thanks, scott, for joining us here today. thanks for having me. yeah, you got it. you're the creator of dilbert among otherthings. i decided, "okay i'm going to check out thisblog," because i'll be honest, somebody who's a fan of the show said, "this guy's crazy,what do you think?" was crazy the word? crazy was the word. that's like the best thing anybody's saidabout me this year.
yeah, this year, maybe! but it was late last year. you were in your predictive mode. and the reason that people were saying thiswas because, in large part, you had said some pretty crazy-ish sounding things about theelection and you essentially predicted a trump victory. a year in advance. and my prediction was different than anybodyelse's in the sense that i had a specific reason for it, that was different from otherpeople's reason.
some people said, "oh it's his policies,"or it's, "people wanted change." you know, they had lots of different reasons. i think cnn printed twenty-four differentexplanations after he won. different pundits said, "well it was thisone reason." of course it's never one reason. mm-hmm. but my theme was persuasion. so i'm a trained hypnotist; i learned hypnosiswhen i was in my twenties. and when i saw trump enter the stage, i sawa level of persuasive talent that didn't look
accidental. he's someone who has acquired these skillsover a lifetime. he wrote a book on it. the art of the deal is essentially persuasionin the form of negotiating. and he talks about persuasion. he talks about it all the time. and when i saw it, i thought, "i think i'mseeing something other people aren't seeing because i have a certain training." right.
you know, i've been learning persuasion fordecades after i learned hypnosis specifically. and i just saw more technique and i thought,"he's bringing a flame thrower to a stick fight and this isn't going to be fair." a lot of the predictions were a little spooky-- or at least people thought they were spooky, especially after they became true. i guess predictions aren't spooky until theybecome true. otherwise they're just crackpot theories. and that's the way that it came across inthe beginning. so you experienced maybe a little bit of like,i don't want to say smugness, because you're
not smug, at least not so far. well i couldn't be smug at all until the actualelection. that was the flagship prediction. if i got that wrong, the other ones didn'tmatter. but then the election happened and this strangething immediately happened, which is, you saw the country sort of going insane. because people didn't expect it. they were thinking that hitler had just beenelected, you know, the people on the other side.
and it was a dangerous situation. i went on periscope as soon as the soon asthe election was certain and advised people to stay cool. you know, and don't go out. and i tried not to go out myself for the samereason. they just don't need any more trouble. i mean it's good enough to win, if that'swhat you wanted as your result. i didn't really need to rub it in. so i tried to resist that.
and you -- what'd you say live tweet? or is it live periscope commentary throughoutthe election and the debates and things like that? that must have been interesting. so i did a combination of lots of tweetingand lots of periscopes. periscope, for anybody who doesn't know, it'sa live streaming service owned by twitter. so i could just turn on my phone at any moment,hit a couple of buttons, and i was, you know, live to usually a thousand people at a timeas soon as i went on. congrats on being one of the last people touse periscope.
i feel --(laugh) i'm not sure how -- i'm not sure if that'seven still the king of the hill, but you're doing more youtube stuff now? yeah so i'm transitioning to probably facebookand youtube. great, we'll see you on there as well. i do want to say though, a lot of people whosay, "well you know, you could have predicted hillary or you could have predicted trump. a lot of people one way or the other. even a broken clock is right twice a day."
what makes your prediction different thanjust -- you didn't pick wrong? yeah, so there's always going to be the survivorthing, right? so like you say, somebody was going to beright no matter what. and those people are going to say, "becausei'm a genius." right, naturally. and of course i'm doing the same thing. why wouldn't i? because i can predict a coin flip and i havea 50 percent chance of looking like i can tell the future in that -- in that case.
so what i tried to do, since i assumed thissituation would happen, if i were right, i would be one of the many people who said,"hey i was right and here's my reason, and here's my reason." and so i tried to make a lot of subsidiarypredictions along the way, you know? so that they could see that mine were beingright on a fairly regular basis when other people were less right. so for example when carly fiorina was in thedebates in the primaries, her big move -- she'd made a big push about abortion. and she described in vivid details, thingsi'm not going to describe for the benefit
of the viewers. sure. just a horrible, abortion went wrong scene. and i predicted at the moment, based on persuasion,not based on logic or policies or any of those things, which people largely ignore -- i predictedthat nobody wanted in their head that image any longer than they needed it. and electing her, kept it in their heads. that was the top of her polls, the day thatshe was talking about that. and she dropped from fifteen percent to fouror five percent within a few weeks.
just because of the anchoring and the negativeassociation? well that was my prediction based on sucha horrible image that is now associated with her brand, she just ruined her brand accidentally. now i make a distinction between what i callthe 2d world and the 3d world of persuasion. in the 2d world, facts matter and policiesmatter and all that stuff. but i think we've seen that that's not thecase. (laugh) when i was saying it a year ago, it was actuallyradical. and i'm pretty sure no one else was sayingit, you know, a year ago.
but if you look at any of the headlines thepast month, you're going to see a lot of people saying, "why is it that people are so irrational? why do people make decisions this way? how did we get brexit? how did we get trump?" so the world has moved over to my point of view. essentially that people are guided by thesesets of emotions rationalizing behavior. i noticed some of that on your blog as well,about our feelings and emotions guiding us. yeah so, other smaller predictions i made.
when trump started going at ben carson, whenben carson pulled even, or a little bit ahead of him, in the primaries. if you remember, probably everybody saw thisvideo of trump acting out the belt buckle stabbing incident from ben carson's own book. where trump came out from behind the lectern,and actually did a pantomime of the attack, where he was pretending to stab and it washitting his belt buckle, and he mocked it and he called ben carson pathological. because that's a word i guess carson had usedhimself in his own book. mmm.
and i watched that performance and it wasso visual that i thought, "this is going to be way more powerful than people think." and i predicted that was the end of him. and that turned out to be the high of hispolls as well. because the visual persuasion is just so good. it's sort of one of the kings of persuasion. up there with fear and identity and a fewothers that are a little bit higher. so if we can associate somebody with somethingnegative, such as carly fiorina with gross depictions of surgical procedures and abortions,can we do the opposite and create associations
that are positive with people? so that our polls go up in theory? totally. i don't give dating advice -- yeah -- no need. -- but i'll just use this as an example. if you were to meet somebody for the firsttime, whatever you say first ends up sort of sticking in their mind as their first imageof you. so one of the best things you can say, "hey,how you doing?"
if the first thing that you say takes themto a visual place, like, "hey have you good any vacations," or "good day for the beach. have you been to any tropical islands?" you know as soon as you can work that in,their mind goes to their own memory of their best vacation tropical paradise and just putsthem in this warm mood and then you're standing there. so the association happens and people havea hard time shaking a first impression. so that lasts longer than it should. so basically, we are using their own associationsand then taking one wire out of there, just
connecting it to ourselves. one of the tricks of persuasion is you wantto directionally tell somebody to imagine a certain thing, but you don't want to overspecify. because as soon as you overspecify, peoplesay, "oh that wasn't what i was seeing." or, "yeah i don't have a memory of that exactly." but if you say, "imagine you're in a -- you'rein nature or you're in the forest," people just see their own forest and then that makesthem happy. then they're on last month's hike throughthe redwoods. sweet.
yeah, it takes them back to a happy place. we want to let their mind fill in the blanks. yes, you have to be careful about it. you need to, you know, bound it intelligentlyso that when they fill it in, it still works for you. right, otherwise we end up with the misuseof persuasion which -- i saw this weird example of this. there's these -- what's the name of this? it's like regressive hypnosis therapy wherethey basically are programing people to think
they've been abducted by aliens. they're implanting these memories by lettingpeople go back and associate things, but they're also adding this little creative element inthere that kind of runs away in their subconscious mind. so i have a version of that. when i was learning hypnosis, we had to practiceon real people and it was better if you charged them because one of the things you learn inhypnosis is if somebody pays for something, they give it more credibility. and once they've given it credibility, youactually are a better persuader.
they've actually given you that. so i would charge people to regress them totheir prior lives -- ha. -- under hypnosis. now i don't believe that people have priorlives, but they sure did. and they would describe these detailed scenariosand they would talk in, you know, sort of the voice of the person. you know, at the time i was doing it, thiswas a long time ago, i was a young man. at the time i was thinking, "well i'm opento the possibility that there are prior lives,
you know? i haven't seen anything that rules it out,right?" but after i was done with this, i definitelydidn't believe because all these people had exquisite detailed memories that had a weirdcoincidence. none of them were chinese. a quarter of the world is chinese. somebody out of 20 people is going to be chinesein a prior life, you know? so, but none of them were. i mean they were all things that you wouldsee on movies.
"i'm cleopatra," you know or, "i'm a viking,"you know? right out of hbo, basically. i noticed that people, whenever they tellme about their quote unquote past lives -- and i tend to limit my contact with people whotell me these types of these things but -- i noticed no one's ever like, "yeah i was justa farmer and before that i was a farmer and before that i was a farmer and before thati shoveled donkey poop into a furnace." it's always, "i was a warrior." yeah. "i was the -- you know, the king's hand."
i don't know, statistically speaking, you'remuch more likely to be some homeless guy who got hit by a horse cart and died young. yeah, you go back a hundred years, there weren'ttoo many happy people. no, and you're right, most of us would havebeen chinese and or -- and if we go back far enough, everyone would have been african. but no, we're royalty from egypt. but even when they have bad lives, they'realways soldiers. yeah, i noticed that. and -- with men, anyway.
it's always soldiers. yes, soldiers who died bravely in battle. and very few people, i don't know if anybodywas a different gender. ooh, that's interesting. well you could do a prolonged study on thatif you had all the time in the world. maybe in your next life you and do that. you mentioned that trump is a master persuaderand that he's a hypnotist. and when you write master persuader on yourblog, you're capitalizing "master persuader." is there a reason that you do that?
is that just a term that you've coined orare you -- no, it's to call it out so that people cansee it's a term that i'm trying to popularize. at least for trump in particular. and you mentioned some specific examples,such as the rosie o'donnell comment and things like that. can you explain that? yeah, so the first moment when i thought tomyself, "oh my goodness, he's going to win," and i noticed his skill, was during the firstdebate, in which megyn kelly had set a trap for him.
she had a question about his past crude commentsabout women. which if you imagined this happening to anyother candidate up there, just being asked and quoted back your own just horrible quotes,it's just a death trap. he should have been done on the first debatein the first minute. that should have been the end of it. and that's what i sort of expected, at thatmoment. and she starts bringing up the comments he'smade about women and then he just, sort of semi interrupts her and he says, "only rosieo'donnell." the whole place goes nuts, and you know, weremember the answer but we've already forgotten
the question. he made the answer so much more interestingthan the question. and by the way, it wasn't even an answer tothe question. it was just something he said that was sortof related. now what's beautiful about that is that rosieo'donnell is a character that the republican base, the people who cared about the primaries,have a strong feeling about. so he immediately got emotion on his side. he was against her, then they must be on hisside right? because they're against her.
but she's also a visual. everybody knows who she is. oh, yeah. and so you imagine her, right? so this will be a theme you'll probably heara few more times in our time together. that as soon as you can make something visual,you're already the king of the senses, right? what megyn kelly had, were a bunch of wordsthat we don't have a person to put to, you know it's just sort of -- it's an abstract concept.
-- abstract. he just moved that off the page with his perfectvisual, emotion-attracting reference. and i literally stood up. i just said, "okay, that's not normal." that's the best you've ever seen anybody handleany question -- a hard question. because if you get that cannon aimed at youfrom megyn kelly, and you start going, "well, you know, i meant it in this context and thisother thing is taken out of context," you're just digging. you're just continually digging a nice littlegrave for yourself --
nothing you can do. -- with these words lining the sides. but instead he took the cannon and he twistedthe barrell around and he basically aims it at rosie o'donnell, a common target for hisown base, and everybody just goes roaring with laughter and they forget about everythingthat came before that because he'd managed to just dodge that entirely yeah, and then he used it as his platformto talk about political correctness. and i have to admit, when i first heard himtalk about that, i thought, "well, people have been talking about political correctnessforever, and it's never really gotten any
kind of purchase." but he made it such a brand -- -- that you sort of almost wanted it and expectedit. if you were a trump supporter, you just wantedhim to be politically incorrect. it was just more fun after a while. he likes to, obviously, attack the media. but he does it in a way that's not just, "wellthis journalist this, this, and that, and the other thing," he really does aim specificallyat credibility targets. so he'll say something like, "check your facts,"and then he'll name the person.
so now you're associating, in a way, thatperson with, "well they don't do their homework." even if it's completely unfounded. by the way, i have adopted that very phrase. the, "check your facts," thing. because on twitter, often people will say,"hey you said blah, blah, blah," and it'll be just something i didn't say or anything. i used to try to correct it. like what we said earlier, as soon as youstart explaining somebody immediately says, "ah you're backpedaling."
you can't win. "i'm not backpedaling, i'm just explainingwhat you got wrong." so instead i say, "check your facts." and it just ends the conversation just soperfectly. because all they can say is, "i did and youstill said that," but by then you're calling on someone else or there's another part ofthe -- yeah, life is moving on. -- conversation. yeah, exactly.
the same thing with fake news. he's constantly saying, "fake news, fake news!" is this just a matter of say it enough timesand people start to believe it? well first of all it was -- i believe he flippedaround the attack, which you see him do. so the fake news was really aimed at the republicanside with their literally fake news where somebody just made up stories. when he's talking about it a little more often,it's something out of context, that sort of thing. that still ends up being fake, because ifyou leave the context out, it's the wrong
message. and i think he does it strategically and hedoes it to lower the credibility of the -- i would call him the opposition media. because they're definitely not there now -- no, that's definitely true. and i think they're also pretty pissed thathe's treating them the way that he's treating them and they're pissed that he won in thefirst place, which is understandable from their perspective. why not just go with occam's razor on someof this trump stuff?
whereas people say, "well, look, if you thinkabout it this way and you look at it that way, then it's really skilled and it's reallyclever." what about the occam's razor explanation,which is, "nah, he's just the jackass." that wouldn't explain his consistent successall the way through. he went from nothing, with no experience,to president of the united states. you don't do that by being a jackass thatjust is fun to watch on tv. firing at -- ready, fire, aim type situation? there are just too many things that he didright. if you even look at the things that peoplesay he did wrong, you know, the chaos and
whatever. if you look at the people he fired and whenhe did it. first he had corey, right? corey lewandowski. and corey had some issues with you know, touchingan elbow of a woman in public or something and he wasn't exactly the right person forthe next phase of the nomination and securing the nomination -- he fired his friend whogot him that far and did probably an amazing job for that phase, he was the right person. scrappy, street fighter kind of personality.
then he got paul manafort who was, you know,the smooth operator -- got him through the convention. and then he went with kellyanne conway toclose it. so a lot of the stuff that looks like, "what'swrong with him? he can't keep his staff together." whatever the criticisms people are making,they all seem to work. you can very easily find the business reasonthat any of this happened. i'm not saying they didn't make mistakes becauseit's a long, long process; they do a lot of stuff.
he made a share. (commercial break) what you mentioned with trump in the blogas well -- and we'll of course link to that in the show notes -- you mentioned a conceptcalled pacing and leading. and this is familiar to me from my hypnosis,nlp stuff that i took a million years ago that i did not really keep certification on. tell me what's going on here. tell us what's going on here. what is pacing and leading and ideally howcan we maybe take a page out of that manual?
so pacing and leading is the most fundamentalhypnosis technique, all right? there are lots of techniques that you haveto layer together to get a result. but pacing and leading means that first youmatch your subject in some way, for example, i'm matching you right now. all right -- that -- was that an accident? did you do that or did i do that? no, you did that. okay.
because i paced you earlier, but that's anotherstory. so you match them either physically or thestyle of their talking -- it could be emotionally you're matching them. so you're matching them in some way that theyrecognize as, "hey you're one of me." because people are not really that rational. if you act like them, you talk like them,must be a family member. you know? i don't mean literally, but some part of yourbrain you just have an automatic trust for somebody who's doing whatever you're doingat the same time.
so trump does this with emotion. meaning that all the things that he says thatare just wrong, like factually wrong -- like factually wrong and they don't pass the fact-checking-- and we all know there are lots of them, right? whether you're a supporter or anti-trump ora lot of things that didn't pass the fact check. but if you look at all of them, they're alldirectionally, emotionally, correct. meaning that, if you said you know, "blah,blah, blah. terrorism is bad for 10 different reasonsthat aren't exactly true," the people who
have the same fear of terrorism said, "yeahhe's sort of where i am, emotionally." the facts really didn't matter that much. he agreed with you and then he agreed withyou more than you agreed with yourself. if you were a little afraid of terrorism,he was a lot afraid. so he sort of paced everybody in their emotionalstate. once he had that, the second part, peopletrust him and then he can lead. and he's obviously doing that now. so if you watch the number of things whichhe's said he's going to do in the primaries, and you see sort of a softening and movingto the middle, and you see very little complaint
from the far right, the people who you wouldexpect to complain. and the reason is, he brought them a victory,he brought them a unified congress, he emotionally agreed with them on every issue, from abortion,to terrorism, to jobs to immigration, and that was enough. so that gave him the credibility to lead. when you say pacing and leading in the contexti should say of, "well, i paced you earlier," are we talking about mirroring body languageand things like that? because i feel like i do a lot of that asa habit. i learned it back in law school because itworks.
but it's -- it can be really clunky when peopleare starting to apply this, when they're new. so for example, i notice when i have peopleon the show, that they'll often do exactly what i'm doing or face me in a certain way. and i do that deliberately to make peoplecomfortable most of the time. i don't really care about how they sit, ijust want them to feel good. but i do find it that it's very hard to resistthat because you actually want to create comfort physically with somebody if you have rapportwith them. and of course if you don't, then it becomesa whole different ball game as i cross my leg, right?
is this something you do consciously now,or is this something that is so autopilot for you that it just happens? the pacing is conscious but it's also, youknow, the details of it are somewhat automatic. it's like anything you learn, it just becomespart of you. it's not something you think to apply. but if i'm meeting a new person, i'm verymuch thinking, "what -- you know, how can i make this a good situation?" and i think the people who have high emotionalintelligence tend to do at least some elements of this almost automatically.
i think it's because people with high eq oftenare trying to gain rapport with other people, and one of the -- a great way to do that istypically to pace and lead, or at least to pace. that would make sense. that would be a good tool. and so this just happens for you automaticallyin a lot of ways. yeah, i mean, i'm always looking for the wayto match somebody when i first meet them. what elements are there of matching? body language?
are you talking about verbal and nonverbalcommunication, eye contact? yeah it's everything. so it's from the physical to the emotionalto the specific way you word things. the best example, this is straight from nlphypnosis training. if somebody uses, let's say a lot of war analogies,like, "oh i jumped on a hand grenade, we have to take that hill," any number of war analogies-- if you also do that, they'll feel more comfortable with you. they won't know why; they'll just think, "yeah,this is a good guy." when i was in college and i started learningthis stuff, i started to do it with everybody
a lot. and what would happen was, if i were drinking,which i don't do that much of anymore, i would get into a cab with, say, a driver from samoa. and towards the end of the ride, my girlfriend,after we got out of the car would go, "okay, did you do that on purpose?" and i would say,"what are you talking about?" and my friends are all in the back with mygirlfriend and they go, "we thought that guy was going to get mad. you talked with the same accent as him, samecadence, we thought you were imitating him." and you know, just because my calibrationwas so far off, because i'd had four beers
or something like that -- gosh. but the person never noticed. the person never noticed. you can pace people in the most obvious ways and they do not notice. in fact, for practice, i was working my dayjob in a big corporation at the time. and they would tell us to sit across fromsomebody in a meeting and, you know, do the pacing.
where if they're like this, you do this. the exact -- the clunky, precise mirroring-- -- of body language. and then you change, and then you do thisand you watch them do this just immediately. same process as a yawn. you know a yawn makes everybody yawn. why does that happen? do you know why that's contagious? i've read about it.
but there's a reason, right? i think there's -- there is, i just -- -- an actual reason, right? i actually don't know. i wasn't testing your knowledge. at the art of charm, our live programs, weteach a lot of special forces and intelligence guys. and one of the tricks that i'd found a longtime ago, and i'm sure i'm not the first person
to come up with this was, if -- it's a countersurveillance technique, where if you're sitting down and you think, "is this person payingundue attention to me?" if you can get a very real yawn going, which you often can by tweakingwith your jaw, and you see them yawn -- it's not a guarantee. because often people are seeing us out oftheir peripheral vision and it has nothing to do with their focus. but if you can do it a few times, and theydo it each time, you start to get the feeling that, "that guy right there's not readingbecause every time i yawn, he's yawning," and it's so involuntary.
and if you get really good, you can see theirjaw muscles tighten when they try to hold that yawn in. and that's been pretty effective, at leastin some scenarios. or it's just a good gimmicky thing to teach. but we've had good results with things likethat. so i love your example of watching the jawtighten. one of the things you learn from hypnosis,and apparently you learned the same stuff, is that detailed observation. looking for very small changes and skin tone,muscle tone, you know, posture and all those
things. but i was going to ask you, my observation afterlearning these skills, is that you can detect lying real easily. really? oh, have you found that in your own life thatyou're the one in the room who can tell some -- if somebody's lying? it depends. actually, i would say i probably should bebetter at it than i am.
but i tend to, in many ways, over think thatsituation. when i finally get my conscious mind out ofthe equation as much as possible, then i'm much better at it. all right, let me give a demonstration foryour listeners -- oh, great! -- of a lie versus the truth. so ask me twice, "are you the murderer?" andi'll give you two different answers and see which one is obviously the lie. so ask me if i'm the murderer.
are you the murderer? where did you get that information? who told you i'm a murderer? all right, now ask me again. what the hell are you talking about? no. i'm not a murderer. i don't even know what you're talking about. which one of those was the lie?
well, this is all dependent on whether ornot you've actually killed someone. crosstalk so let's assume you haven't. i would say the second is the most authentic,more immediate reaction. yeah, so the person who says, "what is yourevidence?" is always the liar. because if you have good evidence, then maybethey have to confess and they better just do it in the best possible way or just startrunning. and if you don't have good evidence, maybeyou just a got lucky guess and they can stick with their lie.
so the liar always asks you about the sourceof your evidence. the person who didn't murder anybody, doesn'tneed to ask. because there was no evidence. or they assume, "the justice system will proveme innocent." because that works every time. that works every time. i think that there's a lot of truth to that. i'm sure some people are better liars thanothers. we know the body's really -- it's tough toget your body to lie in concert with your
mouth. people who do that well win awards on stagesin front of millions of people. my old boss who taught interrogation to policeand military gave me a really good trick which was, if you ask somebody who's guilty whatshould happen to the person who gets caught perpetrating a particular crime, they usuallystart rationalizing. "well you know, it depends how badly was theperson beaten up, you know? because if they just got their stuff stolen,they weren't hurt, then maybe we're a little more lenient." whereas the normal innocent person just goes,"i don't care.
hang him, shoot him, i don't give a crap,"because it has nothing to do with them.-- it has nothing -- -- and they know it. so their emotional reaction is total indifferenceor super harsh punishment because they're not that kind of person. can you imagine being that guy's kid? yeah, yeah. it would just be terrible. it would be tough.
he was a parent. so we'll -- i'll have to get back in touchand se how his now teenage kids are doing or if they've since been locked in the basementfor life. so pacing and leading involved matching people,creating a bond with them. can you give us some examples of trump doingthis in things that we've seen or we'll be able to see on youtube? yeah, primarily the emotional stuff. so he goes hard on the immigration thing,because people are afraid, hard on terrorism, because people are afraid of that.
but he'll also quickly change if he needsto. if he's made a mistake, like he said somethingabout abortion -- maybe there should be a penalty for the woman who seeks an illegalabortion. and you know, if he didn't know anything aboutpolitics, and he was new to it, right, it was almost reasonable because he was justlike, "and, well, people commit crimes, they should be punished." but it turns out that is a special case inwhich it just makes that the doctor is the -- the only one you punish. so he'll sometimes change.
but when you see him with his extreme, youknow, anchor, i call it. his extreme emotional anchor. he's getting everybody to not only imaginethe extreme, so that when he moves to the middle it doesn't look so extreme. he does that all the time. and he talks about. he says, "i do that." but it's also emotionally bonding with people. so at -- really every one of his policieshas an emotional hook to it.
how is it different from just flip flopping,right? because if he's pushing us in one directionand then goes, "actually, just kidding, we're going to go over here." if it's not somebody who's a master persuaderor a hypnosis trained person, it just looks like they're changing their mind because it'sconvenient. maybe there's an example that i can't thinkof, but with trump i've only seen him on the far end of the spectrum and just sort of movein the spectrum. i've never seen him go to the other side. is there an example of this?
uh, you know-- i should have come armed withone. i think i was mostly looking at things like,"the wall. well, maybe we'll do a fence. no, we're going to have a wall now." i mean it just keeps constantly bouncing around. well let's talk about that. i love -- this is one of my favorite examples,the wall. so when he first started saying, "wall, wall,wall," everybody said, "it can't be a solid wall the entire way.
maybe some fences and drones and water hazards." sounds like a mini golf course. and at one point he said that, "oh yeah, mightbe different solutions in different places." but he rapidly and wisely, went back to theincorrect statement that it's going to be a wall. now here's why. the incorrect statement makes you talk aboutit all the time. and the stuff you focus on just becomes moreimportant to you because it's the only thing you've been talking about.
so this whole wall thing, the whole immigrationthing -- before he ran, i didn't even know it was a big issue. i thought it was an issue but not really thebiggest one. but now it feels like it's the biggest issuejust because he made it so. it's so important in our minds. but the wall, when he says, "it's a wall. it's a big beautiful wall." jordan;it's a great wall, if you will. yeah and it'll have a door.
you can picture it. but he didn't give you so many details thatyou can't picture the wall you want to see. so everybody's seen the wall they want tosee. it's incredibly visual. compare that to, "well, we need border security,in a variety of ways. each section will have its own solution thatmatches the section." and our eyes are glazing over. concept, concept, where's my picture? give me a picture.
trump gives you a picture every time. and he does it at the cost of being wrong. meaning, it's not going to be a solid wallthe whole way. he said it won't. everybody says it won't. that's a hundred percent true. but he still says it's true. and it's the wrongness that actually keepsyou thinking about it and, "ah it's not a solid wall."
and of course, the term "great wall" is justa hat tip to the big wall that everybody knows and has known since they were a kid. right? right, and you know, contrast is always animportant thing, right? so if you can you know, get the right contrast,you can sell anything. so people who are saying, "we can't possiblybuild a wall." but if he calls it "the great wall" and youthink of the great wall of china, well, they were doing that stuff -- did they have thewheel yet when they built the -- when they built that?
i would hope so because i've been there andit's amazing. but they were sticking these rocks togetherwith, i believe, rice gruel. and it's still there. i mean the dang thing's still there. it's incredible. there are buildings in san francisco thathaven't been around nearly as long that are in worse states of repair than the great wallof china in certain places. so it's a good thing to pair yourself withthe people who are wondering if we have the wherewithal to build a wall.
yeah, we can build a wall. we just have to make it a priority if we care. you write on the blog there may be an objectivereality in our world, but our brains did not evolve to be able to see it. this is fascinating. can you tell me about this? so this is not based on science; this is basedon sort of a commonsensical look at things. evolution doesn't care about your feelings. it doesn't care about the details; it doesn'tcare what shirt you're wearing.
it just cares if you create more of you, right? so winning, in an evolutionary sense, is justbeing able to make more of you than other animals are making more of them. there's no part of that that required us tobe right all the time. or even much of the time. all we need is a consistent view of the worldthat fits. so the example i like to use is that if youbelieve you are reincarnated from a tibetan monk, and i believe that my prophet flew toheaven on a horse, we're not living in the same reality.
but we can both go to the grocery store, bothbuy our groceries, have a conversation, go out for a drink. none of it matters. so it turns out that you can have entire weirdfantasies in your head that usually don't matter. if you look at the country now, or right afterthe election, it immediately causes cognitive dissonance of the people who lost and theystarted thinking that they're literally living in a -- in 1930s germany and that hitler hadjust been elected. and this is real.
i mean they were actually living in this hallucinationthat the world had fallen apart and this is the worst thing. the people that won, just thought, "hey wegot some policies we like." right, finally, yeah. but we share the same highways, we're allliving, we can all reproduce. it just didn't matter. it does seem that every election cycle, ifi look back at really old writing -- it's hard to find this stuff, but if you look,you find that when obama was elected, "oh, my god, it's the antichrist."
before that, when bush was elected, "thisis going to be a police state." it's the same fatalistic crap, it just hasa slightly different meme, a different picture, or now people are talking about it on snapchatwhereas before they were talking about it on usenet. i remember, i think it was three years intothe obama presidency and i was talking with an older gentleman and he mentioned that obamawas a muslim. i said, "now you don't really mean that youthink he's actually a practicing muslim." and he said, "yeah, it's well known. he's actually a muslim."
and i had to, you know, go to the internetand show him that wasn't true. but -- and you were able to prove to this person,from the internet, that that was not the case? i don't know if he changed his mind or not-- i'm pretty sure -- -- he probably -- i'm pretty sure you're pissing into the windthere, scott. yeah, that may have been a waste of time. but the point is, his world of living in a-- in what looked like a, you know, caliphate
forming in the united states, was just purefantasy. but it didn't stop him from reproducing oranything else. so essentially, all we need is a model that'sloosely tied to a few pillars somewhere on the shoreline. other than that, we can bounce around allwe want, in between the constraints -- -- and we'll survive just fine. and you see it all the time when people goon pharmaceutical drugs. somebody will have one personality and oneway of looking at the world and either they're afraid or whatever it is.
you give them the drug, you check back ina week, the drug works, they have a different personality, and the world is different tothem. the whole world looks different. all the cause and effect looks different. i mean it's completely upside down. but they can still function. better, actually, because if the drug worked... so yeah, we don't really need any kind ofsense of actual reality in order to survive. it just was never necessary.
we didn't evolve to have it. and so we're essentially run by social programming,cultural programing, and our emotional filters as to how we perceive cause and effect then. beyond that -- well a lot of variables bumping those around,but yes. yeah, sure. also at the bottom of your blog post, everypost, says, "you might enjoy reading my book, either because you vote or you don't." or, "you might like reading my book becausekittens are so cute."
is this the copy machine effect, where youjust use the word "because" and then everything after that is irrelevant? so the copy machine effect you're referringto, robert cialdini's book -- -- influence, in which he talks about whenyou use the word because, it almost doesn't matter what you say after because; peopleregister it as a reason. and if you have a reason, well i guess i'llgive you what you want. you've got a reason. so yes, i actually have been using nonsensereasons because i talk about that effect in my blog so that people who get there knowexactly what i'm doing.
so it's both funny to them because they seeit in context, but it also works. people have been telling me that, "damn itthat actually worked!" "i bought your book because of this." so i tested the copy machine effect and it's disturbing how effective this thing reallyis. i did it in the exact same context -- well,sans coffee machine or copy machine -- -- i went to chipotle, which is the modernday coffee shop, kinko's, whatever. "hi, can i cut in front of you because i havea scooter?" i literally just had a mini razor scooterwith me.
"oh, sure!" and very few people would go, "why would thataffect the need for you to get in?" i think one person went, "what does a scooterhave anything to do with it?" and i went, "ah, i'm just kidding." and then he went, "what, i'm trying to figureout -- you can go ahead of me, i just wondered why the scooter has anything to do with it." so it still worked! it still worked! it still worked even though the guy went,"scooter?"
i picked dumber and dumber reasons that weremore arbitrary and i even tested not picking a reason until it came out of my mouth, whichforces ridiculous things to come to the surface. one of the ways that even before i'd readabout it in the book, is you always have this awkward situation about who picks up the check. and so, especially if you're a guy, you know,there's a little more social pressure. and so i'll have these situations where youknow you go to dinner and you're thinking, "okay, in this situation, it's sort of a tie. i could pick up the check, the other personcould." sometimes you want to be the one who picksit up because it's better to be the one who
does than the one who didn't. yes. if it's sort of a tie. definitely. you just feel a little better. and so here's the way i always win the tie. i will come up with a fake because beforedinner. it'll be something like this. "i'll pay because you drove."
or, "i'll pay because it's your birthday." or, "i'll pay because you had a bad day." "i'll pay because you had a success in thatcontract that we were just talking about." and it doesn't matter what you say. after the word because, people go, "oh, thankyou." and they'll put their wallet away. but if you don't say that, if you say, "letme get it," you'll be there all day. now it's in a constant -- now you're fightingabout it. aw!
the only thing that wouldn't work would probablybe some sort of negative connotation like, "i'll pay because i heard your business isdoing terribly." yeah, here -- "i'll pay because i heard your book is notdoing so well." "i hear you're a cheap bastard. let me get this." "nobody likes you." i love, "i'll pay for this one, you get thenext one." because often times it's somebody that you're-- maybe you're not going to see for a long
time. you're not going to remember this and norshould you try. don't do that. "remember when i paid last time and said youwould get the next one? you're up, buddy." but i do -- i love the because -- the copymachine effect, the because technique if we can coin that. it's so representative of what our minds do,which is just kind of accept any reason given to justify the previous request.
and this is almost universally applicable. yeah, that one and the mcgurk effect. you may be familiar with that -- -- if not, i'll tell you about it -- are thetwo things that are simplest to explain with the most profound like changes in your lifeforever. so the mcgurk effect, if i'm saying it right,is the observation that --well, i'll just tell you what the experiment was. they have somebody just say the words, "bah,bah, bah." b-a-h, like a -- like a sheep.
and they just show the lips going, "bah, bah,bah," then they keep that tape on, the same words, "bah, bah, bah," except they do a closeupof the same person's lips, except he's forming the letters that would have said, 'fa.' "fa, fa, fa." your brain instantly translates 'bah' to 'fa'in real time while you know it's a trick, while you know that the word is 'bah.' they tell you. and all it is is a visual, completely changesyour sensation to a hallucination. and it's instant.
and you can go back and forth as many timesas you want, as long as you're showing the lips going fa, fa, fa, you'll hear fa, eventhough that's not what it is. and when you see that, you can't unsee that. how quickly the brain is reprogrammed andfooled, even when you know what the trick is, every part of the trick, there's nothingabout the trick you don't understand and it immediately works. why does this work because it -- it wouldmake sense to me if we learned speech by reading people's lips and talking, but blind peoplelearn how to speak fine all the time. i'll tell you why it works.
it's because the visual persuasion just isso powerful. it overpowers the -- -- the auditory persuasion. yeah, if there's one thing that people couldtake away from this whole thing, is that if you're describing things in a visual way,and someone isn't, you're going to win. it's just that powerful. that's a really good takeaway. the mcgurk effect. yeah i think it's m-c-g-
we'll have to google that and throw it inthe show notes. you mentioned also in your blog, in the news,that google's trying to dehypnotize potential isis recruits by manipulating what contentthey see when they try to search for pro-isis have you been following this at all recently? well, i suspect there's a lot going on inthat regard. both in and outside the government. so yeah, i would imagine that the governmenthas contacted the search engines to serve up the kinds of things that would help thenational security. i don't have any details on that.
at one point i did have sort of a connectioninto that world, but i didn't really follow up on it. i think that having a master persuader, trump,in the white house, is probably the only way isis could be defeated. because if you think about it, war itselfand killing people, is just persuasion. you're not trying to kill every single personon the other side. you're trying to kill enough of them to persuadethe others to stop fighting. so war is persuasion. trump just has another weapon that isn't just,you know, military.
he can frame things differently. and i think you're going to see a lot happeningin that regard. you may never know it happened, but i thinkyou'll see it. take, for example, trump's idea of these safezones in syria. that's -- on the surface, it's just a wayto keep people safe and separate the bad guys from the good people, but it's really persuasion. because think what's going to happen whenall the fighters are on one side and the women and children have been filtered out to thesafe spaces and they can't get to them. what are you fighting for when all the womenare gone?
just think about that -- -- from a persuasion perspective. they've still got all the weapons, they'vegot all the anger, they've got all the religious reasons, but all the women are gone. or enough of them are gone that, you know,the average person has no access to mating. when you take it down to mating, now you can'tmate. i think that's pretty powerful persuasion. i think you throw your gun away at that point. yeah, all you've got is this sweaty guy nextto you that's also hungry.
yeah, let's not get into that but -- yeah, yeah -- that's a whole other can ofworms. that might be persuasive enough for some folks. you do mention that google, facebook, theinternet, things like that are already kind of -- take our political choices and evenour free will away. i would love to hear more about that in thecontext of persuasion and things like that because -- and we have seen that things likefacebook, even when they're not trying to be biased, the algorithms still filter forthings that we click 'like' on, which are things that we agree with and shows us moreof that so we can end up segregating ourselves
into these little bubbles which inform ourpolitical choices as well. which is why everybody who voted for trumpthinks, "the whole country must have voted for this guy" -- -- and everybody who voted for hillary thinks,"who in the heck voted for this guy? how did this even happen?" because of what they're seeing, in a largepart of the media, and especially social media. yeah, i've been testing that with some ofmy liberal friends who will love to send emails to criticise what's happening or what washappening. and i just simply asked them, "are you familiarwith, say project veritas or anything that
is well known on the right?" you know, "have you even heard it?" forget about whether you agree with it. forget about whether you think it's pertinent. "have you even heard it?" and it's shocking the things that i thinkare just common knowledge are only common knowledge on one side. and i'm pretty sure that, you know, the sameblindness works both ways. it's not a one way thing, but it certainlytells you that reason, if it ever had a role,
it's certainly less now. and i think it's becoming easier and easierbecause our brains do look for facts to back up our existing beliefs. that's not new to anybody who's been watchingor listening to the art of charm for any period of time. however, now it's so much easier to find factsthat fit our narrative when we're essentially training computers to then train us that thosefacts are so easy to access that they show up everywhere whether we want them to or not. by the way, there's something way bigger thanjust influencing politics going on and it
comes down to the nature of the human being. free will, in my view of the world, is nothingbut an illusion. our brains are subject to the rules of, youknow, cause and effect and the rules of physics, so a certain number of inputs, for a certaincondition at a certain time is only going to give you one output. we have an illusion that we're deciding things,but science has also done a pretty good job that that's not the case. in fact our rational faculties don't evenfire until we've done things in some cases. that's a recent discovery, is it not?
i was reading a lot of news about this inthe past couple -- now we're both straightening up. these damn chairs, or you're very persuasive. i went first, i'm just -- that's -- no, i know you did, that's why ihad to call it out. because i'm like, "dang, that looks more comfortable. oh, but now everybody's going to think i didit because of you." we've seen a lot of brain science recentlywhere they're actually able, through i think fmri, to find that they can predict, withina few milliseconds or seconds before somebody
does something, that their brain had alreadydecided, subconsciously, to take that action. i first heard that in a hypnosis class. i heard that the science had already discoveredthat in hypnosis class in the '80s. maybe now they just have more proof that that'sthe case. i think that better -- because of the betterimaging and stuff like that. it wasn't new to me, but it's certainly gettingmore attention. well we know, and again, things we teach atthe art of charm all the time, rationalization of behavior is kind of a cornerstone of persuasion,influence, talking with robert cialdini on this show before.
any time you can get somebody to take an actionfirst, you can change their belief. even if the action is seemingly unrelatedto the belief, you can get people to then wrap their beliefs around that action nicely. i mean if you can get -- and this is for goodor bad -- if you can get someone to go to the gym, even if it's just to pick up a powerbar for a snack for me, you can get them to work out that much more easily the next timethey walk in there. i mean, there's all kinds of crazy thingsthat our brains will do because, as you mentioned, we're evolved to simply wrap ourselves intothat bubble. and now, so right now, people are programingcomputers and software and then those things
are programing humans. so your fitbit, your search engines, and allthat. so it still seems like humans are affectingother humans, they're just using this tool in between. but we're very close to the point where themachines will make those decisions themselves. so imagine -- and this is not science fictionvery far away. imagine you've got a few more sensors on yourbody. you know, just normal stuff that we couldalready do, and the machine says, "hey, you're a little dehydrated.
take a drink." well, the first few times it does that, you'regoing to say, "well, i might. i might not. it's inconvenient. i don't want to walk over there." but as you continue to follow the suggestionsof the machines, you'll find they work because they're all based on science. they've studied, they know you need this. eventually it won't be a choice anymore.
on some level, you could force yourself notto have the drink -- but it would require a lot of willpower. why would you hurt yourself? so your free will is going to be -- basicallythe illusion is going to disappear, i think, in our lifetime. then we will actually feel like we're justsort of going along with the plan because the machines are telling us what to do, andwhere to go, and when to do it, and we're just sort of doing it. do you have a problem with that type of guidanceand persuasion because -- just to bring back
the comment you made earlier, "well, i straightenedup first." we almost don't want to admit that we're underany sort of influence, even though it's completely normal, completely human -- -- and we're doing it to other people deliberately;we don't want it done to us. yeah, ego is the enemy. another persuasion -- important element isthat if your ego is making your decisions, then they're just all going to be bad, right? so the more you can -- you can tell yourselfthat ego is just a problem and not a thing to protect.
you know, i see it as a defect. any time ego crawls in when i don't want it,it's a defect. but i also think it's a tool, because i sometimeswill amp up my ego because it makes my physiology -- -- change. when you act confident, you know this is basicpersuasion -- if you stand up straight, if you do the victory pose, your body immediatelychanges to match what you're doing physically and what your mental state is. you can change your health, your performance,and everything else by manipulating your ego.
but if you start thinking your ego is sortof important and you should bow to it, like if it's embarrassed about something, you shouldn'tdo that thing. if i'm embarrassed by something, i do thatthing. sure, that's the idea. that's how you grow, right? i think somewhere along the line, and i wantto say probably somewhere in puberty at least for me and for guys in general -- we go fromour ego being something that's used to protect us to us protecting our ego -- -- and everything that happens after thatis a freaking disaster.
an absolute disaster. yeah, you can actually look at people whoare successful and i think the people who can manage their ego the best, almost alwaysdo better. you find that because then it becomes a nonconsideration when they're trying to get somebody else. for example, our persuasion context. if you're trying to get somebody else to dosomething, and you have a choice between doing exactly what needs to get done in order forthem to do that, or you have to somehow damage your ego, you often end up fighting againstyourself and you do the wrong things.
which is unfortunately why sociopaths areso good at what they do, in many ways, because they are completely unafraid to just ignoreeverything beneficial and negative about their own ego, if it's going to get a desired result. and then after that, they'll get their egoback tenfold by essentially getting one over on their victim. and we find that those people are highly effective. in part because they are able to just separatethemselves from that ego for just long enough to manipulate the heck out of somebody ina very dastardly way often enough and get it done.
that's why accusations of narcissism, whetherit's trump or me or anybody else, are somewhat missing the point, that there is a positiveamount of narcissism. you know, healthy good feeling about yourself-- that just makes you more effective. and then there's too much that just makesyou a jerk who can't see the world clearly. if you know the difference between those twostates, it's pretty useful to be a little bit narcissistic. just enough. just narcissistic enough. that might be the title of this episode.
so what are you working on now? well i'm writing a book. it's going to be called, "win bigly." you can imagine what that's about. but it's about -- it's mostly about persuasion. but the context is the election. i also have a startup called the whenhub andwe can tell stories with time. so it's a platform for telling any kind ofstory about things that happened in the past or schedules of the future in a visual way.
again, it's visual persuasion. so instead of a texty little calendar, youcan have, you know, video and pictures and graphs and maps and stuff. and we will link to all that of course inthe show notes as well as your book.
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