Transcription
The main thing you have to dial up is the experiential part, because here's what happens. Kids learn. Kids are like a f—it's, it's important to understand that a child is physiologically no different than an adult, right? The same heart, the same brain, the same liver, the same kidneys, the same skin, the same everything, right? They're just smaller, and their brain is an—is growing at a rate. It's the same brain, right? Right. Right. But what happens is they're able to retain, store, and uh, and correlate information faster than an adult, only because of how quickly their brain is growing. They haven't, they haven't developed the pathways, the neural pathways yet as well. They're developing them, right? Right. You and I have them developed, right? Right. They're, they're like a, like a sponge is a fantastic way. If you crush a sponge and you stick it in the water, what does it do first? It expands very quickly. What does it do towards the end? It expands very slowly until it's saturated, and then it just sits there, right? We're the same way. A child is just a crushed-up sponge. So, they're absorbing very quickly. As they get older, it moves a little slower, and then when it's saturated, it just holds still. Adults are saturated [ __ ] sponges. Yeah. We don't have to be, because guess what you can do to empty a sponge? Just squeeze it again, right? So, that's the whole concept of neuroplasticity: is you can, you can purge what you believe in, purge what you think you know, and learn all over again, even as an adult. That's what's magical about the brain. But children don't have a choice. Children are starting from that small, crushed sponge phase. So, the thing to understand is that they're constantly learning, and, and what they learn from experience is what, that's where the majority of data comes from, right? So, if I'm having a conversation with you, the only data you're learning is what I am telling you. If we then go and do something together, you're learning from what I'm showing you, and you're learning from what you're doing. But you're still not making independent decisions because you're doing something with me. Like, if we went for a hike together, I'd be like, "Oh, come Jamie. Jump in my car. We're going to go for a drive. We're going to, I'm, I'm taking you to the mountains. I'm driving the directions." You don't know the roads. You don't know the road names. You don't know where we're going. We're talking about [ __ ] coffee. And I'm in control of the car. Compare that to if I gave you a, a pinpoint on a map and you had to drive there yourself. Now you're learning so much more. You're learning how the car feels, how the roads handle, what the traffic directions are. You're learning what the road names are. You're learning where the stop lights are, right? Where the cops are parked. You're, you're gaining so much more data on your way to go do the exact same thing because you're experiencing it yourself.
Children learn the majority of what they learn through experience, which is why so many of us are actually dissatisfied with our children. Because what are they actually learning at school? Not the content of school. They're learning about standing in line, waiting their turn. Everybody has an equal opportunity. The, I'm not the most important person. That's exactly the opposite of what we want our kids to learn, right? We want our kids to become adults who don't take [ __ ] from other people. That's a great point. But we put them into a school, yeah, where their job is to take [ __ ] from everybody and keep their mouth shut, right? Unless it, unless it fits the rules that were dictated by somebody else. [ __ ] man. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Oh, gotcha. Yeah. My heart's beating. But all, all that experience is what they're actually learning. That's why they don't come home and talk about ancient Egypt, because what they really learned was all the contextual data that came from their life experience.
So, the same thing happens when kids are at home. When my wife and I, just like any other married couple, we don't always agree. We try really hard not to have knock-down, bang-out argument fights because they're not contextually helpful to anybody, right? I'm, when I'm so emotional, I'm yelling at my wife, I'm not learning at all. I'm just reacting emotionally, right? She's not learning anything good because she's just seeing me react. And of course, the audience, the children, no matter where they are, behind closed doors or somewhere else, they're not stupid. They hear the yelling from somewhere else, or they're witnessing the yelling, and they're not learning anything good either. So, what we try to do is we try to practice this, uh, this habit of what we call hard conversations, where we have hard conversations that are rational and logical, and also emotional, but we have them in front of the kids. We don't try to hide it from the kids. It'll be in the car, watching a movie, over dinner, whatever else, like, "Hey, you said this to me the other day. It really kind of hurt my feelings, and let me tell you why." Or, "I'm really nervous about this thing, and I know that you're really focused on a vacation, whatever it might be. Really nervous about us taking this vacation to Mexico because what if everybody gets, gets food poisoning, and we're doing it just because we want to make your parents happy." It's a hard conversation. We try to have those in front of the kids because that is contextually teaching them how adults converse, right? And then they weigh in on the conversation, too. And sometimes our son is like, "Yeah, I don't really want to go to Mexico, Mom, because the last time I was there, I did spend three days throwing up, and I didn't like it." And then my daughter is like, "Oh, it's okay. I actually learned that barfing isn't as scary as I thought it was." But the thing is that the context is where they get all of their education. So, to your point, yes, we teach them through the same process: education, training, and experience, but we really lean hard into the experience. So, we don't, we don't overeducate. Most adults overeducate. "Let me teach you this. Let me teach you this again. Let me teach you this a third time. Tell me what you learned. Let's do a quiz." Too much education, right? Give them the awareness, and then do it with them. "Hey, you, if you're going to walk down the street to your friend's house, I want you to be careful because this road is dangerous. That road is dangerous. And you, you got to cross the street to get to your friend's house. And the next time, you're like, why don't you show me how you walk to your friend's house? And then we're going to walk that route together. And on the way, I'm going to say, look left, look right, look left, look right. These are the most important streets. There's your friend's house across the street." After one or two training sessions, boom, let them go, right? Watch them from your window. [ __ ] your pants in your own car, but don't interrupt their experiential learning process because that is where they're getting the most enrichment.
For, for some of this, I mean, your, your backgrounds are both really interesting to me, you and J. Gi has a, I think a Buddhist background, if I'm not mistaken, right? You grew up with that in that faith or in that, in that discipline. I think you grew up in a Christian-based family, if I'm not mistaken. How much of your parenting and what you do today is influenced by that versus influenced by what you've done in the CIA? It's a great question. I would say it's a little bit of a mix. I, for me, I actually grew up in a household that was very anti-religious. My mother came from a heavily Catholic family. Yeah. And my father, I lost my father before I was born. So, my mother raised me very much to think that religion is the opium of the masses, right? Like religion is what weak people need, uh, structure, and, and the church is for people who don't have vision and passion of their own, right? So, it was a very, very hostile, uh, place to grow up. And then I came into Christianity on my own when I went to college. Oh, okay. Right. And, and it's, it's interesting because I would say that I still grew up in a Christian household because the, the things that dictated my household, sure, we're just contrary, contrarian to whatever was Catholic at the time, because my mom just wanted to do the exact opposite. Like so many of us, we have a, a really good relationship, and then we break up, and who's the next person that we hook up with? The exact opposite of the last person. Yeah. So, but my wife, my wife grew up and had a very positive experience with her, uh, sect of Buddhism. So, now that we have kids, one of the first hard conversations we had was we agreed we didn't want to raise our children religious. We wanted our children to experientially observe us exercising our own faiths and let them come to their own conclusions, their own questions, their own, their own curiosity about both of us, instead of learning that one way is the right way, one way is the wrong way, one way requires whatever, right? Instead of creating the the confines of the institution of church around them, we were going to give them the opportunity to just learn whatever they wanted to learn. So, that's where we started. As we thought through the process that CIA taught us about mastering and optimizing ourselves and how to essentially control the environment around you, we really wanted our children to learn those skills as well. Those skills are very opposite of religious skills. If anything, religious skills, religious doctrine, whether it's Catholic, Christian, Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim, they're all about conforming to a larger, uh, calling. Whereas the skills that CIA teaches you are to create and direct the environment around you, not to conform to the environment, but to get the environment to conform to you. So, we found ourselves in this kind of strange situation where we were like, which of these schools of thought do we want to teach the kids? And again, going back to the whole awareness, like education, training, and experience. We opted that we weren't going to choose any path at all. We were going to make them aware of both options and then let them decide through their own decision-making process, which is experiential, which path works for them. And what we have found just naturally occurs is that our son prefers to learn the confines of the institution. Like, what is normal for the environment I'm going into so that he can fit within that normal box so that he can essentially go undetected. Some people call that shy. What I've discovered with our son is that he prefers to go undetected until he, on his own terms, basically calls attention to himself. Wow. That's huge for my 8-year-old. That just gave me a whole different perspective on my 8-year-old. That's awesome. Our daughter, on the other hand, to hell with the institution. She will roll in and she'll take control of the entire setting. Second child. Yeah. Second child syndrome. Right. So, what we've discovered is that, you know, the both the religion and the intelligence elements of how you carry out life, they really do blend together well. And at least my, with our kids at the age that they're at, I don't necessarily think that they're violating any fundamental expectation of either faith either, right? Buddhism is all about essentially, uh, understanding cause and effect. Our children are doing that. Christianity is all about honoring the father, right? Honoring, bringing honor to the kingdom. If, I mean, our children are making the kinds of decisions, whether they're bullying their way into those decisions, or whether they're, you know, bypassing their way into those decisions, they're not doing anything that brings glory to themselves, right? They're bringing glory to some larger, some larger purpose.
Quick question on this, because I'm, I'm thinking about this even selfishly. I guess I'll, I'll give you my situation. We, we live in the DR, as you know. We did a year, and we told our kids, you know, we're going to, we're going to do, we're going to do like a year. We, you know, I could go back to the semantics of did we say exactly a year to whatever? But, you know, kids hear what they hear. Our older kid, our older kid at the end of the year, or as we approached the one-year mark, and we were making this decision, do we stay year two? He got very, very resolute on the fact that it's a year, I want to go home. And we paused on the decision for some time with the thought of, are we going to create a lack of trust if we make the decision to stay? How much do we involve him? And we, we deployed a lot of tactics that, uh, people, you know, people who have done something similar, you know, hey, uh, ask him what, what might be, um, what he might enjoy about staying another year. Is there a way that you can make it, you know, a positive thing for him? But the question I guess I have is, is it, in order to get your kids the experience, is that just the decision a parent needs to make, or psychologically are you creating a level of distrust, or are you pushing them potentially further away by forcing an experience?
You always give children choice. Here's the thing. Human beings thrive on what's known as the illusion of choice. You and I are the same way. Yeah, we need to feel like we're in control, but that can and often is just an illusion, right? Consider when you go to a grocery store, when you go to a store and you're going to buy something, who the hell has the money in their pocket? Yeah, you do. I'm a dad. Right. Right. You have the money in your pocket. You're the one that's going to choose what to buy. But when the store puts up a sign that says it's 70% off, yeah, anchoring effect, the cognitive bias sets in and you're like, "Oh, this isn't what I came here to buy, but I can get it for 70% off." My wife, but yes, we all do it though, right? If you walked in and saw 70% off a Lamborghini, sure. Sure. Right. You, you'd be like hard-pressed to think, "Oo, I mean, I can get this thing for $35,000. Let's go." Right? So, that's, that's what we call the illusion of choice. And the illusion of choice is super important to understanding human beings because human beings, this is the, the example to the contrary. Have you ever walked into, have you ever walked into a store in the United States and seen 5,000 different types of toothpaste? Oh, gotcha. And then you're like, what, what's what's the difference? Like, what? This is becoming harder for me to choose because whitening, not whitening, minty, fresh breath, gel, paste, like you have to read the boxes. And then even as you read the boxes, you don't really know what the difference is. That's where the illusion of choice works against you, right? If somebody were to just give you three [ __ ] options, right? Here's one that tastes like mint. Here's one that tastes like ass. Here's one that has no taste. The illusion of choice is going to drive you to pick the one that's mint. I hope so. That's a great point. Right. And that's, that's what we see. We see that overseas because overseas countries just don't have the money to invest in 5,000 varieties of toothpaste. But here in the United States, you know, it go, it works against us. And, and Arm & Hammer or Aquafresh or Colgate or whoever else, they are constantly trying to develop new formulas because they think that that's going to help their marketing. They double down on something and they only give people two options. It's a much simpler choice for people to buy. The illusion of choice is so powerful. That's a psychological, uh, hack that that most marketers don't actually take into account.
You and I talked before about polarization and the lessons from CIA as you're bringing them into business. And I, if I, if I couched it right, if I heard you right, you essentially said, "Hey, look, the CIA espionage 101 is essentially like divide, right? Divide and, and go that way." And as you've gotten into business, I, I think I made the comment to you, man, I've noticed you having a stronger opinion lately as I've followed your brand. And you said, "Yeah, I'm learning that that actually that CIA tactic mindset, uh, whatever the phrase might be, is applicable to business: divide." I feel like there's a, there's a segue or a road from what you just described, the illusion of choice, to the idea of polarization in terms of business, or the idea of, uh, of taking a stand, defining what exactly it is you or your business stand for. Can you take that and run with it? So, yeah, go for it. Absolutely. And it ties right back to your original question too, about what to do with children. Yeah. Right. Do you force a child to do something because you're the parent and you know and you want them to have the experience? It's the same thing with the toothpaste. It's the same thing with creating a coup in a country. Right. What you're doing is you, you want to lean. I'm serious. I know. It's just, it's hilar—it gave me a chill. I, I, everything went through my right brain and then over to my left brain. Everything just went through me. I'm like, no. I know what it is now. I'm going to train myself by beating my leg. No, I'm just kidding. Stick with it. I'm going to run a razor blade across my right arm. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I thought that was hilarious. Let's save this executing a country.
So, essentially what you're doing here is you, you want people to feel like they're in control of their own decision, when what you're actually doing is creating a probability set that can predict what choice they're actually going to make, right? So, consider this with your child. One of the things that we always do with our kids is we give them two options. Why do we give them two options? Because both [ __ ] options work for us, right? Right. "Hey guys, it's time to brush your teeth. Do you want to brush your teeth in two minutes or four minutes?" Yeah. Yeah. We don't tell them it's time to brush your teeth. If you tell them it's time to brush your teeth, they only have one way of exercising control. No. And parents do this all the time. They, they go head-to-head with their kids. One of the best parenting books that we ever read was a book called *Unconditional Parenting*. Oh, nice. Right. It's like a 1970s era book. Fantastic book. And, and in that book, the author, basically a psychologist, a child psychologist, explained that in a battle of wills, an adult will always lose because the adult has less resources than the child to stand on this willful decision. So, if you're the kind of parent who has these battle of wills with your kids, and then your kids win, and then you go to bed at the end of the day feeling defeated or beaten or like manipulated or whatever else, your [ __ ] seven-year-old is not manipulating you. How is a seven-year-old cognitively more capable than you at 35 or 25 or 45? They're not. They can't out-manipulate you, but they can sure as hell out-willpower you because they have nothing else draining their resources, where you've got a job and a relationship and rent and responsibilities. All that stuff is draining your resources, plus just old as [ __ ] like me, right? So, you can't have a battle of wills against kids. So, the way that you bypass the battle of wills is by giving them the illusion of choice. "Brush your teeth in 2 minutes or 4 minutes." "Do you want strawberries or bananas for lunch?" Right? "Do you want, uh, hot dogs or hamburgers for dinner?" You don't give them any other choice. You don't go up to them and say, "Hey, we're having pizza for dinner and I need you to eat three pieces," because then the only way they can exercise their choice is to say no. And then you're in a battle of wills, right? The same thing works for adults, man. Let's go back to that toothpaste example. I'm sure there's a thousand people hearing this conversation right now who are saying that toothpaste example is [ __ ] Right? If Colgate only offered me two types of toothpaste, I guarantee you I would buy Crest instead. Okay, fair. Now, when Colgate takes their entire toothpaste line and they shut it down, and they shut the whole thing down, right? There's no longer 50 varieties of Colgate. They break it down to two: Colgate Basic, Colgate Elite. Colgate Basic costs the same amount as Crest. Colgate Elite costs twice as much, right? Are you gonna buy $9 toothpaste? [ __ ] no, I'm not gonna buy $9 toothpaste. Yes, you will. I was gonna say, I think I am, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're giving you an illusion of choice. And psychologically, subconsciously, you can process that so much faster than you can process the 15 choices from Crest. So, you walk into the grocery store and you see $4, $5, $4, $5, a thousand different ways, and then you see $9. The first thing you do is you see $9. Guess what you just did? You just noticed. You just got a bookmark in your [ __ ] brain and you're like, "Oh, there's a $9 toothpaste. What's that about?" And then you read it. And then you come to a conclusion. You say, "That's bullshit." And then you look at the other stuff, and then you burn out your resources. Just like your kids burn out their resources, you burn out your resources on all these other choices until you're like, "I just might as well get that $9 toothpaste. I mean, I might as well take it home, see if it works." Even if it doesn't work, you've bought it once. So, the odds of you buying it again are now like six out of 10, right? The illusion of choice is what we're looking for. It's the reason pricing works the way it works.
And like, when it comes to countries, when it to your point about dividing a country, every country is already divided. Our country is already divided. Our country's been divided for a long time. We are just on a spectrum of how divisive we are in that division that already exists, right? So, right now we're at a place where it's at a, like an all-time high where if you are a left-leaning liberal or a right-leaning conservative, you feel like you have to attack the other side. There was a, there was a time when, you know, conservatives quietly teased liberals, and liberals quietly teased conservatives, and most of us were in the center. Yeah. Today, guess what? Most of us are in the center. But all of us in the center, we don't want to be teased. We don't want to be made fun of. We don't want to be attacked. So, we keep our [ __ ] mouth shut. So true. Right. And then all the voices that we hear are the crazies on both sides who are trying to get more validation from each other by attacking the other side. So, we're already divided. So, when a country is divided, it makes it easy for some place like Russia or China or Iran, all the countries that have been meddling in our elections for much longer than just since 2016. 2016 was just when they got caught, right? I don't know why people think that Obama was elected in a pure environment, while Bush was elected in a pure environment, and Clinton wasn't elected in a pure, No. [ __ ] no. Like, we've always been the country that every other adversary wants to target our election system. We just, they got caught in 2016. It became mainstream in 2016, and now it exists, and we all expect it. It's always existed. We just never knew about it before. The way that it works is that they see us, and they are playing into our illusion of choice. Because at the end of the day, when it comes time to vote for the president, how many people do you really get to vote for? Yeah. Two. That's it. Two. Yeah. That's it. That's the illusion of choice. That's a good point. [Applause] Freed