is that? I think it's an estimate. I don't know. But if, if you're, I'm 44 before, and if you're my age, you've probably met 800 psychopaths in your life. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

The question I want to ask, cuz it came when you brought that, um, the book I read was called The Psychopath Test. I'm pretty sure. I don't know if that was the same guy that you mentioned or not, but, um, 1%. Oh, yeah. We looked it up. 1% of the population. But that's the. Can you ask GPT instead of the? What is this? Is this called area? Uh, yeah. Google. Google says 1%. But well, might be some psychopaths over there. Dude, I was on Joe Rogan. You can leave this in the show if you want to. And I, I was talking about mitochondria and, and like, I've studied mitochondria for a very long time, and our mitochondrial health, how mitochondria don't have human DNA, like these amazing facts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then I said mitochondria make up like 6% of your body weight. And Joe was like, "What?" And then Jamie brings it up with this Google AI thing. I was like, "No, that's not accurate." I was like, "That's accurate, but I didn't want to, I didn't want to buy him on the show." Like, please use. It's funny how that becomes like the standard of truth in a way, right? Like, what does, what does Google, the LM say? Yeah. Um, okay. So the question I would ask was this: The book that I read, Psychopath Test, it like sort of just profiled different psychopaths. Like they al, they often, I remember abuse animals when they're young before they go on to like abuse people. Um, but there was some test and I read this a long time ago. I say read, actually, I think I did the audiobook. I want to say that a test was developed to discover psychopathy in an individual, but it was developed in a way that it couldn't be gamed. And so the qu, and this ties a question I wanted to ask you earlier where you were saying, "Hey, I want my son to know these facial expressions so he can sniff empathy in other people because that's really good for everything in life." The question I was coming up with there was like, if someone knew that, could they go in the mirror and practice those things and like be a good mimic of empathy even though they don't have it? And so, sorry, that was like a complicated two-part question, but like, is it possible for someone to game these ways in which we, uh, discern whether someone is crazy or not? Yeah, absolutely. They can game some of them, but a lot of them are based on, even if you're 40 years old, it's going to be based on like, what are your neighbors and parents going to say about you as a child? It's hard to game. Uh, have you been arrested before for X, Y, and Z types of crimes? Uh, were you in trouble in elementary, middle, high school for X, Y, and Z types of behaviors? That's why it's hard to game. Uh-huh. Uh, and then a lot of the other parts of it are talking to co-workers, former bosses, friends, neighbors, and those kinds of things. It's hard to diagnose or there's no diagnosis of the, but it's hard to get somebody on that checklist because it requires a, a ton of research and work. Yeah. Um, but if you pull the audience, that's probably the best way, right? Because Yeah. Everyone's cued into the subtleties and Yeah. So if, here's what I taught my son, actually. If, uh, all the expressions look good, and everything, everything looks great, do you feel bad after the conversation stops? Do you feel bad when it stops? Like, do you kind of, have you want it to continue? Yeah, but okay, well, of course, if it's great, you want it to continue, but do you have a comedown? H. So if I'm talking to a, a master manipulator, narcissist, psychopath, sociopath, whatever, and after that conversation, there's a drop in my feeling. Mhm. That was dopamine because they knew how to trigger all of these buttons in my head. But if after that conversation, it's like, "Wow, that was amazing." That's little serotonin, little oxytocin kind of mixed in there, these connection and bonding chemicals. So how do you, the, the best way that I've ever seen is if somebody's faking it, how does your heart feel? Like, how do you feel as a person after that conversation is over? Wow. Fascinating stuff.

All right. All the psychological things we've talked about today, uh, these, I assume, get applied in a military or police setting for purposes of interrogation, right? Like extracting information from individuals. Yeah. Can you, can you just start to tell me how that works? Like, how, how are these things applied for interrogation? So a lot of it, uh, I, I'll just give you a quick interrogation course, Mhm, right here. So perfect. You want to, you want to go through a few different questions to figure out like, did they likely do it? So do I need to be interviewing you or interrogating you? Those are two different things. Interrogation, when I switch to interrogation, that means I think you probably did it, or you probably have what I'm looking for, the information. Uh, we're going to start with something called a punishment question. Mhm. So let's say that you snuck three doors down to one of your neighbor's houses and kicked their trash can over. Okay. And it's a big deal, and you get called in, but you know you're, you're going to deny it, right? And, and you, and I sit down, and I say, "Hey, man, look, is there any reason at all that anybody would say that they saw you walking in that area, or that it might show up on a camera or something, because you don't have all the cameras clocked, right?" But I never told you that I did have that, or somebody did say those things. So since we're starting the conversation with this, I'm either going to, if you're innocent, you're going to be like, "No, absolutely not." Mhm. If you're guilty, now, your anxiety's really high because I haven't told you what I know yet, and we're only one question in. I like how it started with the reason, too. Does that tie in earlier where you were talking about reason being kind of like highest level? No, I'm related. Okay. Sorry. So, "Is there any reason?" And you might say, "Well, I mean, yeah, I walked by." So you either, "Yes, I was there," or "No, I wasn't." And the moment you say no, you don't know whether or not I'm about to flip something on the table and show you a video, or or bring in witnesses that said that you were there, like eight of them or something. Like, your brain is in high anxiety mode, but it's only in anxiety mode if you're guilty. Mhm. So an innocent person would be like, "No, absolutely not." And there's no anxiety spike at all. And then the next question is called the punishment question. And this is what do you? It's not just a, "I'm sorry." What was the first? I thought the first one was the punishment question. First one's different. First one, I'm sorry. Is a bait question. Bait question. Bait question.

Okay. And then a punishment question. And the punishment question is essentially, and I'm, I'm really breaking this down to the bare bones here, but we're working really hard to find out, you know, what happened and who's behind this. And I'm just curious, what do you think should happen to the person that did this?

And that works so powerfully, especially on sex crimes and people that have committed sex crimes. "What do you think should happen to the person that did this?" You're going to hear answers that soften to a crazy degree. Somebody's like, "Well, definitely an apology to the family, but somebody who does something like this is sick, so they need mental counseling. They don't need to go to jail. They need to get repaired because they're broken. They need, they need counseling." No one's gonna say that, especially if it's with a minor or something like that, right? So that question is really powerful. I've used that on my kids when they were younger.

And if I, I'll ask a couple more questions after that. But if I have a reasonable suspicion that this person's guilty, I'm going to launch into this interrogation framework, which is socialize, rationalize, minimize, and project. Just those four things. And this comes from a Reid technique, which came from Hans Sharf, who is a German interrogator. He's the guy who kind of invented, hey, what if we're not an [ __ ] to the people in the interrogation room? Like, he kind of came up with this idea. And Hans Sharf, every interrogation formula used today in the world is a derivative of Hans Sharf. Got it.

Um, have you ever been to Disney World here in Florida? Yeah, we were there just Christmas time. Yeah. Do you know when you walk in that giant tile mosaic that's like a million pieces of tile? It's like the, in the main entrance, in the castle, or in the hotel castle? I, I think so. Thing that you walk through is a million pieces of D. Hans Sharf made that by hand. That's a story for another day. Another day. Wow.

So, um, socialize, minimize, rationalize, project. And ma, minimize and rationalize can be swapped, but the other two can't. Yeah. So essentially, what I'm saying is, let's say, um, you stole 10K from your company or something. And I'm, I'm talking to you. And I might say something like, I want, so let, let me break it down first before I say it. So, socialize: people are going to understand. Minimize: it's not a big deal. Rationalize: it makes perfect sense. Project: it's not your fault. M-hm. All right.

So with the socialized aspect of this, I would say, Robert, look, man, I think when people understand why this happened, everyone's going to understand because they're going to, anybody that's going to be in your shoes would have probably done that. So there. Socialize. Minimize. And man, let me tell you, I work with bad people every day. I work with horrible people every day. And the one thing I can say is this is not a big deal. I see people get over this every day and they go home. This is not something that has to be a big deal at all. And I've seen far worse. And if there's one thing I know, it's when I'm talking to a bad guy. And I don't think you're one of them.

Rationalize is next. So that was minimize. Now we're going to rationalize. And one of the reasons that I came in here to talk to you today was my day off today. They were telling me about you. And I think the same reason I came down here today is the same reason that this money is missing. I know that your aunt, uh, was dealing with cancer. I know she had some outstanding medical bills. And I don't think you did this for bad reasons. I don't think you're a bad person. And people make mistakes. And mistakes, we can get over. Uh, lying about mistakes is something that's, that's totally different.

And now I'm going to project. And to be frank, and I want to stop you from talking in between those two. So my hand comes up. I'm going to say, and to be totally honest with you, I've looked at that company's books. Let's call it Mako or something. I've looked at Mako's books. I've seen what they, they pay their employees. I think I would have done the same thing that you did. They don't, if they didn't want that to happen, they would have paid people fairly. And I think you were doing this for good reasons.

And the final step is an alternative question. So like, the essentially you're saying, are you a piece of [ __ ] or are you a good person? But it sounds like this. It sounds like, so Rob, what we, what I want to figure out here is, and, and I know there's a lot of people out there outside that door, uh, who are waiting for this information. Is are you, have you been stealing for 10 years from this company because they've been, they've had a record there. You've worked there for 10 years and they have a record of missing money for 10 years. It's about $894,000. It's that's gone missing. But I don't think this is you. Uh, this was either you or you made a mistake and you were trying to help one of your family members. M-hm. So we're looking at a million dollars here. So all I need you to say is that you made a mistake and, and we can get through this and we'll work it out.

And that's what an interrogation might feel like and, and sound like. And so that, like the way you started through to the end without the other party even talking, that's the whole interrogation. It's a monologue. Wow. Yeah. And then at the end of that, they just either come clean or they don't. Nope. We'll start the monologue over and I'll rephrase everything that I just said. Ah, again. Really? And again. Interesting.

And then where does that lead you? Like, I, I, well, I guess if they're guilty, where does that, how does that show up? And then if they're not guilty, how does that show up? Or is it a flat-out confession? Uh, it's typically, you're not going to get a confession immediately. You'll typically get something like, like you'll see the, the body just kind of collapse a little bit. Or you'll hear them go, "What if I say I did it? What's going to happen? What's going to happen to me if I say that I did that?" And usually I say, "My job here is to figure out why. We are, they already know this has happened. The investigators are working on it. The police are working on it. That's a done deal." M-hm. M-hm. I just wanted to figure out why so we can get your story out there. And I know that you did this because you're a good person. My job here is to figure out why. Their job is completely different. But what I can promise you is I'm not going to arrest you. I don't think this is a big deal at all. This is petty [ __ ]. That company didn't.

So now I'm starting my monologue all over again, just in response to your question. Crazy. And I'm not going to be the arresting officer. Right? There's a cop out there who's going to arrest you. But I say, you know, I can tell you I'm not going to arrest you. I don't think this is a big deal at all. I see way worse stuff and people go home.

What is your internal experience when you're say, engaged in interrogation like that? Like, are you sort of deam, delaminated from yourself? Like you're kind of running this routine and the real you is not accessible? Like, how does that work? I feel like a character. Okay. That's one of the only times when I feel like I'm, I'm performing. Yeah. And I try to channel Andy Griffith that whole time, to where it's very paternal, calm, composed, understanding. Got it. And kind of just southern wisdom coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That just is the warm, kind of warm and inviting in a way. So they're more likely to, you know, talk to you, basically. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay. I've kept you too long already. It's already 5:10. Um, I have to ask this question though. It's like, okay, you're, you're the, the guy. You're the behavior guy. Scared to ask this question. You've been sitting here with me for three hours. Like, are you analyzing people in every setting you go in? Like, do you turn it off? Like, is it, like, do you know all these things about me now that I don't know about my? Like, where, what's it like to be in this mode or to have this skill? It feels like you can see behind the veil that people wear. And if there's one thing that'll ruin influence and persuasion, it's judgment. And the first thing that I teach people when they're learning behavior profiling is like, judgment will destroy every bit of this. Could you, can you expand on that? Why is that? Yeah. Like, if I get to peek behind the curtain, that means I need to make an agreement in myself that the moment I judge what I'm seeing back there behind that curtain, M-hm. It's the same thing we learned in elementary school. I've got three fingers pointed back at me. Like, I'm secretly afraid of casting, shining a little light in these little spots I don't want anybody else to see in myself. Gotcha.

So it's, it's refreshing in that you can see these little hard spots in people that where they kind of, I could see where armor is. And I'm not seeing all the way behind people's masks and stuff 24/7, but I can tell where the armor is in language. And, and if I can tell where the armor is, I know what it's protecting. I know the soft thing that that person has chosen to protect. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I've, when I, well, I mentioned I had to grow up pretty fast, like all that stuff. And then it wasn't until young adulthood that I realized I do have this. Well, largely through relationship, through friends and romantic relationships, like, you know, you're a little emotionally detached. You're a little abrasive. You know, I had some, can get angry sometimes easily. Like I had these things and I started to realize that I had armor or or scar tissue or something like that I'd carried from childhood into adulthood. Yeah. But let's, and started to work on it. But it's still like, it's always an ongoing project, I guess. Yeah.

And I'll say for anybody listening, um, if I could correct you with one piece of wording, is when you're, if I call something a scar, that means it's fully healed. M-hm. Oh, okay. So it's a wound until it becomes a scar. M-hm. You know what I mean? And then it's, it's a little hardened there, but I'm not wounded anymore. Got it. Um, and that's kind of the, a good terminology to use. Like, am I looking at a wound or a scar? Is a person healed from it, right? And if you're looking at armor, that presupposes there's a wound under there. Yeah. Got it. Unhealed wound. Okay.

So, um, you're one of the types that we would talk about. Like we have like a, in intelligence work, especially, we teach them how to very quickly type people. And you would be under your initial category would be under what we call smile management. Mhm. Like, you don't offer smiles to plate people. I don't know why that's funny, but. Well, you don't use a smile as a tool. Okay. 90% of the world does. 95% of the world does. They offer up smiles to help lubricate social situations and make introductions. Like, you and I shook hands out in the driveway. Yeah. Um, you didn't smile. Oh, really? I didn't smile. That was two seconds into our interaction and I had like the, okay, he's a type seven. So like smile management. Yeah. Uh, which not, I'm not saying smile withholding. Sure. Like, you're just, the smile comes out when you feel happy or when the smile is real. You don't, you're not using the smile as a tool. Yeah. That's useful. Well, actually, one of my long-term ex-girlfriends used to always get on to me about that. She's like, "You need to smile more. Smile more. Smile." Uh, okay. What else? Like, is, we can stop there if you want. By the way, I don't, I don't want to go deeper. But if there is something else you want to say, please go ahead. You're obviously a psychopath. But uh, damn it. Damn it. No, that's all. Let's stop there, dude. This has been like really good conversation. This stuff is so interesting. Um, I feel like there's this whole other domain I need to study and learn about. Like, I, I've been trying to just, you know, trusting that radical truth is just going to save you in every situation. But like, well, it doesn't actually. I've had some situations where it's kind of worked against me. And so now I feel like maybe knowing more about this would be really useful in life. Doesn't mean you have to go out and interrogate people, per se, but Oh, yeah. You could have the knowledge to maybe, you know, resist manipulation, things like that. So thank you. Yeah. Uh, where can people, I guess, any closing words of wisdom? And then where can people find you on the internet? Yeah. I think if, if you boil down any successful time in your life or any failure point in your life, it's a failure or a success in three areas. And that's self-mastery, observation, like, can I read the room? And communication. Did I say the right things? Did I, did I communicate the right way? Self-mastery. And those are the three things that we teach. And the system is called NCI. It stands for neurocognitive intelligence. And it's just nci.university. Beautiful, dude. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me on, brother. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, click here to find more just like it and here to find our most recent episode. Also, make sure to like this video to help shine light on the corruption of money. And be sure to subscribe to this channel to stay connected. [Music]