Manipulation, Solved

You’ve probably lied to someone today. You also probably think you lie less than everyone else. Welp, I have some bad news. We all manipulate, we all get played, and sometimes, the smarter you are, the easier you are to con. In this episode, Drew and I get into what manipulation is, why everyone does it, and how to keep from getting fooled. We tell the story of how Freud’s nephew turned bacon into a doctor-approved breakfast, and how the TSA spent nearly $1 billion training officers to spot liars, with nothing to show for it. We walk through the one test that shows when persuasion crosses into manipulation, and the tactics advertisers, propagandists, and con artists have been running on you for a century. Then we cover why skeptics make some of the easiest marks and the only defense with serious evidence behind it. We also spend a good chunk of time on the manipulator you know best (or least)... yourself. You can’t fully escape influence, and you might not want to. But once you know the playbook, you’ll spot it, even when it’s coming from inside the house. Get your free Manipulation guide: https://mrk.mn/bpxozoh3 CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: Are You Being Manipulated Right Now? 00:05:21 CHAPTER 1: Everybody Manipulates (The Water We Swim In) 00:11:14 How to Spot a Psychopath (It's Not What You Think) 00:18:42 We're All Manipulators: The Social Brain Hypothesis 00:21:50 The 6 Manipulation Tactics Couples Use 00:32:11 White Lies & Subconscious Manipulation 00:37:57 The Spectrum of Manipulation 00:43:27 Why We Believe Our Own Bullshit 00:52:58 The "Virtuous Victim" Red Flag 00:57:46 Is Self-Help Manipulation? 00:59:01 Can You Actually Spot a Liar? 01:11:55 CHAPTER 2: The Morality of Manipulation 01:21:15 The Murderer at the Door 01:29:59 Nudges: Is Good Manipulation Okay? 01:43:12 Kant vs. Machiavelli: The Angel and Devil on Your Shoulder 01:54:19 Family Secrets: When Is Lying to Protect Okay? 02:05:37 Consent: What Kind of Support Do People Want? 02:14:21 Power, Parenting & Manipulation 02:27:50 CHAPTER 3: The Practice of Persuasion 02:39:32 Robert Cialdini's 6 Principles of Influence 02:40:52 Principle 1: Reciprocity 02:45:16 Principle 2: Commitment & Consistency 02:49:57 Principle 3: Social Proof 02:56:29 Principle 4: Authority & the Milgram Experiments 03:02:39 Principle 5: Liking 03:04:09 Principle 6: Scarcity 03:10:25 Advanced Manipulation Tactics: Anchoring, Framing, and the Exposure Effect 03:23:18 CHAPTER 4: How to Resist Manipulation 03:28:35 Crypto, Madoff & Complex Schemes 03:33:30 The Teeth-Brushing Experiment 03:44:22 Practical Defenses Against Manipulation 03:51:50 Why You Need Diversity of Thought 03:57:47 Check Your Own Emotions 04:00:21 Conclusion: Living in the Age of Manipulation Check out our sponsors AG1: Visit https://drinkag1.com/solved and get a FREE Immune Support Bundle with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. Plaud: Get 22% OFF with code MANSON22 — before the Black Friday rush! Exclusive offer: November 4–19 only using my link: https://www.plaud.ai/manson | Available on Amazon as well: https://amzn.to/4zfE0pq MacroFactor: Start your 14 day free trial at https://app.macrofactor.com/mfmark and use code MARK Quo: Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://quo.com/solved Cozy Earth: Cozy Earth's biggest sale of the year ends December 3rd. Head to https://cozyearth.com and use code SOLVED for 35% off home and sleepwear. Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/SOLVED. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Quince: Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns at https://quince.com Tello: Check out Tello Mobile using my link and start saving today: https://solved.deals/tello Notion: Learn more about how Notion can support your business, at https://notion.com/solved Momentous: Head to https://livemomentous.com code: SOLVED for up to 35% off your entire first order. Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Main character energy only. Free trial at https://shopify.com/solved Purpose: Start for free at https://mark.deals/purpose ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG:⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG:⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter:⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So I want to start this episode off with a question, which is, am I manipulating you right now? What if I told you that this episode is potentially life-changing? My team and I spent months researching and working on it, that some of the ideas and implications within it could have profound moral impact on how you see the world and every relationship that you have? Am I manipulating you now? Now, I realize that I'm just a podcaster in your ear, but seriously, I've been researching and writing about human psychology for almost 20 years. And what I realized prepping for this show is that manipulation and the ways that we try to influence each other is maybe one of the most under-discussed topics that impacts every single moment of our lives. And sure, maybe you already kind of get that, but the fact that these concepts are not

• 0:43Speaker 00

  widely taught or discussed has started to shock me. How about that? Was that manipulative? Did it feel manipulative? Because everything I said was true, but at the same time, I used six persuasion techniques on you in sequence. The curiosity gap, an authority marker, superiority flattery, social proof, strategic self-deprecation, manufactured urgency. But like I said, none of it was a lie. I didn't fabricate a single thing that I said. We really did spend more time on this episode than any other episode that we've done this year. I really do think this is one of the most under-discussed practical topics in this industry. I really have been studying this stuff for nearly 20 years.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I did not deceive you about any of that, but I am also manipulating you because like every good podcast host, I want you to keep listening. I want to intrigue you. I want to create curiosity. I want to create excitement in you. And here's the really crazy part. You want me to do it too. You don't click on a podcast like this to be lectured for hours or bored to death. You want your attention to be swept away into a fascinating narrative. You want to feel that pull of curiosity. You want to feel the hours bleed away like they were minutes. To an extent, you want to be manipulated. You want me to manipulate you. Today, we are solving manipulation. And the first thing to know is that manipulation is not something that happens to gullible

• 2:09Speaker 00

  people at the hands of obvious villains. The science on this is extremely clear. And what it says is far stranger and more uncomfortable than the story that you and I have always been told. Because we are all manipulators, and in some contexts, we all seek to be manipulated. The moral question then is not who does the manipulation, but to what extent and for what ends. I think this episode is going to blow your mind. And no, I'm not just selling you right now. Today, we're going to be talking about a lot of fascinating and important topics, including psychopaths, what they are, how to spot them, how one researcher's understanding of them

• 2:54Speaker 00

  kicked off a whole identity crisis around human interaction. We're going to talk about why law enforcement, psychologists, and body language experts are just as bad at detecting lies as you and I are and what that means for us. We're going to talk about the fact that not only do you manipulate others, but you also manipulate yourself and why. We're going to discuss what Emmanuel Kant, Niccolo Machiavelli, and a $6,500 payment from the sugar industry have in common and why it matters for your marriage. How's that for a spicy hook? We're going to talk about the experiment where people who have never met you, armed with nothing but a checkbox, shape your medical decisions more effectively than your own stated values do. We'll talk about how Sigmund Freud's nephew turned bacon into breakfast and cigarettes

• 3:38Speaker 00

  into feminism, and how he built an industry whose entire business model fails one ethical test that this episode is going to teach you. We're going to talk about the only evidence-based defense against manipulation that actually works and why it's been ignored largely for 50 years and why it costs you about five cents. This and much, much more. We're going to walk through how manipulation actually works, where the ethical lines fall according to philosophers who genuinely disagree with each other, how entire industries and governments have weaponized the science of manipulation against us, and what you can concretely do about all of this. Because once you understand manipulation, it stops feeling like you need to identify and avoid the bad people.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  It stops feeling like you need some supernatural ability to read faces and spot liars. And it starts to feel like something that you can understand well enough to manage in your own life, beginning with the manipulator that you know the best, or maybe the least, which is yourself. I'm the three-time number one New York Times bestselling author, Mark Manson, and this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and a man who thinks massages are weird but could really go for a belly rub right now. Where do these come from?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  You don't write this. I don't write, I don't know where these come from. This is solved. The most comprehensive podcast in the world, where every episode, we aim to solve one problem in your life, once and for all. Today, we are solving manipulation, what it is, where the line falls, why do we all do it? How do we defend against it? And why it actually might be a beneficial thing at times. So I actually want to start this episode by talking about madness and psychopaths. But to begin, we need to go way back. I want to go back to the ancient Greeks because I think one thing that is interesting about

• 5:34Speaker 00

  manipulation and lying in general, misleading people, is that it has generally universally been considered wrong, cross-culturally, historically. So whether you're looking at Christianity, Islam, the Eastern traditions, lying and manipulation is pretty much universally considered a bad thing. Philosophically, if you go back as far as Plato, Plato saw manipulation as a failure of a person to manage their own emotions. It's basically a situation where emotion overtakes reason. In Plato's framework, he had this idea of a tripartite soul. So you had kind of your reason, you had your impulses and animalistic desires, and then you had your emotions.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  And he saw lying and deceit as when somebody is overcome with their emotional urges or their own personal drives, and they allow it to take over their reason. And it is a failure of rationality, essentially. Aristotle's framework treats it pretty similarly. And then, once you get into the Christian tradition, it's just lying is wrong. And if you're lying too much, you probably can't really control your own impulses or urges. So there's this psychological connection between impulsiveness and manipulation. People observe that highly rational people, people with a lot of self-discipline, a lot of self-control, generally are able to be more honest and upfront with others, whereas

• 7:00Speaker 00

  people who are very impulsive, very selfish, very self-indulgent, they tend to be the ones who are the most manipulative. Now, what's interesting is that even as, I mean, as far back as recorded history, people have always observed that there is a certain class of people that are just so fundamentally irrational all the time that they are just kind of disconnected from reality. And they are lying 24/7. They're lying to themselves, they're lying to other people, they are just living in la-la land. And this became known as madness, just craziness. And for mostly human history, these were not seen as people that we should sympathize with or feel sorry for.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  They were seen as pariahs, as people that were problematic to the social order, and they should either be quarantined or punished appropriately. Now, this all started to change around the Enlightenment. And there was a physician by the name of Philippe Pinel in France in the late 18th century, who in many ways is seen as kind of the godfather of psychiatry. He spent a lot of time with asylum patients and people who suffered from mental disorders. And he was kind of the first prominent thinker that argued that we should approach these people with kindness, compassion, and that it's actually through that kindness and compassion that these people are able to get better and have a better orientation towards reality

• 8:25Speaker 00

  and stop behaving so delusionally and so inappropriately all the time. Then in 1801, Pinel made a very interesting observation. He noticed that there were a certain group of people who actually seemed fully rational, completely integrated into society, but made highly irrational antisocial choices, that they could become incredibly violent, they had a propensity to lie and manipulate people, to use people, to control people, to take advantage of people's emotions, that they were in many ways evil, but they weren't crazy. And up until this point, those two things were always associated with one another. The most evil people were also the most crazy.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  They were kind of the cackling, evil genius maniac who was, you know, almost like cartoonish in terms of their personality. Pinel was the first person who came along and said, no, actually, there are some people that are highly rational, highly functional. And just fucking cruel. Now, this observation was picked up a few decades later in England by a man named James Pritchard, and he actually started intentionally seeking out these people to try to understand them a little better. And he noticed a few things. For one, he said, "Not all of them are actually violent. In fact, many of them are just as manipulative and self-serving without being violent. They actually can appear very compassionate on the surface."

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And Pritchard drew a very interesting distinction. Up until that point, it was just known as insanity. Pritchard differentiated moral insanity from actual insanity. So, actual insanity meant people weren't able to reason correctly, they are impulsive, delusional. Under Pritchard's definition, somebody who is morally insane is somebody who can intellectually reason appropriately, but their moral understanding of other human beings, their ability to empathize, consider other people's emotions, is just completely scrambled or nonexistent. Now, nobody really knew what to do with this, and it kind of just sat untouched. The idea wasn't picked up again until 100 years later by an American doctor named Hervey Kleckley. Kleckley worked at a

• 10:32Speaker 00

  mental hospital in the 1930s, and he became fascinated with these cases. There were a number of patients who came in who seemed completely normal, could have completely reasonable conversations with him, who showed no signs of delusions or emotional stress, were very calm and collected, yet had lives that were in total disarray. What struck Kleckley about these people is that they made horrible decisions, and in many cases, they couldn't even really explain why they made the decisions, but they showed no remorse for it whatsoever. In many cases, they could imitate remorse, they could give you a nice speech about how they felt bad, but underneath, they didn't really feel anything at all. So, in 1941,

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Kleckley took a collection of interviews that he did with these patients and put them together into a book called The Mask of Sanity. And this book is kind of the foundational text on what we today consider psychopaths or sociopaths. And in that book, he distilled all of the characteristics down into 16 traits that you see in a psychopath. And these are all the classic ones that we associate with psychopaths today. So, total lack of remorse or shame for their behavior, an absence of nervousness or anxiety, a chronic untruthfulness or insincerity, an inability to empathize or understand other people's emotions, a

• 11:57Speaker 00

  failure to learn from prior experiences, to draw lessons from their mistakes. What's really interesting about Kleckley's work, and the reason that I want to start with psychopaths in a manipulation episode, is because Kleckley really forcefully made the argument throughout all of his work that psychopaths are undetectable throughout daily life. Like, you can't really walk down the street, or go to a dinner party, or sit down at lunch with somebody for an hour, and properly detect that this person is a psychopath, that they have absolutely no empathy or remorse. What concerned Kleckley was how much these people blended into day-to-day society, and how, in many cases, a lot of the people

• 12:42Speaker 00

  in the psychopath's life don't even understand their condition, like, don't realize that this is a person that doesn't feel remorse or shame, that doesn't give a fuck at all about what they feel or anything that they've done. And it's interesting, because towards the end of Kleckley's career, starting in the 1970s and 80s, there were a series of extremely high-profile serial killer cases that kind of swept national media and turned the serial killers into celebrities, the biggest of which was Ted Bundy. And Kleckley himself was called in on a lot of these cases to interview, examine the serial killers, get to know them, make diagnoses about them. And the sad irony about Kleckley is that

• 13:26Speaker 00

  these serial killers, because they were so violent, they were so sadistic, and they were psychopaths, and Kleckley was the one who was called in to verify that they were psychopaths. Ever since, the concept of a psychopath has been merged directly with this kind of awkward, sadistic, compulsive killer who does really fucked up things and is extremely violent in very strange ways. So, across pop culture and the mainstream understanding of manipulative behavior, this completely blew up the main point of Kleckley's work, which was that the most manipulative people on earth are undetectable. They are

• 14:07Speaker 00

  so similar to you and I that you actually could not point them out in a lineup. The truth is that everything you think you know about psychopaths is probably wrong. Our culture and Hollywood have turned psychopath into this highly visible monster, this like very strange antisocial person who is always behaving erratically and doing very evil and conniving and masterminded things to innocent people. And the truth is, is that psychopaths completely blend into the crowd. The vast majority of psychopaths, they're not violent, many of them are not even antisocial, many of them have actually learned very well how to mimic human emotion and empathy to get what they want from others. And so, I

• 14:51Speaker 00

  actually think the most important lesson from psychopaths is not that there are these specifically evil people in the world that are highly manipulative and highly violent that we need to figure out how to avoid, it's actually the opposite. It's that manipulation is so common and so ever-present in our day-to-day lives and in our day-to-day relationships, we actually have to have a better understanding of how these manipulative practices take place, how they're wielded against us, and how we wield them against others. Hold that thought, we will be right back after this. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Now, at home, my health routine feels pretty locked

• 15:32Speaker 00

  in, but the road is where I get tested. Most trips will start the same way. I catch a flight at some ungodly hour, head straight from the airport to a stage, and then try to remember which city I'm in before I get to the mic. Those are the days that I'm so glad that AG1 Next Gen is so easy to pack. One scoop has a multivitamin, probiotics, and greens, and I just mix it in with water and whatever hotel room I'm in. It's formulated to support energy production, and I've noticed that my energy stays steadier on those crazy days. It's also clinically shown to enrich gut microbiome, and I've felt less bloating, which on a long flight is good news, not just for me, but everyone around me. Now, in clinical research, when paired with a proper diet, AG1 helps you meet 94% of your

• 16:14Speaker 00

  nutritional needs, and it's formulated to support a healthy immune system as well. AG1 Next Gen is backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. In an industry where not everyone invests heavily in research, that is really impressive. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/solved and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 K2, with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/solved. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Mark Manson sent you. This episode is brought to you by Plod. So, I get invited to a lot of events and conferences. I go to these events, I meet like 20 different people, I have all these amazing conversations, and then the next day, I don't remember half of the things

• 16:58Speaker 00

  that I talked about. It's a Plod has this amazing little device, it's about the size of a credit card, it magnetically attaches to your phone, you can carry it around, and it takes notes on any in-person conversation you want it to. It's amazing in business environments. So, when you meet that guy who runs the agency that is doing the cool new thing that could be really useful and you want to follow up on, it automatically captures it, it summarizes it, and you can go back and check the notes of the conversation at any time. It's great for in-person meetings to capture those summaries of what was talked about or what the action items are. So, all you do is you tap a simple button and it starts capturing. Now, Plod can spit out a transcript with key insights, next steps, visual infographics. If I need to find specific details weeks later, I can just ask Plod

• 17:42Speaker 00

  what I talked about with my content team back in September, and it will automatically dig through everything and find it for me. And so, when it's finally time to execute on our plans, it's easy to go back and find it. Some of our best episodes started with a throwaway idea while Drew and I were just hanging out in the studio, shooting the shit. Just make sure everybody knows and agrees before you hit record, because obviously, you don't want to get sued. Now, if you want to try out Plod, go to plaud.ai/manson and use the code MANTSON22 for 22% off. Okay, we're back with manipulation.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so, it was really a shame that Kleckley got done dirty like that, right? It was a shame that we missed it, because in the 50s, 60s, even before the 70s and 80s serial killers came along, there were some kind of interesting ideas and research coming out that kind of started to, I guess, tilted towards normalization, even though in the literature, manipulation was still seen as like a deviant behavior.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  For the most part. It wasn't a very normal behavior, it wasn't good people who did it, right? It was these more psychopathic types that the popular culture had in their minds around it. That actually did start to change a little bit, though, in the 50s and 60s. There was this guy, Irving Goffman, in the 50s. He was kind of the first in Western psychology, anyway, to kind of call out like, "Oh, hey, actually, we're all kind of performing. We're all manipulating the image that we put out into the world, what I'm trying to get you to think about me, or you to try to do something. All of it's just social interaction. It's all theater to some degree, right?" Ralph Waldo Emerson has this great quote, he says, "Every man alone is sincere, but at the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy

• 19:22Speaker 01

  begins." Left alone, left their own devices in a vacuum, sure, we're all saints, right? It's only when we interact with each other that all of this manipulative behavior comes out. I mean, that idea really started to germinate in the 50s and 60s in psychology, right? You get to the 70s, and then we tried to get a little more systematic about it. These researchers, Richard Christie and Florence Geis, and they wanted to, they actually came up with like a Machiavellian personality test almost, right? We'll get into the details of what Machiavellianism really is, but suffice to say for now that it's manipulative behavior, just in general. How do you get what you want?

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Right? By manipulating others.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  How do you instrumentalize other people?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  To achieve some other goal?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Right, right. For instance, they had this one game, it was this $10 game, they had three people, they gave them $10 between the three of them, they could divide the money however they wanted to. The two people who agreed on the split would get the money, right? And they gave them this kind of Machiavellian personalities test first, and then they had them play this game. No big shocker, the people who scored high on this Machiavellian personality test gained almost like four times more money than anybody else in it, right? They started to do this like really systematized, like what are these personality types? What is this manipulative behavior? And everyday people, again, these weren't people who were clinically insane or anything like that. These were people off the street.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Random people off the street.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  University students, whatever. These Machiavellian, high Machiavellian types, it wasn't that they could read people's emotions, that they were actually disregarding them altogether. So like in this $10 game, right? It's like, I don't, I don't care if this person's my friend or not, I want the money. That's all there was to it. That, that was the goal, they went after it.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Not to give too much away, but I think one of the biggest surprises for me in prepping for this episode is how much reading other people is not really a thing.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  It's, and it's not, yeah, as we'll see.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's funny, because if you look on social media, there's a lot of content these days about how to spot a liar, how to be, how to guard against manipulation, how to, you know, not be taken advantage of by narcissists and all this stuff. It's funny that a lot of that is just completely misguided. Like, we're actually pretty terrible at reading other people's intentions in general.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And maybe one of the reasons is, is that manipulation is so pervasive, it's everywhere, that you could, you could say anything is manipulative. So any little body language thing you could pick up on, you could turn it into something that's manipulative and it turns out to not mean a whole lot, right? We get into the eighties and research starts to focus on even more kind of like everyday situations, for example, like in your relationship. David Buss, who's a famous evolutionary psychologist, he, he started researching this in the, in the eighties as well. They studied, originally studied 59 couples. They found six really common manipulation tactics that came out of this. Charm, silent treatment, coercion, reason, regression and debasement. Okay. Now, the good news, there's some good news out of this.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  The number one tactic was reason, using reason with your partner to try to get what you want. I wouldn't necessarily call that manipulative, most people wouldn't, right? Charm came in second, alright? So first you try to reason with them, and if that doesn't work, then you try to charm them, okay? So that's maybe one point for, you know, the better interest lover nature, right? What they kind of found though, was that it, it kind of depended on the context of whatever conflict or interaction you were in with your partner, right? If you're trying to make them do something, you're more likely to use charm. If you're trying to get them to stop doing something, there's usually more coercion involved, okay? So again, this is an everyday relationship. You're using some, some form of manipulation in almost every interaction you have with

• 22:58Speaker 01

  the person that you're probably closest with and should supposedly love the most, right?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  I think we should pause for a second.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Because I, I can already, I mean, I'm already feeling it myself. I imagine in listeners, there's already a little bit of resistance building of like, I don't manipulate people I care about. Who the fuck are you to tell me that I'm a manipulative person? I, I think it's probably worth kind of taking a moment and just talking about what is manipulation? Like, what is the definition of manipulation? So it actually comes from a Latin root of manus, which means to handle or like a handful of something. And so in ancient times, the concept of manipulation was like rendering and changing things with your hands is like manipulating this microphone stand, right? Or it's like the way we would change an object to fit our own will. And then at some point, that got transferred on to people, right?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  We manipulate people to reshape them to fit our own will. And of course, all sorts of moral connotations came along with that. The word manipulation, in, at least in the English language, we have a lot of negative connotations around it. Like, there's kind of this implication that if I'm manipulating you right now, it is to take advantage of you in some way, or to get something that I want out of you. Whereas if I'm just trying to influence you, or motivate you, or change you, like, those all have very positive implications. But coming back to Irving Goffman and his argument that we're, we're kind of always performing, he used a lot of extremely basic and simple examples. For example, like saying thank you after somebody does something for you, right?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Or like, uh, you know, if, if you ask me, how, how is my day going? 90% chance I'm going to say, fine, regardless of how it's actually going. There's an intention to kind of meet expectations or keep the peace that is always happening in social circumstances. It requires an extended amount of effort or an important reason to break those social expectations, or break with convention to change your behavior in front of people. So like, in Western culture, we have almost this like pure idea that we should be fully authentic with, with ourselves, we should be honest at all times. I think it was when we did the ego episode, maybe six or eight months ago, we talked

• 25:17Speaker 00

  about how this idea that, that there is a monolithic identity, like there's a single Mark Manson, and I should be Mark Manson in every context. You know, the way I behave with you on camera should be the same way I behave with my mother at Thanksgiving, and the same way I behave with my wife on a Tuesday night. And in Eastern cultures, there's kind of more of a practical understanding that, no, actually, there's many different versions of yourself. And you actually should behave differently in different contexts and different situations. And certain things or conversations that are appropriate at work are not appropriate with your family and vice versa. For some reason, I don't know what it is about what, like the Western lineage, I think we, we struggle with that concept.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  And we see it as manipulative, right? Like, if I have the same conversation with you today that I had with my wife yesterday, and I say something different to you than I said to her yesterday, in a Western mind, that is seen as inauthentic and dishonest. It's seen as manipulative. Whereas I think in other cultures, they would just see that as practical. The point I want to drive home for listeners in this first chapter is that manipulation is practical, and that we all do it all the time for very practical reasons that are not immoral at all. We have social politeness, we have niceties, we do courteous things for each other. If we disagree with somebody, but we don't really want to have a fight about it, we'll like, kind of passively aggressively nudge them in a certain direction.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  We'll discover in later chapters that there's kind of a game theory around all of this, that there are certain things, you know, we tell white lies to keep the peace with people that we care about. All of these things are completely normal and natural. I guess the arc that we're covering here is that for most of human history, dishonesty and lying was seen as this uniquely evil and irrational thing that we should aspire to never do. But modern psychology has gradually and almost reluctantly uncovered over and over again that this sort of manipulation is present in almost all of our interactions, and it is happening all the time.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  You know, not only is it incredibly common and incredibly practical and pragmatic, like you said, it's probably the reason we have the brains that we have. In the eighties, there were some researchers who came up with like the social brain hypothesis, or some of them call it the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, whatever you want to call it. Basically, they, they found this relationship between, especially in primates, the size of the brain and social group and social complexity. For a long time, they thought, oh, it was tool use that, that determined the size of your brain and the complexity of your brain. It's not, it's social complexity.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And so manipulation is one way, is actually the main way that we navigate that social complexity. That takes a lot of brain power too. And so we probably developed these huge brains. One of the main reasons for it anyway, was to be able to gently deceive each other, or manipulate the way we come off in a group. Our standing in, in group, we've talked about how important that is in other episodes too. Like, we need to be able to shape that in some way, shape or form, and manipulation is a very effective way to do that.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  And probably track deception as well.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And tracking it too, that's a big, that's a big, big component of it as well.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Cause it's like, if you, if you deceive me, I need to be able to remember that in future situations.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  You'd be completely ineffective if you didn't remember that, obviously, right? That, part of the definition of manipulation is being able to track that over time. It really is not a disorder. This is where Dunbar's number even comes out of too. We've talked about that in previous episodes as well, but quick refresher. Dunbar's number, it's about 150, which is about the number of relationships you can effectively manage, okay? Any more than that, and you start to, it's, they're not very effectively managed that way. Really, you have about five close friends, 10 good friends, you know, it goes out into concentric circles like that. This is probably where that comes from as well. And again, being able to manage those relationships, track everything you're doing, and there is some degree of manipulation, again, within that. You can only manipulate so much as well.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  So keeping those numbers at manageable levels is something we have to do too. And that's, again, that's probably why we have the brains we have.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  I think this probably gets us nicely into kind of the game theory aspect of this, right? Like, if you look at our evolutionary history, we lived in largely small bands and tribes, and social status was incredibly important for survival. Dependability and trust was incredibly important for survival, right? Like, it's if you and I are out hunting. Woolly mammoths together, like I need to trust that you're actually going to show up and do the thing when you're supposed to do it. And the fact of the matter is that things like gossip, social exclusion, reputational damage, like these things could have life and death impact on certain people. What happens is that you create a situation where, let's say you and I are in a

• 30:11Speaker 00

  tribe together, we disagree about something, but that disagreement can have outsized impact on other people in the tribe. It could like, you know, put everybody's welfare in danger. So instead of you and I actually like physically duking it out, we can find all of these subtle ways to signal to each other the disagreement without actually having overt conflict, right? So this is where you get stuff like passive aggression and, um, and dropping hints and forming alliances, right? It's like, I can, I can go over to Misty and be like, wow, isn't Drew such an asshole? Like, can you believe that he thinks this? And then she like gets on my team. And then it's like, that creates a new dynamic of social pressure on you. So maybe that will manipulate

• 30:55Speaker 00

  you to change your mind in a way that doesn't require actual violent force or violent pressure. And so it's, it's funny, there's a famous quote from Von Clausewitz, and he said that politics is simply an extension of war. And I think you can kind of see this on a very evolutionary level of like, yeah, it's so costly to physically fight people or physically threaten each other that we find all of these manipulations and machinations to influence each other in both subtle and overt ways to get what we want out of each other, because ultimately it produces less risk and downside than just openly fighting about stuff.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. So it's, it's kind of like, uh, if you had like, I don't know, two big bull moose or something like that, right? And they were about to go at it. And a lot of times they will fight physically, but, uh, what they'll do first is kind of like, they'll show off or, you know, grunt or whatever they do, right? Humans are a lot more complex than that though. And we found that it's actually much more productive to engage in these machinations and this manipulation in order for us to still kind of get what we want, but also not have to come to like physical violence for it in a way that would be much more costly. There's an outlet for it still.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Kind of. Okay. That's, that's pretty fascinating.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. There are conscious ways we do this, right? Like, I think, like telling a white lie is kind of the classic conscious way. It's like, you know, if my wife cooks a nice dinner for me and it's not really that great, but she asked me how it is, right? I'm like, oh, it's great. Right? Like I just, I tell that lie because I'm like, I don't want to ruin the evening by having a fight over like this dinner that she spent hours preparing. So there's like the white lie there. That's a very conscious way of doing it. But we also do this very subconsciously, right? Like we're often trying to influence each other in ways that I think in many cases, we're not even aware of. We are just kind of reluctant to be around a certain person or to agree with a

• 32:55Speaker 00

  certain idea. And so we find excuses to like procrastinate or delay doing the thing as kind of a unspoken signal to others that like, hey, this isn't, I'm not really into this, or I'm not really excited about this. And then we hope that other people subconsciously pick up on that signal and say like, okay, yeah, Drew doesn't really want to do this thing. So let's stop bothering him about it.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Here's, here's a subtle one too. It's like, oh no, I, I'll do whatever, right? Like somebody who's very agreeable sometimes, that could even be manipulative in a way.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  You wouldn't know it at all, right?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely. You, you could argue that you're manipulating people into liking you by, by, by being easy. You're suppressing your own desires and interests to keep the peace.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But that, that wouldn't be at a conscious level for most people anyway. Yeah. Interesting.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of manipulation of others is rooted in your manipulation of yourself, right? So I think most people pleasers genuinely think they're happy with whatever. It's because they haven't allowed themselves to have those desires in the first place, right? So that the manipulation actually starts internally with themselves and then it manifests outwardly in their, in their relationships with other people. So related to this, there was a, a cool study that a researcher named Bella DePaulo, uh, did where she had people keep lie diaries. So she had a bunch of people document every single social interaction that they had for an entire week and then go back after the fact and, and analyze whether they said something untrue or not. Young people, college students averaged about two lies a day. Uh, and then working adults averaged about one lie per

• 34:24Speaker 00

  day. Self-serving lies outnumbered white lies two to one.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  We're not quite as innocent as we think. So, so like a self-serving lie would be like, it's something that made you look better.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  As opposed to a white lie that like kept the peace with somebody else and made them look better.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Made them look better. Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  All right.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  The most common thing that people lied about was how they felt, which kind of comes back to this game theory thing, right? It's, it's, it's the classic like, why are you angry? I'm fine. I'm not angry.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  I feel attacked, but also I get it. Um, so hold it. The one, one, one lies for like working adults, two for younger adults. I think that's probably a, I don't know, 10 times too few, I'm gonna guess. This is self-report.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  It's self-reporting, which means that this is probably drastically underreported.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Right. Right. So people report that they lie one or two times a day.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I, I, yeah. And maybe, and maybe a lot of that, like you already have alluded to, is a self deception. Like I don't even know that I'm lying, which we, we can get into that as well. But yeah, I, I find that to be way too low of an estimate.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  What's interesting too, is afterwards in the study, people were asked whether they believe they lied more or less than other people their age. And almost universally, every single person said that they lied less than other people their age, which is, you gotta love humans.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  You gotta love humans. Most of us realize that we do this. You know, we tell the little white lies. We tell little self-serving lies when we think we can get away with it. I think too, that the majority of us recognize that the majority of our manipulation, it's relatively benign. Like it's, these are very small, little momentary insignificant things, like little face-saving things. They're not like having these drastic repercussions on ourselves. And I think the reason why all of us do these things consistently, repeatedly, despite the fact that we know that we do them, is because the downside risk is so asymmetrically large. Like the downside risk of social exclusion or

• 36:21Speaker 00

  the loss of a relationship, for all of us in most situations, it's just easier to keep the peace. It's, it's just easier to like go along with it, you know, don't ruffle any feathers, don't piss anybody off. And there's some, some interesting research around this. Like they, they found that even brief social exclusion by complete strangers in a lab setting increased impulsivity, slowed the subjective sense of time, reduced a sense of meaning, and increased avoidance of self-awareness, uh, in people that were studied. As we've covered in so many episodes, we, we really evolved as social creatures and so much of our wellbeing and day-to-day happiness is derived from the people we surround ourselves with and the quality of relationships that we

• 37:05Speaker 00

  have with those people. And so if we are put in situations where even being honest creates like a 5% chance of massively disrupting a relationship that's important to us, we just fucking lie. From a pure expected value perspective, that lie actually makes a lot of sense and is overall better for social cohesion, both for the relationship, but for the group in general.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So that makes a lot of sense, like in the, in the smaller scale, right? Where you're trying to maintain those relationships and through subtle manipulations, through benign manipulations, as you were talking about. Where we get into trouble, I think, and this is a little foreshadowing for later in the episode, is when that need or that drive for social inclusion kind of gets hijacked, or somebody intentionally is manipulating that, knowingly manipulating that to get you to do things that you might not otherwise do, or even against your best interest.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  I think there's a spectrum of manipulation, right? And I think on the lower end of the spectrum, it is mostly motivated by social inclusion, not disrupting social cohesion. Generally motivations that I think you and I would consider noble, you know, and like generally good. As you move up that spectrum of manipulation, it starts to become more status-seeking, I think, and it becomes more like about power struggle and power games. So I have a good friend and my friend had another good friend who...

• 38:34Speaker 00

  She had known for about 20 years and her good friend, his business recently went bankrupt, went out of business. So he was broke, out of money, in a really tough spot. Unfortunately, my friend worked at a very large corporation and was able to help find him a position. And as soon as he came in, he started really politically manipulating some of the higher ups and over the course of about two years, like pushed her out, pushed her off kind of the career track that she was on in terms of promotions and took the promotions himself. And each time she confronted him about this, he denied it. He said, I don't

• 39:17Speaker 00

  know what you're talking about. I'm just doing the best job I can. But she had picked up signals throughout the workplace that like he had very intentionally kind of maneuvered himself in front of her and manipulated some of her coworkers against her. I mean, she was like very upset about this, not just because of what it did to her career, but also like this person that she trusted and like really felt a lot of loyalty to, you know, it was just betrayed and the loss of the friendship and everything. And so I think, once we start getting up the scale of manipulation, the stakes get much higher, the power that's at play gets higher.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  And then I think at the kind of at the tippy top end, where I think everybody would agree that it is just kind of universally unethical, that's where you start to get into the things with like violent repercussions or like very serious and catastrophic consequences for individuals or large groups of people. But what's interesting is that that same kind of self deception and self justification continues on all the way up the spectrum, or most of the way up the spectrum. So if you talk to somebody who is very Machiavellian, such as my friend of a friend, they will also justify it to themselves. They will also have all sorts of pro-social reasons, justifications for certain things that they said or did. I

• 40:42Speaker 00

  think that self deception is still present. We've covered so many cognitive biases on this show over the years and the propensity and ability for each of us to individually delude ourselves when it's in our best interest is just unmatched.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Boundless.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's absolutely boundless. Don't go anywhere. We're going to take a short break. We've got a lot more coming. This episode is brought to you by MacroFactor. So a while back, I told you that I was using MacroFactor to stop white knuckling my diet and actually figure out what my body was doing. Update, it's going pretty well. And honestly, the way it worked surprised me. The biggest shift was not the number on the scale, although I did lose a few pounds. It was that I stopped guessing about everything. Every week, MacroFactor looked at my actual weight trend and food logs and adjusted my targets based on real data instead of some formula I'd have to fine tune myself. The first few weeks, my maintenance number was way higher than I expected, which explained a lot about why my old flat macro targets never worked. It turns out that I

• 41:41Speaker 00

  wasn't lazy or undisciplined. I was just targeting the wrong macros. The other thing that changed was how I think about tracking. I used to treat logging food like a punishment inflicted on myself for a week before quitting. This time, it felt more like getting feedback from a coach who was actually paying attention. So I stuck with it a lot easier than I normally do. Now, if you've got a goal that you keep almost reaching and then abandoning, this is worth trying out. So click my link in the description below and use the promo code MARK for a 14 day free trial. This episode is sponsored by QUO. Most businesses don't get to fully clock out for the holidays. You've got family in town, your uncle is explaining crypto to anybody who will listen, and a to do list a mile long. Your customers, meanwhile, are still calling. If

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  you take the call, you're getting glared at over stuffing. If you let it ring, that customer is calling your competitor before the cookies. At some point, you're just like, let's [bleep] QUO. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q U O. It's the business phone built so you never miss a call or customer. QUO's AI agent handles calls and texts 24/7. It answers questions, gets the details, and can even text them a link to book an appointment. So the lead gets handled while you're on your second plate and there's a summary waiting for you in the morning. Every call, text, and voicemail lives in one thread, so anyone on your team can jump in already knowing the story. Customers only have to explain themselves once and the sale does not slip through the cracks. It's the number one rated business

• 43:05Speaker 00

  phone on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses. This time of year goes by fast enough, so spend it at the table with family, not under it checking your phone. Money's on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/solved. That's Q U O dot com slash solved. And we're back. Let's get right back into it. I think it's useful to take a moment and actually dig into how most of our manipulation is not rooted in malice or bad intentions or taking advantage of people. A lot of it is just really genuinely us kind of manipulating ourselves, convincing ourselves of our own bullshit, because it is in our best interest and we will be advantaged for

• 43:50Speaker 00

  it and gain from it.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's a few different kind of categories of findings around this too, that are really interesting. It's like, we deceive ourselves. Like, we can't even see ourselves doing this. Like, why would that be? Why would we want to do that? One kind of group of findings kind of falls under this like self deception category. Your self deception really has a job. That job is to help you deceive others, yes, and manipulate others, but it has a very specific kind of function for that. There were these two psychologists, actually, Bill Von Hippel and Robert Trivers. They made the argument that sounds a little bit backwards, is that we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others more effectively, which, I mean, actually checks out when you dig into it just a little bit. The deliberate liar has some problems, okay? There's this huge cognitive load. When you know you're telling

• 44:35Speaker 01

  a lie, you're like, oh God, am I going to get found out, right? There's this huge cognitive load around the lie.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  You have to cover your tracks, think through all the different contingencies.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  And yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  But somebody who believes their own bullshit, okay? They don't have to worry about that.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, you're like, I'm not even thinking about it because this is just the truth.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  It's much more energy efficient.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Right. It kind of has these functions where like, it's going to erase all of those tells that you have. Like, you're not going to have the weird fidgety stuff that's going to make people think that you're trying to deceive them, or you're going to, if you believe your own bullshit, somebody else is, it's much more likely to believe your bullshit too. And then if you are caught, you just plead innocence too, right? Like, do you, you're like, well, that's not what my intent was at all. What are you talking about? I'm not that kind of person. Of course, I wasn't doing it for that reason. Believing your own story first has huge advantages. So in order to really effectively, I think on that smaller scale at least, deceive other people, you first have to deceive yourself.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  I think it also protects your own self-esteem.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. You're not a bad person anymore, are you?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Right. I'm just doing my best. I'm just working hard. I'm just trying to get along with everybody. Like, what are you getting mad at me for, right? Like, it's, if you knew you were doing the things that you're doing, you would probably feel, well, assuming you're not a psychopath, you would probably, you would probably struggle with a lot of remorse and shame and guilt and all sorts of things. There's also some interesting findings around this about how we rationalize our choices after the fact to justify them to ourselves, primarily, even if we didn't actually make the choice consciously to begin with. So, one of the cooler studies that I've come across in a long time, happened out at Lund University. So what they did is they actually took magicians who are great at sleight of hand card tricks

• 46:20Speaker 00

  and used them for this study. So what they did is they created decks of playing cards with people's faces on them. They would have subjects come in. The magicians, and the subjects didn't know they were magicians, they thought they were researchers. The magicians would present two cards with faces on, on the front of the card. They would ask the subject, which face do you find more attractive? The subject would choose one of the two faces. And then in half of the situations, the magician would secretly switch the card. They would hand the card to the subject and tell them to keep it. What's fascinating is that later on, researchers came in and asked the subjects to pull their card out and explain what they found attractive about that particular face. And of course, half of the subjects are holding

• 47:02Speaker 00

  cards of faces that they didn't actually choose. Do you want to guess what percentage of people realized that they actually didn't choose the card that they were holding?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  All right, it's probably pretty high.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  It's a shockingly high amount. It was, it was actually about three quarters of people didn't even realize

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  that they were holding different cards than they had actually chosen minutes before. And then the researchers asked them, say, why do you like this face so much? And the people started going into these like elaborate explanations of like, oh, I really like the jawline and like the hairstyle is really cool and all this stuff. And it's like, people are explaining a card that they didn't actually choose why they chose it. And like minute detail of what they care about and what they like. And again, it's not that these people realize like, oh shit, I didn't choose this card. Let me make up reasons to justify why I might have chosen it. It's like, they didn't even realize they didn't choose it. They just started justifying it to themselves. The explanation came

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Automatically without them even having to think about it, without them even having to realize that this isn't even a thing that they chose in the first place. So if you apply that to everyday life, right? Like, how many situations on a weekly basis? Do you kind of just find yourself in and without even like choosing to be there? Like, it just kind of happened? Like, you just go along with it? And next thing you know, you're like, I don't know, at this cafe or something with people and you're like, why am I here? Like, I don't know, I just kind of like followed this person here and said yes to this thing. And but then you start justifying it to yourself. You're like, no, no, I actually like this. This is actually, no, this is, I wanted this, even though you had no say in the matter whatsoever.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think I kind of did this with you this morning, actually, on the way in here.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Oh, God, what did you do?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Well, no, I was talking about myself. I was like, it was about being single and stuff. I'm like, yeah, no, it's probably like, how much do I actually control this?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, you did say this.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  And it's like, I've kind of set up my life this way and it's okay.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you keep telling yourself.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  There's all this, I do this all the time. The post rationalization, why I bought the thing I bought, or went to the place I went to, or said the thing I said, all of it is post rationalization. We talked about this a little bit in the, or the values episode, I guess it was. Jonathan Haidt talks about, you know, the writer and the elephant type of thing. I think this is related to that big time. We post rationalize so, most of our decisions, this just happens, a lot of them, a good number of them. That's not to say we can't think and then decide, obviously we can, it just takes a lot more effort to do that. We automatically, the point here is, we so often automatically.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  We don't notice.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Come up with something. We don't notice that we're even.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  It's like the sleight of hand. Like, it's just, it just happens and we think it was always there.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  But God, those reasons sound so convincing, don't they? Like, it's really not hard to convince yourself of why you did something.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  In many cases, there, there's like, a lot of interesting contexts where being smarter backfires against you. And I think this is one of the reasons, is that the smarter you are, the more easily and readily you are able to come up with justifications and rationalizations for your own bullshit. And like, to convince yourself that like, you're totally fine and everything, everything you're doing is great and very noble and very well intentioned, when actually, like, you're completely full of shit, but you're so smart, you don't realize it.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  You come up with better reasons.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  You come up with better bullshit.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And I, I think this is why, street smarts versus book smarts, you know, like, street smart people, they seem to have a little bit more self-awareness around this sort of thing and like, kind of just get that like, okay, everybody's a little bit full of shit, but that's fine, because you, you just got to play the game. Whereas like, book smart people don't even realize this stuff's going on, because they're so good at rationalizing everything that happens in front of them. It kind of explains a little bit of, you know, the, the nutty professor phenomenon of like, being a genius, but not even realizing when, when like, a car salesman is ripping you off, or like, why they're trying to rip you off.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Seeing manipulation out in the world actually doesn't protect you from it, especially if you're smart about it, because of, precisely because of that. Yeah, and then seeing it in yourself is even harder sometimes, which is also a weird little paradox we run into.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Coming back to the self-esteem thing, too, our old friend who demolished self-esteem, Roy Baumeister, did some research in the early 90s that found that when your actions hurt somebody else, you tend to rationalize yourself as being the reasonable one, and the person who is hurt as being the irrational and unreasonable one. This seems to happen automatically at a very subconscious level. It is that, that self-preservation of, we all need to see ourselves as the main character, as the hero, as the good guy. Baumeister even had a quote in one of his papers, he called it the myth of pure evil, and he pointed out that this idea that people who are evil know that they're evil, just doesn't seem to exist. I mean, Baumeister studied violent criminals in, in the late 90s, so like, he consistently

• 51:43Speaker 00

  didn't come across people who thought that they were evil. There's a fantastic quote from David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, from around the same time, coincidentally, where he said that evil people never believe that they are evil people, they believe everyone else is an evil person. Which, if you think about the ability to deceive yourself into doing awful shit to other people, the most logical way to justify that would be to convince yourself that everybody else is evil and you're the only good person.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Okay, we'll go back to those scales already, aren't we? Like, in the small scale, you can deceive yourself and it's fine, it gets you through your day, but yeah, scale it up and watch out.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  And the self-deception continues all the way up. It's just the nature of the deception shifts. So at the low end, it's very like, I'm just being polite, you know, oh, I, I just want to be nice, right? Middle of the scale, it becomes, hey, it's not my, like, I'm doing my best here, I didn't mean for that to happen, it's not my fault. And then at the upper end of the scale, it's, no, no, I'm not evil, they're evil. I, I'm the good guy, I'm trying, I, I'm justified, I'm the one out here fighting evil all by myself. And the last thought around this, and this isn't really PC to say, but what you often find is that the people who talk the most about being a victim are not always the ones who have been hurt the most.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  In fact, there's research that has linked a virtuous victim with high traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The truth is that by framing yourself as a victim, both to yourself and to others, it becomes easy to justify a lot of manipulative and violent behavior towards others. It becomes a way to preserve your image of yourself as somebody who is noble and good, despite the fact that you were doing awful shit to other people. And so it is actually quite dangerous to overly sympathize. Obviously, we should sympathize with victims, but if you see somebody who is chronically playing the victim, who seems to be victimized in every context and every scenario, that

• 53:46Speaker 00

  is a huge red flag, right? Because they are weaponizing their victimhood into a justification for victimizing others. There's a fun quote from Nassim Taleb, where he said, "Half of people lie with their lips, the other half lie with their tears." You know what the strongest predictor of believing that other people are willing to conspire against you is? It's your willingness to conspire against other people. So there is actually data that finds that people who believe everyone else is trying to manipulate them and take advantage of them, are the ones who are most willing to manipulate and take advantage of others.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Takes one to know one.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting, okay.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  I know this is a hard question for us to ask ourselves, but I mean, to me, it begs the question of like, how far up or down that scale do you think you are? How aware of your own lies and manipulation do you think you are?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  You know, you have that idea about the, the best thing about a person is also sometimes the worst thing? I think that's where we should look. That's where I looked, anyway. A high value of mine is like, helping other people. That can get manipulative pretty quickly, though, too. I, I don't outwardly come to somebody and be like, well, I help you, I've done all of these things for you. There's, there are people who will just blatantly come out and say that, right? I don't, I, I don't think I've ever said that to anyone before, but I think I probably felt like, ah, I've done all those things, these things for this person, why can't I get a little bit back here, too? That's manipulative.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, it is.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I never, ever feel like I'm doing that in the moment, though. I never feel like I'm manipulating them in the moment, it never feels.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Feels genuine, yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Only when I look back on it, and if I'm really honest about things, like, ah, I probably did that to get something out of that, didn't I? There is a pro-social way to do that, you know, there, it's like, yes, I'm scratching your back, you scratch mine, kind of thing, that just happens, that's how we function sometimes. But it, it never feels like that's the motivation for me. And I'm not saying that's the motivation all the time. A lot of times it isn't, I really genuinely don't expect anything in return. But when that's my mode, right? That's my, that's my MO, that's what I go to, I think that can pretty quickly, I got to be careful with that one.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Well, and also, this begs the question of like, there probably is like, net positive manipulation, right? Like, it's, like, if I do a nice thing for a person because I want to be friends with that person, and it does help engender a very wonderful friendship, right? Like, that is a pro-social, net positive form of.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Better than blackmail, right?

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And interesting, and we'll talk about Machiavelli in the, in the next chapter, I believe, but he talked about the difference between ruling, like, manipulating via love versus fear, and that there are advantages and disadvantages to each one. I like your framing as the, the best thing and the worst thing, because it's, one of the things that I'm, I keep thinking about, when I think about this question, is two consistent pieces of feedback I have received my entire life from the people closest to me. One is, Mark is sometimes too honest, that is, like, every woman I've ever dated has said that, my family has often said that. But I've also been told that I, I can be very insensitive, and I can, I can say things that are very hurtful without even like, realizing that I'm saying them, and I think

• 56:53Speaker 00

  that is kind of the flip side of that honesty coin, is that sometimes I will say the thing, I will not say that the general polite nicety that is supposed to be said, and I will say the thing that most people are not saying. And it will be hurtful, and it will like, cause a little bit of fallout, or people will be very annoyed by me. When I think about like, friendships I've lost over the years, I think it's often because I do just talk about the elephant in the room and people get really upset. What's interesting, too, is I think most of the people who like, read my books and listen to this show and follow me on social media, like, that's also why they follow me, is because it, of this kind of costly form of honesty, right?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  This goes back to what you were talking about in the intro a little bit, you want to be manipulated to some degree. Somebody comes to you and they're too honest with you, oh my God.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's not, it doesn't feel good.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Or here's, okay, there's the other side of it, too. Maybe, sometimes you can use honesty as manipulation.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Right? So it's, it's everywhere.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  It's absolutely everywhere.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  I mean, one of the thoughts that I had to prep in for this podcast, is that in a sense, everything this industry does is a form of manipulation. Like, if you think about actually trying to get people to change and improve themselves and grow, that is manipulation. If I put together a YouTube video with this beautiful script that is extremely inspiring and motivating to somebody, and they go out and they make different choices in their life, based on what they heard me say in that video, that is manipulation. Like, I'm actively trying to manipulate them into doing better things, or, or making better decisions in their life. And I think that is why this industry has such, such ethical gray areas and ethical issues, because I do think there are a number of people in this industry who cross that

• 58:34Speaker 00

  line morally, and then justify it to themselves by saying, well, I'm helping people, right? So, okay, yeah, that marketing campaign, little over the top, kind of bullshit. Made me a bunch of money, but look how many people I'm helping, right? And it becomes a very easy justification to get by with. And then of course, you end up with all sorts of horror stories that we see out of the self-help industry. I guess the last thing we should talk about in this chapter before we move on is detecting manipulation. Right? So we've, we've, we've covered how we all manipulate everybody pretty much all the time. We manipulate ourselves pretty much all the time.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Is there a way to spot this? Like, can we train ourselves to see lies and misdirection in others, deceit in others? Like, can we become better at tracking this within ourselves?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I, I mean-

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Give me good news, Drew.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So digging into this, it's basically a coin flip, maybe a little bit better than a coin flip. For the most part, the few meta-analyses that have been done on this, like deception detection, lie detection, manipulation detection of any kind, basically comes out slightly higher than 50%. It's statistically, it's a coin flip.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  And these are like the best people, these are like-

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter. This is gonna be laypeople or experts too. Yeah, yeah. So that's another point.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Nobody, the best lie detecting people in the world top out of what, like 55 or 54?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  56 ish percent, something like that. Yeah. What they found. I think this again goes back to like, the smarter you are, the more expert you are, you can come up with better reasons. And again, but though it's just a coin flip at that point.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Well, the researcher I mentioned earlier, DiPaolo, she found in her research that police officers, judges, psychiatrists, therapists, were no better at predicting lies than college students were.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  People who dealt with liars every day.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are no better about it. Governments have spent billions, probably trillions of dollars at this point over that course of history, uh, working on this. Just a small example of this, after nine 11, TSA developed this program where it's to train people to spot deception and-

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Shady people?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Shady people, basically, and deception at airports. What was it? 900 million, basically a billion dollars they spent on this program, right? Years of training and a lot of this was pretty subjective, but what they basically found was that they, they weren't any better at spotting the deceiver or the shady people than just a random person on the street was, uh, after this. So they ran this huge experiment, very expensive experiment, very high stakes experiment, weren't able to produce anything out of this. Again, we all have this idea, like we were talking about, we can read body language or like averting your gaze is like a tell or something like that. It's really not though. People just exhibit all sorts of behaviors all the time, but our brains will latch on to anything

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  that the story that we're creating fits into, right? And we'll say, oh, no, no, no, he, you know, blinked a few times to me or something like that, right?

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Where he covered it. I know covering your mouth-

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Covering your mouth, avoiding eye contact, like all of those things. None of those really pan out. Averting your gaze, that's one of the most common ones are found around the world. People are like, oh, if there's a liar, they won't look you in the eye. A lot of people are just uncomfortable with eye contact though, too.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. A lot of people are socially insecure, socially anxious. And by the way, psychopaths probably have no problem holding eye contact with you.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Someone you're familiar with, you probably have a better insight into their tells than other people, just because you have that experience with them. But just like a random person on the street or somebody you're watching on a video somewhere or something like that, you know? There's not really a lot of evidence to support any of that kind of stuff. We're really bad at detecting lies, basically is what I'm saying.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  We can't train ourselves or learn.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Much better at it. Yeah. Uh, yeah, there might be some very specialized areas where this can work, but for the most part, no.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Drew, we're, we're ruining so many podcasts right now.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, but why? Okay. So why?

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  So many podcasts have told me that this is how I can spot a liar, or this is how I can know I'm dating a narcissist.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Oh God, it's all over. Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  No, you, you can't. I, I mean, the truth is, is that the only way to really verify the honesty of somebody is to go actually check if the thing that they said is true or not. And like, go verify it yourself. Go see like, did they do the behavior that they said they did? Did you, did like, go check with third parties? The fact of the matter is that's very cumbersome and tiring and total pain in the ass. And we don't want to have to do that with each other. So we, it's, it's, it's more convenient to just trust somebody and assume that they're, they're telling the truth until proven otherwise. Some psychologists have made this argument that our inability to pick up lies might actually be a feature, not a bug for this exact reason.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  Because if people are telling small lies and deceiving each other in very like miniscule ways all the time, if any of us actually were really, really good at picking up on those things, it would drive us fucking crazy. Like we would be so distrustful and skeptical of everything and everybody all the time. It would destroy our social circles. It would just rock our worldviews in terms of like what we believed humanity is and capable of. That I think we need to believe people most of the time. And, and the psychologists make the point that people are honest most of the time. Most people are honest most of the time. So it is better to default towards honesty,

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  to maintain that social cohesion and be lied to on the margins here and there, uh, every once in a while, than the alternative. The constant distrust, if you distrust people, you can't really build a relationship with them. You can't rely upon them. You can't collaborate with them. And so if you distrust everybody all the time, you are socially, it's another form of social isolation. And it is extremely harmful for your wellbeing. So we are kind of forced to trust others. It's good for us to trust others. And it's in many cases, probably good for us that many of these white lies go, do go undetected. We do benefit from the, the pro-social cohesion that comes from, from them.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  This kind of goes a little bit back to the evolutionary thing too. You know, we, we evolved in small groups and we had repeated contact with the same person. In those situations, it's, it behooves everyone to be honest more often than, than not. The little white lies aside, but it behooves everyone in that situation to interact honestly with each other. We've talked about this before, like the, the tit for tat, you know, that whole strategy. It's actually more advantageous for you, uh, in a repeated context with someone.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  To be truthful and honest. And so you may as well just assume honesty.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. If anybody wants to nerd out really hard on just kind of the evolutionary explanation of human friendship and human collaboration, check out the friendship episode from, from last November. We get really deep into a lot of the game theory of just human cooperation and why it matters so much.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  The other interesting thing that we came across that I, I found fascinating was that a survey in 2010 found that, almost 50% of all lies came from 5% of people. And so very much like the same way, you see this across a lot of crime statistics, right? So 70% of the burglaries are committed by like 2%, of the burglars. It seems to be similar here where it's like, the vast majority of lies are committed by a very small group of compulsive and consistent liars. As long as you just make a point to avoid those people and kind of give a little bit of grace to, to everybody else.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  You're, you're probably fine and it's not worth agonizing over every little lie, every little like being manipulated in every micro situation. It, it's really just like, avoid that 5% and you're fine. So this has been a long chapter. To sum everything up, kind of where we're at, we've established that manipulation is not a certain category of person. It is a spectrum of behavior exhibited by all people all the time. We're doing it all the time. Everybody we know is doing it. White lies, timed compliments, strategic framings, stories that are a little bit self-serving, maybe exaggerated or embellished to make ourselves look a little bit better.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  The typical lie, it happens a few times a day. It tends to be very small in its implications. It is not even worth the effort to spot in the first place, uh, much less call somebody out for. And not only do we do these things all the time, but we aren't even aware of the fact that we're doing them all the time. Like the most effective way we deceive others or manipulate others is by deceiving and manipulating ourselves. We are extremely adept at it. Our minds seem to be prone or predisposed to do it. And it's not because we're horrible people. It's just because like, that's kind of, that's how our machinery is built. And that's how the game theory of human interaction works out is that it is more cost efficient to believe your own bullshit than to have to spin up some wild tale consciously

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  and then spend a ton of energy and effort and anxiety trying to defend it. We've talked about how that self-deception and self-justification exists on all parts of the manipulation spectrum. So even from the smallest white lie to the most heinous violent assault on somebody. The person who is doing the manipulation is going to have justifications for themselves because they need to maintain that sense of self, that they are the good guy, that they are the hero in the story. And this is why you should be especially skeptical of people who always seem to have a narrative of themselves being a righteous victim. Because it is that sense of righteous victimhood that justifies the worst and most manipulative behavior.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  If the conclusion is, is that we're all manipulative to varying degrees and manipulation is always occurring throughout our lives to varying degrees. The question becomes, where is the line? At what point does manipulation go from just being kind of this benign, annoying, unfortunate thing to an actual ethical problem, something that is reprehensible or that people should be punished for? And the truth is, is that that line is kind of murky. It's not completely clear. And so in the next chapter, we're going to get into a lot of the different ethical philosophies of where that line is and what manipulation is acceptable in our day to day lives and what manipulation is unacceptable and how to distinguish between the two. All right, we will be right back after this.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

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• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  The philosopher Immanuel Kant was, I think, every biohacking bro's wet dream. For pretty much the entire back half of his life, he lived such a regimented and planned schedule. He would wake up at the same time every day, 5:30 in the morning. He would read for the same amount of time. He would write for the same amount of time. He would go to the local university where he would teach the same class every single day. He would take lunch at the same restaurant. He would go on his afternoon walk through the same park on the same route. He would arrive at home at the exact same time every single day. He would work into the evening. He would hang out with the same group of friends and he would go to bed at the exact same time every single night.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  He ate the same thing every day. He never left his hometown of Königsberg, Prussia, in his entire life. He lived like 30 miles from the ocean and never saw it. He did not drink. He did not party. He did not waste any time. Everything was focused and dedicated to either work or his own personal mental and physical health. And his routine was so predictable that his neighbors used to joke that they could tune their clocks based on Kant coming and leaving. Now, what's interesting about Kant is that this insane adherence to routine, it was not accidental. It was actually very intentional and it was based on his own moral philosophy. Now, it's useful to kind of place Kant in the context of the Enlightenment.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  So he is one of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers, one of the most influential philosophers who's ever lived. At the time, there was a pretty massive gap around moral philosophy, which was that up until that point in the West, all morality had been based around Christianity. Everything was in the Bible. God said you can do this, you can't do that. That's just how it is, right? That's how we're going to live. When the Enlightenment thinkers came along, they argued that truth should be ascertained not from the Bible, but through critical reason and rationality. And this worked really, really well for all sorts of things, for the advancement of

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  science, for the improvement of technology, inventing new theories in economics, the later industrialization of the Western world. Like, all of these things were very much driven by the scientific process, the pursuit of, of truth via rationality, experimentation, learning from failures, so on and so forth. The problem at the time was that there was still no way to deduce morality rationally through reason. The same way you can make a scientific prediction and then go verify it through observation, you couldn't necessarily make an ethical or moral prediction and then verify it through somebody's behaviors. It just seemed to be very much based on people's sentiments and how things made them feel.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  And this was Hume's argument in, in earlier in that century. Is Hume argued that all morality is basically, is just vibes. It's just feelings, man. Like, we tend to associate what is ethical with what makes us and other people feel good and what is unethical with what makes us and other people feel bad. This was not satisfying for Kant. And so he took on the project of devising a kind of fully rational or theoretical view of morality that could be argued from first principles and reasoned through, the same way you would reason through mathematical proofs or through like different physics experiments. One of the things that he realized is that for something to be a moral truth, it needs

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  to be true in every context and in every situation. You can't, you can't have something be morally correct with this person over here, but it's incorrect for that person over there. Like, if something is a moral truth, the same way the law of gravity is, is true here in Los Angeles, as it is in Tokyo, as it is in, in India, a moral truth has to be true in everywhere and with every individual as well. And Kant called these moral truths categorical imperatives. They were basically truths that were self-evident and self-reinforcing and applicable to every situation. Now, one of these categorical imperatives that he came up with, that I, I personally find to be incredibly profound and also I think is extremely relevant for this ethical

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  discussion of manipulation and where kind of the moral bounds of influence and manipulating each other is, is something that he called the formula of humanity. And the exact quote was, "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." So basically, never treat people as a means to some other end, only treat humans as a means unto themselves. Now, what's brilliant about the formula of humanity is that I think it, it explains really nicely so many of our moral intuitions of what is right and wrong.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  So for example, if I tell you that I like your jacket and I like it because I just like it, I'm treating you as an end. The motivation of my behavior is purely for your sake. And because I am saying something nice about you, because I am inspired to say something nice about you, makes it feel moral. It feels like a good thing, like I did a good thing by complimenting you that way. Now, imagine if I said that you have a nice jacket because I want you to drive me home after this. And I feel like if I compliment you a bunch, you're going to offer to give me a ride. That feels like icky, right? That feels a little gross.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  And when people do that to us, it makes us feel a little bit gross. And Kant would argue that the reason for that is because I'm not treating you as an end, I'm treating you as a means to another end, right? The end, the- Fundamental motivation is for me to get a ride home. And so I'm going to say nice things to you because it's going to increase my, the chances that I get a ride home from you, right? So I'm treating you as a means to some other end, which Kant would say that is by definition unethical. So if you think about what lying is in general, it is treating people as a means to some other end. If you think about stealing, right? It is treating other people's property or possessions as a means to some other end.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Like if I steal your car, I am treating you as a means to some other end, which is to get a car. If I cheat in some way to impress you or get something that I want out of you, it's the same thing. Like if you go down the line of kind of all the classic moral principles, lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, violence, coercion, all of these things have kind of the same underlying principle in that you are using another human being as a means to some other end to benefit yourself. Now, what's beautiful about the formula of humanity is that it also applies to ourselves because we also use ourselves as a means to some other end.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  And again, we, we tend to see people who do this as distasteful or unethical. So if somebody demeans themselves or degrades themselves to earn the approval or, or impression of some other person, we see that as pathetic. We see that as, is like somebody who has no integrity or dignity for themselves. If somebody harms themselves in some way to earn more money or receive gifts from somebody, right? Like you have that same ick factor. You're like prostituting yourself for, for just like some kind of superficial benefit. When you look at things like compulsive behaviors or addictions, you could look at it through

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  this lens of like, if you are drinking compulsively, you're demeaning yourself for the sake of, of fun or social cohesion or, or, you know, some kind of wild experience or wild night with, with a bunch of people. Like you could look at that as treating yourself as a means to some other end. Like that is an unethical way to treat yourself. It's this incredible rubric that you can run almost, almost every undesirable behavior you can imagine, you can run it through the formula of humanity and it will come out the same pattern. You are either treating somebody else as a means or you're treating yourself as a means. And by Kant's definition, that makes it unethical.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Okay. This, this sounds good to me too. And I think you're right. You can run lots of shady situations or whatever through this, uh, this, this test. This is one that always kind of confused me anyway. What about when you're lying to protect someone else or even real lie, lying to protect their feelings? Like somebody asks you a question and yeah, you have an honest answer, but like we kind of already talked about, there's these little white lies we tell.

• 1:21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  To smooth things over or, you know, somebody, you don't want to be rude. You want to protect a relationship and you want to protect that person's feelings, maybe even to their self-esteem, their self-image of themselves. What about a situation like that, Mark?

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  So Kant's would say it's unethical. Kant was very radical. So it's funny because at the time Kant's critics brought up, very quickly brought up thought experiments, like you just suggested, and they actually brought up a very extreme one, which was the, the murderer at the door case, right? So they said, okay, what if a murderer knocks on your door and they say very plainly to you, I want to kill your friend. Is your, is your friend at your house currently? And your friend is in the back. What would you do? Now, obviously you lie, right?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Like there's never been a more obvious situation where you say, I have no idea where they are. Check down the street. So Kant actually argued that you should not lie to the murderer at the door, which this has done a huge number. I think this single public defense has probably tarnished his moral, moral theory and moral framework more than anything else, uh, over the past 200 years. Cause it violates every intuition that we have. And, and frankly, it's just, it's fucking stupid. So his argument was, is that you should be honest with the murderer. But the reasoning is like, it's actually quite elegant if you understand it. And like, even though it's fucking stupid, I still admire kind of the philosopher, philosophical

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  framework that it comes from. So Kant's argument, the basis of his entire moral framework was that consciousness itself is the most rare and special thing in the known universe. Out of everything we know in the whole universe, there is this brief flickering light of, of consciousness and reason that to our knowledge has never existed before and has never existed anywhere else and will never exist again. And so everything we do should be optimized and designed to protect and promote that consciousness as much as possible, which is a very beautiful realization and, and I would argue basis, basis of a moral framework.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Now, if you think about what consciousness is, it's a lot of different things, but in, in Kant's framework, what he identified as ethically unique about somebody with consciousness is that they have agency, that they have the right to choose their actions and behaviors, uh, to choose who they're going to become, to choose like who they want to be in the world. And so the reason the formula of humanity is a definition of morality is because it is in principle, what violating somebody else's agency is. So when I lie to you, it's not just that I'm lying to you to get something out of you. It is when I lie to you, I'm distorting or preventing you from acting with full agency in the world.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  I am giving you false information. I am distorting current information you may have. I am hiding intentions that I have. What it does is that it interferes with your ability to fully act in the world with full information. And so that's, that is actually what Kant's argument is, is unethical. And what accompanies that agency is responsibility, right? He called it duty, right? He said that because we are conscious and we have agency, we all have a duty to do our best with everything in our lives, to maximize ourselves to our fullest potential and help maximize other people to their fullest potential. And in his framework, the way you do that is by not interfering with their agency at

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  all whatsoever, is by like giving them full control over their own lives and not deciding at any point that you know better than I do, what's good for me or vice versa. So coming back to the murderer at the door, Kant's argument is that by lying to the murderer, like if the murderer is going to kill your friend and make that horrific mistake, it is not your responsibility to prevent that.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  Okay. Which is fucking stupid.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  But, but you can see how he arrives there, right? Like it is this very idealistic moral framework. And I think like all moral frameworks, they start very beautiful and elegant and noble. And then when you start to get into more and more extreme situations, they all become absolutely absurd and they collapse upon their own kind of mental scaffolding.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  But that would be Kant's argument.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Okay. If we don't take such an extreme example.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Okay. Let's say you have a friend that comes to you, uh, who's not going to be murdered. But instead they're like, you know, do you think my nose is big? Do you think I have a big nose? And they have a big nose.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Okay. The, the best way I've ever heard to deal with this anyway is to say, yes, you have a big nose and I don't care because you're my friend and it doesn't matter to me. Those types of things don't matter to me.

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  So don't lie to them to say, no, your nose isn't big because then, you know, they're like, they know their nose is big, right? Like, so they're not going to be able to trust you at some point.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  But also tell them that it doesn't matter that they have a big nose.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  So I like that tactically. Um, Kant did soften on his stance later on towards the end of his life. So about 10 years later, he wrote an essay called perpetual peace, which by the way, he was the first person to suggest, uh, a United Nations as like a source of global peace. Totally story for a different podcast. Uh, but in that essay, he came up with something a little bit more practical to navigate a lot of these situations. So basically he acknowledged that the desire to influence each other is, is natural and kind of inevitable. What makes it ethical or unethical is whether or not the, the other person wants becoming

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  aware of that manipulation would be upset or not. So for example, if I lied to you and told you a bunch of stuff, hoping that you'll give me a ride home and then you found out about it, you'd probably be like, wow, that's kind of shitty dude. Like you should just ask me for a ride home, right? Whereas like, I don't know. Let's say I do you a favor. Like, like, let's say I decide I'm going to run down to the corner store. I'm going to, and I'll pick something up for you. And then I tell you, I'm like, hey, I'm going to go pick this thing up, but I'm only doing it so you give me a ride home later. That doesn't feel as bad. It's kind of like, okay, well, yeah, it's like a tit for tat thing. Sure. All right, whatever. We could think of this almost as like the publicity test, right? If, if the person that you're trying to influence became aware of the influence that you're

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  subjecting them to, how upset would they be about it? And in a lot of cases, they actually wouldn't be upset. And in some cases, they might actually be happy that you said it, right? So I used the example earlier of like, let's say that my wife spent a bunch of hours like preparing a really nice dinner and the dinner is kind of like eh. But I keep complimenting her for it and I'm like, wow, this is so good. Thank you so much. Oh, you put so much effort into this. Now, let's say that she became aware that I actually don't like it that much, but I'm telling her that I like it a lot because I appreciate how much effort she put into it. She probably wouldn't be upset about that, right? Like she'd be like, oh, actually I'm really glad he did that. Because it would have made me feel bad and it would have caused a fight and it would have just made the whole night worse, right?

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  So basically, the algorithm is expose the manipulation. If once exposed, the manipulation upsets people, then it's probably unethical. If it is met with indifference, or even people are appreciative that you did it, it could potentially be a good thing.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so there is room for some transactions and relationships, or even transactional relationships themselves.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  And this, yes. As long as it's like, it's above board. Like, hey, I'm doing this for you because you did this for me.

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  People deride transactional relationships so much, but if you look around, like, we need them. We absolutely need them.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  I mean, if I'm like, let's say I'm gonna sell my couch to somebody, right? Like, can we get into a negotiation over price? Obviously, there's a whole suite of behaviors and techniques to like negotiate better in situations like that. Like, you never walk into a sales negotiation and say, okay, well, I'm gonna set my anchor price extremely high, hoping that this manipulates you into like,

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  People already know, like, they get it. It's just part of the context, it's part of the situation. It is a relatively benign form of manipulation. And that's fine. If I'm like negotiating with a car salesman or something, it's not that I'm trying to fuck over the car salesman. I'm just trying to get a good price, right? And he's doing the same. There's nothing personal involved. There's nothing like, uh, we're not like actively trying to harm each other. It's just, we're trying to find mutual ground where we can both agree. The more interesting version of this is that there's this whole concept of nudges. Are you familiar with nudges in economics?

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of research, um, kind of loosely based around, uh, Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory and how to actually like leverage that in policy. So a simple example is organ donation. In Germany, only about 12% of people are, are registered to donate organs. Whereas in Austria, uh, it's like 99% of people are registered to donate organs. And the reason is, is that Germany has an opt-in organ donation. So it's like whenever you go get your driver's license or passport or whatever, you have to check the box saying, I am willing to donate organs. Whereas Austria has an, an opt-out organ donation. So you are by default an organ donor unless you check the box saying, I don't want to

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  donate organs, uh, when you go get a driver's license or whatever. And so this is an example of what is called like a policy nudge. It is creating policy that manipulates people's environment to push them into more pro-social behaviors. Let's say you were automatically opted out to be in an organ donor. Would you be upset about, like, I wouldn't be upset about that.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  I would actually be kind of glad, I'd be like, wow, our politician is a little smarter than I thought. To me, it's just like effective policy. So I think there's just an understanding that human perception is bounded, right? We're, we're only capable of being aware of very few things at any given time. And so it, it's not reasonable to expect everybody to be able to make conscious rational decisions about everything in their life at all times. So I, I, I think a sign of a functional society and a sign of, uh, a function, like functional social relationships is being able to effectively nudge each other into better behaviors, better choices, um, and better options.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, okay. Now, there might be some people who still think that that's a little too paternalistic, though, like in the organ donor case.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Right? So, um, they actually did go back and they, they, they set this up a little bit differently too. So it, yes, Austria was opt-out.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  They kept it opt-out, but then they put a little, they, they made sure everybody knew that it was opt-out. And you even still get the same, uh, rate of compliance after that even too, when it's a social benefit. They told them, they said, okay, this is automatically chosen for you because it benefits the society, our society more, and because setting the default, uh, will give us a higher compliance rate.

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  People were still okay with that. This was a really good example of Kant's publicity test. Where it's like, it survives daylight.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Because there were a lot of people like, no, that's being manipulative, that's paternalistic, we shouldn't be doing that. And then, but even when you do provide that for people, they still will, they're okay with it.

• 1:32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  And so everything's above board at that point.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  I just thought of another example from my own life. You know, as you know, I spent about three years without drinking. And, um, and it was funny because there, there were a few different instances where I went out with friends and they told me explicitly, they said, I'm not gonna drink tonight because I don't want you to feel left out or, or for you to feel any, any like pressure or, or any urge to drink, like have to fight that urge. And like, it was completely welcome. It's almost like, it's funny, it comes back to this idea that there are actually like, manipulation can sometimes be almost like a love language. Like, it can be, it can be something that you, you can actually do in a very loving and, and, uh, beneficial way for somebody that you care about. Which is fascinating because I never would have, that, it never occurred to me that that

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  was even possible before we started prepping for this, this episode. But it's like, if you look for them, you can find all sorts of situations where we actually do manipulate our loved ones into being better versions of themselves.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  There's a fine line with that too.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  I mean, as long as like, if it does survive daylight again, right?

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  If they're on board with it, right?

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  If a partner came to me and said, I do this just to like, help you do this thing. And I'm like, oh, that's really sweet of you. Thank you for helping me do that because I suck at this and you're helping me a lot. That's great.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. It all hinges on the recipient's desire.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  Right? Like if my friend didn't drink because they didn't want to influence me and I actually really did want to drink, I'd be like, dude, stop being like, fuck, fuck you. Like, I'll do what I want, you know?

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's a philosophical, um, argument for where the line is. And it, that agrees with much of, uh, philosophy throughout history as well.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  It, it aligns with our intuition, but then there's more of a pragmatic or like political definition of where that line is.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so that was, that was Kant's idea. This is, that's this philosophical idea that I think most of us can kind of agree with, at least in principle. And it's very idealistic, right? And does a lot of work for us. It gives us a very strong framework, I think, too, um, to, to kind of base a lot of our decisions and a lot of our actions as they regard other people. Great framework for that, right? But there's another side too, that's more practical sometimes and more political even too, that we also need to address. Because like you've already mentioned, Kant was pretty idealistic. And he, he went to extremes for that idealism, but it sometimes didn't always work, right? He wasn't the first one to though, to say that manipulation was wrong.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  This was an idea that had gone back through philosophy for 1500, 2000 years, right?

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Very, very long time. Go all the way back to Cicero in 44 BCE. He wrote, uh, On Duties, uh, which he said that wrongdoing actually takes two different forms and he used animals.

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  As a metaphor, right? Uh, force was lion, was a lion, okay? Whereas fraud was a fox, okay? So wrongdoing, manipulation can take one of these two forms. You can be very forceful about it, or you can be very deceptive about it. All right? Cicero thought that both of these things were really, they're obviously bad. They were unbecoming of being a human being in the first place. But he's, he thought that fraud was actually more contemptible.

• 1:36:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Um, because it wears this mask of good while actually doing bad. Where at least, you know, you had like a, a really forceful dictator of some kind, whatever. You knew what his tactics was. He wasn't lying to you, right? But the fox was very deceptive and, oh, I'm doing this for your own good, when really they were doing it for their own good.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Right? This was very much the idea throughout pretty much all of human, human history for thousands of years, like do good. Like virtue is the way to lead a nation or a group of people or household even, right? It's all about virtue.

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  This is a very stoic idea as well.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Very much so. This was really the, the prevailing idea for centuries.

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Right? Um, so we get up to the, the, the 16th century, around 1512, the Medici take over Florence, the Medici from Spain take over Florence. Okay. And there just so happened to be a diplomat, a bureaucrat in the Florentine government at that time named Machiavelli, right? As part of this takeover, when the Medici came in, uh, he was jailed. He was put into, he was put into prison. He was ridiculed. He was told to renounce his government, all of these things, right? He was a very dedicated Republican though, um, to his government. He served for, uh, like 15, 20 years, something like that. A, an advocate of, uh, of Republican government, of representation, of democracy even too, right?

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Then he sees this happen, right? The Medici were not Republicans. They were not democratic. They came in and they ruled with an iron fist. So he sees this happen. He's thrown in jail. He's exiled to like a farm somewhere, I think. And he's looking at this and he's like, okay, all of these virtues that we had, that we've been upholding for centuries now, look where it got us. Look where we are now. These people come in, they have no scruples about them. They rule with an iron fist and we're the ones who get screwed over.

• 1:38:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  This is what, where, when he wrote The Prince, his most famous work, right? Okay. So in The Prince, Machiavelli argues that cruelty isn't really a scandal, you know, of people in power. It's the fact that they're, the old system was covering up the fact that they were actually cruel, but they were pretending like they weren't. Okay? He's the one who's trying to bring daylight to all of this here. And so this is actually what's going on. And this is how you actually have to rule. It's just a necessity of life that rulers have to face. And so he took that metaphor of the fox and the lion from Cicero. And he said, you know, Cicero said, these were two animals that were unworthy of man, right? Machiavelli said, no, actually the prince, the ruler has to actually embody both

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  of them. It has to be, uh, they have to embody both the fox deceit and fraud.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  And the lion force. And, but they have to be like very cognizant of all of this in order to rule effectively, right? He said that, that the, that leaders have to learn how to not be good. Okay. And use that knowledge as the situation demands, because just practically speaking, things come up where they have to use force. They have to use deceit in order to save people from, it might be a huge war or a famine, or, you know, it's kind of from, for their own good type of, uh,

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  A little bit paternalistic of him. He has this famous line in there where men judge more by the eye than by the hand. Everyone sees what you seem, but few touch what you actually are. It is very Machiavellian, what we call Machiavellian today. Keep your promises when it's convenient, break them when not.

• 1:39:44Speaker 00

  Conditional.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Very conditional.

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  Coniving, yeah. This raises so many interesting points and questions for me because I think, you know, what Machiavelli is pointing out is that ultimately, I mean, we can wax on about virtue and ethics and morals all day till we're blue in the face. But at the end of the day, what gets shit done is power.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  And power is ultimately about leverage. It's, there's always this game fury aspect of like, if somebody can get away with something, they, they will. So if you leave a vacuum, uh, somebody will always find a way to fill it. I, I think what gets missed a lot is that it, you know, Machiavelli, he was just writing what works. It's, it's not like he's saying rulers should behave this way. Governments should behave this way. He's just writing like, this is what works. And this is, when they do it, this is why they do it. But before we keep going, a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Quince. Now I've spent a lot of my life on the road, living out of my luggage. And after enough years of that, you actually get pretty damn

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  up, turned on auto pay and you just stopped looking, right? I do it too. And then suddenly 80, 90, a hundred dollars a month, and you don't even know what you're getting for that. But switching sounds like a pain in the ass. So, you know, you keep paying. Now I have to apologize in advance for what this sponsor is about to make me say. Wireless that doesn't drive you crazy? Telo me about it. I'm so ashamed. It turns out there's a simple, uncomplicated solution that doesn't involve bad puns. Telo is a wireless provider that offers budget friendly plans, starting at $5 a month, up to an unlimited plan at $25 a month, which includes 50 gigs of high-speed 5G data that rolls over, unlimited talk and text, and 10

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  gigs of hotspot, all on America's largest 5G network. Now, switching to it is easy. Keep your phone and your number and you can set it up at home. There's no contract. Plus, it has over 15,000 excellent reviews on TrustPilot. So if you could use some peace of mind and flexibility, click on the Telo link in the description to get started. All right, let's get back into it. So I feel like we are seeing the two poles of a ethical conundrum, which is, Kant kind of represents this idealistic philosophical side of us, right? Like where, where everything he says feels correct. It feels virtuous. It feels true. Like, yes, that's how we want people to behave. That's how we want to behave. That's how we want our leaders to behave.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  Whereas Machiavelli has this very practical look. Life is a power struggle and this is how it operates. Whether you like it or not, whether you're virtuous or not, when there is a vacuum, somebody will always step forward to fill that vacuum. And if the way to do that is unethical, there will always be somebody who will, is willing to behave unethically to fill that vacuum and take control of that power. So you, you have this almost like internal tug of war, which I think happens within all of us, right? Of what we know, the better angel of our, of our nature, right? The angel on our shoulder, which is kind of the Kantian, treat everybody as a, not as a means, but it ends to themselves, to

• 1:44:26Speaker 00

  themselves. And then you have the Machiavellian side of ourselves, which is like, look, you can probably get away with this, so you, you should probably go ahead and do it. And, you know, nothing great is accomplished without, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs and so on and so forth. And I do feel like a lot of us feel that tension within ourselves. Uh, there is that temptation to cut corners a little bit, to maybe piss somebody off, hurt somebody occasionally, if you believe that it is better off for yourself in the long run, or maybe for a lot of people in the long run. And I think this is kind of where that spectrum of manipulation comes in. There is the Machiavellian pole,

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  which is just pure cynical, do what gets me power, no matter what. Then there's a pure Kantian pole, which is almost naively virtuous, like virtuous to the point of being stupid at times, of being honest to a murderer at the door who is looking to kill your friend. And I think the tension we feel is that both of these poles are right. They are correct. And, and the vast majority of us live in the middle somewhere. So we feel the doubt and the second guessing and, and a lot of times the agony of stressing over, is it worth it? I don't know about you, but like, I can, I can think about a handful of times

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  in my life where I have either lied or kept a secret or hurt somebody. And I still to this day feel like it's justified. That it was, and not, not because I'm like such a special virtuous person, but it is just looking at kind of the cost benefit overall, right? It's like, okay, this person got hurt in the short term, but it is going to promote all of these other causes or interests over the long term. And so it's worth it. And I think what Machiavelli was observing among princes and kings and leaders is that they have to make those difficult decisions all the time. Right? You kill one person to save

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  a hundred. You start a small war to prevent a large war. Um, you oppress this small group of people to allow this larger group of people to be free. And none of that feels good. None of it is, in many cases, it is downright reprehensible morally, but also life puts you in a lot of situations like that. And as much as we would like to be like Kant and be like, no, you are honest all the time and you promote the freedom and the, uh, and the livelihood of everybody equally all the time, in practice, it's not always that simple.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So the, the question really becomes then, okay, so how do you pick and choose? Which one do you use when? Um, I guess is maybe what we're saying. Cause like you mentioned before, there's a tension that you kind of just have to sit between. This is a real thing.

• 1:47:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  That we all have to go through at some point where, do you do the, the noble ethical thing and, you know, maybe screw a bunch of people over even though it's the honest thing to do? Or do you try to protect them and be paternalistic even at, at some points? There was this philosopher in the seventies who tried to come up with some sort of reconciliation, I guess for this, or at least some sort of, uh, way for us to navigate this. Um, his name was Michael Walzer. And this was in the seventies. He actually was building off Jean Paul Sartre's, uh, play. It was called Dirty Hands.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Okay. There was, uh, this character in this play. He was a communist leader. Um, his name was Horderer? Horderer?

• 1:48:11Speaker 00

  Porter.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Horderer.

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  Not a very good communist if you're a hoarder.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  No, no. But it was this communist leader in this play and he had this famous line that says, "I have dirty hands right up to the elbows. I plunge them in filth and blood. Do you think you can govern innocently?" Kind of stating this whole conundrum that we're talking about right now. Walzer's kind of, his, his conclusion was that there are just certain roles in life, in society, in politics, even just everyday life too, where doing a good job requires you to do something we would consider wrong, at least on the surface. Deception, manipulation, betrayal, sometimes these have to be deployed for good ends, like you were just talking about.

• 1:49:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Sacrificing the one to save the hundred or some configuration of that, right? Walzer's point though, was that we don't want someone who can just make that deal. That's, we can find anybody to do that, right?

• 1:49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  That could just be a cruel person that we can find to do that. What we actually want is someone who can make that deal and they can feel bad about it. They know that they're, that it's wrong. They have the scruples to know that they've done something wrong and that they just have to accept that.

• 1:49:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  So it's a little bit of a reconciliation between the two because you acknowledge that, yes, there's this noble good thing over here, but at the same time too, in order for us to have a functioning system of any kind, and almost any kind of system anyway, you have to be able to sometimes go outside of that, that box that we put ourselves in, right?

• 1:49:49Speaker 00

  So a great historical example of this is Abraham Lincoln. When the South seceded from the United States and the Civil War began, Lincoln had to institute something called habeas corpus, which is basically like suspending legal rights, suspending the Constitution. There was a massive draft of all sorts of people into the war. Privately, Lincoln really struggled with a lot of depression and grief during this period. I mean, obviously he believed he was doing the right thing, but he sometimes wondered at the time whether he was actually destroying the republic in order to save it. Obviously, he was assassinated before he left office. So like, we never really learned what his long-term views were looking back

• 1:50:32Speaker 00

  and like how much, how much guilt he would have ended up sitting with over his decisions during that period. But we do know that during that period itself, he agonized over a lot of this, the choices that he was forced to make. And he very openly wondered whether he was making the right choices at all or not. Interestingly, towards the end of his life, his speeches got a lot more religious and he started speaking more publicly about being judged before God. Ironically, pretty close before he was assassinated. I think it gives a glimpse into the psyche of somebody who is like forced to wrestle with a lot of

• 1:51:13Speaker 00

  these sorts of choices and decisions of like making the hard awful choice to prevent an even more awful choice. And coming back to that spectrum of self-deception, the danger there is that, as we talked about, the more egregious the manipulation, the more egregious the deceit, the more we tend to justify it with explanations of the greater moral good. Really start to run into a lot of dangerous situations when you start justifying these things. Like, I just feel like your threshold of certainty needs to be raised so much higher. Like if there's any doubt, you should probably just default towards error on the side of

• 1:51:56Speaker 00

  honesty and virtue. Because if you do start subscribing to, well, I'm doing this for the greater good, I'm doing this to preserve the country, the republic, my group of people, all these things, you can start justifying a lot of heinous acts. And there's a lot of counterexamples to Lincoln throughout history of pretty awful people who used the same justifications that he did.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  And like Walzer's point, he felt the dirty hands.

• 1:52:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  He knew what he was doing was on some level wrong.

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  Right. Whereas a counterexample is like Joseph Stalin, who also used many of the same justifications of like, okay, we're gonna let this million people die, you know, to preserve the socialist republic or whatever. Stalin seemed to be a person of zero remorse. There's actually a crazy story where the Germans captured one of Stalin's sons during a battle and they held him captive and then they sent a ransom to the, to the Soviet government and they said, you know, we have your son. These are our demands to let him go. And apparently upon receiving the ransom, Stalin looked at it and he said, "My son's

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  already dead." And just left him, didn't do anything. So yeah, kind of fucked up. You can justify a lot of fucked up things.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's a reading of that where you could say, well, that was how noble of him.

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  Right. Gave up his own son for the benefit of the, of the, of the Soviet Republic, right? So it gets, it gets murky. And I guess to bring this back home to the listener, you know, the whole point of this chapter is when is it okay to manipulate and when is it okay to be manipulated? And I think so far, we have the publicity test is kind of one litmus test. I think this dirty hands test is, I think it's less of a litmus test. It's just something to be aware of that like, you're gonna have to live with, right? So it's like, even if you find a way to justify some manipulative behavior, even if it's for the greater good, even if it legitimately is the right thing to do, there's going to

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  be this kind of persistent disgust with yourself that you carry throughout your life.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:09Speaker 00

  And so you have to be prepared for that. Like that is part of the price that you have to be willing to pay, I think.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Well, and we don't have to be Abraham Lincoln or Joseph Stalin either, right?

• 1:54:18Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  To talk about this or to, to think about this because there's plenty of examples. Parenting is gonna be full of these kinds of things. Like how much do you actually let your kid in on what's going on? I, I don't know about you, but the older I get, the more like family secrets come out, you know?

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  And I'm like, holy shit, this is fucked up, right? And I'm kind of like, at first I'm indignant about it.

• 1:54:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  But the more I think about it, the more like going through this episode too, I'm like, actually, I'm not sure if I would have wanted to know all of this as a little kid or even a teenager or whatever. And now that, you know, there's things coming out, you know, that I didn't know about certain people in my family or something like that, like extended family especially. I'm just like, yeah, I don't know. I think about that now. I think about how my parents and my grandparents, they had to carry that.

• 1:55:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  That had to eat at them to some degree. And I'm, I'm sure it did. And I don't know what the right thing to do there was necessarily, right?

• 1:55:10Speaker 00

  It's funny because I can relate a lot to that.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Speaker 00

  There are a number of family secrets that became known to me in my 30s. And it's, and it's interesting because I'm actually really glad I learned about them in my 30s. Because I think if I learned about them as a teen or in my twenties, it would have caused a shitstorm. I would have caused a shitstorm.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  You were already pissed off and angsty enough.

• 1:55:34Speaker 00

  Right. And I had all sorts of baggage with people and yeah, things would have gotten very, very ugly. I think by the time I did learn about some things in my 30s, I think I had the maturity to realize like, okay, these things are secrets for a reason.

• 1:55:48Speaker 00

  And so I've, I've continued to hold those secrets and, and bear those secrets. Get my, have my, my, my hands dirty, right?

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:58Speaker 00

  And I've, and I'm okay with that. Like it, to me, it's all the, the stuff we talked about in chapter one about how the, the asymmetrical risk of losing relationships is just so much higher than having a slightly uncomfortable but intact relationship with somebody that you love and care about. To even make this less dramatic, you know, let's like really, let's like really try to get this into the day to day. I'll give you another example. So really good friend of, of, of mine recently got married and it was one of those situations where his partner like, we were kind of like, really? Like her?

• 1:56:41Speaker 00

  It's one of those situations where you see a friend date somebody and you're like, wow, you could do a lot better than that. It's not anybody's place to say that, right? And you want them to be happy. And if the, if the relationship is a dumpster fire and the marriage is a disaster, like you gotta let them find that out themselves. My wife and I like, we spent a lot of time with the couple and, and we're like, you kind of sit there and you, you just kind of put on a smile and you're like, that's great guys, we're so happy for you.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it's, meanwhile, it feels like you're watching like a, you know, a, a car careening off the, off the highway with no driver. And, and you're like, okay, well I hope this turns out all right. But like saying something just feels so much worse. Like again, that, I think this is a perfect example because in a Kantian world, you know, Kant's argument would be that you actually have a duty to honestly voice your opinion. And whereas a Machiavellian world is like, look, what's the cost benefit here, right? You're probably gonna fuck up a friendship, complicate a happy couple that is like very

• 1:57:51Speaker 00

  excited to, to be together. You're not gonna really change anybody's minds, but you're gonna introduce a lot of like pain and strife into, into a friendship. So just shut up.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:05Speaker 00

  And go along with it.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  There's, there's also too, like in that situation, there's a high chance, you know, if it does, the, the relationship does end.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  You'll still have a good relationship with your friend.

• 1:58:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  And you can be there for him when, if and when it does end. Whereas if you say something upfront, it's like you've kind of ended it right there and there's no rebounding or it's not gonna be the same.

• 1:58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no good outcome.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  There's not a good outcome.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  It's like even if, even if, even if that, that marriage falls apart, like what, what am I gonna do? Like what's gonna happen? He's gonna come back, I'm gonna be like, told you so. You know, like it's, it's gonna feel awful either way.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Well, if, if your friend came to you and asked you directly though.

• 1:58:43Speaker 00

  Yes. What do you think?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:45Speaker 00

  I, I think this is kind of the missing piece of Kant's framework, which is that consent for certain perspectives and opinions is, is, is almost like necessary, right? Like if you're gonna say something that is potentially gonna jeopardize a lot of relationships or different people's lives, like I don't think the onus is on you to be a hundred percent honest all the time. I think the onus is for you to be honest when the situation presents itself, that the person is, is ready to hear it, right? Like if you're, if you're gonna say something that's true, but the person who's receiving it is not gonna receive it well or doesn't want to receive it, I think in many ways that's just as damaging as not saying anything at all.

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's actually some research that actually got to judge right up with that too.

• 1:59:32Speaker 00

  I love it when you back up my harebrained theories with research, Drew. This is why you're here.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  They have a pro-social lies are there's like some social glue to that, right? There's like, uh, it increases trust. Even when the person knows that you're lying for their own benefit, they'll at least trust you more. Now, they're not probably going to trust what you say necessarily, but they trust you more as a person. They're like, okay, this person is more trustworthy, even if I can't fully trust what they're saying. I know they have good intentions at least, and I can trust their intentions. But you also made a really good point there, too. This does split when it becomes more paternalistic and people feel like they haven't consented to that. That's when it does become a problem, whether it was for their benefit or not. We just have this weird aversion, not weird actually, version. It's just, we have an aversion to someone like blatantly manipulating us, blatantly

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  dominating us even too, right? And that's, they do find a split there. When the kind of boundary that they've kind of found in a lot of the research they've done, and it's not like super set in stone type of research, but pro-social lies do land when the honesty would cause pain without giving useful information, like that's

• 2:00:45Speaker 00

  Makes sense.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  It's just like, you're, you're just being mean to be mean, or not even be, you're just being honest for honesty's sake.

• 2:00:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  There's no end to it, right? There's no

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  You see this a lot with assholes.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:00:55Speaker 00

  Like every asshole's just being honest. I'm just being honest.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:58Speaker 00

  Just being, don't be mad at me, I'm just being honest. It's like, well, yeah, no, you're, it's like, it's like the line from the Big Lebowski. It's, you're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole.

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you can make the for their own good defense, right? It's always for their own good. It's like, well, okay, are they consenting to that though?

• 2:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  In some way, shape or form, or it kind of goes back to a little bit, at least to the publicity test. It's like, okay, I know you're kind of like shading something here to help me out and I appreciate that and I'm gonna let it go.

• 2:01:26Speaker 00

  We're gonna get into kind of sales and persuasion tactics.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Next chapter, but I do think a lot of this is tactical, right? There is an elegant way to tell somebody that they're bad at something.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:39Speaker 00

  And there's a very inelegant way to tell somebody that they're bad at something.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Like the example I have, like if your friend has a big nose and they ask you about it. Yeah, you got a big nose, but I don't care.

• 2:01:46Speaker 00

  Right. Or another example, this is something that I've, a very small tactical thing that I've implemented in my own life, right? It's like, we've all, we've all been in the situation where like, we make plans with somebody and then it's like the day of and we're like, God, I really don't want to do this. And, uh, and then you make up an excuse to cancel or not show up or whatever. What I do in those situations is I just, I text the friend very plainly. I'm like, look, not really feeling up to it, had a crazy day.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 00

  Didn't sleep well, not feeling well, not really feeling up to it, but I still really want to see you.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:21Speaker 00

  And are you available this weekend? Let me plan something. And that way it's like reassuring them that like, hey, this is not about you, this is about me. I don't want to come to your thing, but I still like you and I want to see you. And so like, let me make this up to you, you know, on a later day.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't feel manipulative, yeah.

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  But it is.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  But it is, yeah.

• 2:02:44Speaker 00

  It's totally manipulative, right?

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:46Speaker 00

  Don't go anywhere, we're gonna take a short break. We've got a lot more coming. This episode is brought to you by Notion. Now, it feels like I can't go a week without somebody asking me if AI is going to replace all of us. My take, I don't think so. I think AI will make talented people even more valuable and it'll just let the machines handle the busy work so that the humans can focus on what humans do best, working together, being creative, trying to build something great. Notion sees it the same way, and that's why both of my companies run on Notion. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects and agents all come together in one place. Our entire production pipeline lives there, episode planning, research, meetings, everything, because it's all connected and AI has the context that it needs to answer questions

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• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  livemomentous.com promo code SOLVED. Okay, we're back with manipulation. Speaking of, you know, for a person's benefit, I think some of this too gets into the definition of like, what do you see as for your benefit, right? So let's say somebody's like very insecure or worried about their job or their performance at something. I'm the type of person that if I am bad at something or something I do is bad, I actually get pissed off if people try to tell me it's good. I've had many situations in my life where like friends and family have tried to be supportive and tell me like, you did a good job, you like really put all your effort out that I'm like,

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Gets under my skin too, dude.

• 2:06:16Speaker 00

  I'm like, just tell me it sucks.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:18Speaker 00

  Like, if you love me, just fucking tell me it sucks because at least I can learn and get better from it. But it's interesting because a lot of people are not that way. And, and so I've ruffled a lot of feathers throughout my life by like, being honest with friends, being like, hey, you know, this thing could be better if you did this, this and this. And they actually get really upset. So again, it comes back to the consent thing of like, Yeah, there's, there's another thing I've seen like, that's gotten spread around Instagram and TikTok and stuff. This is that like, if a friend reaches out, one of the most effective things you can do is ask them upfront, um, what are you looking for? Are you looking for a hug? Are you looking for somebody to help solve a problem? Or are you looking for somebody to just hear you, listen to you?

• 2:07:01Speaker 00

  And sometimes all we need is just somebody like sit there and listen to our bullshit.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or a belly rub. Don't look for that belly rub, Mark.

• 2:07:11Speaker 00

  Uh, not, we're not there in the episode yet, Drew. We're not there. Next time I want to manipulate you, I will, I will give you a belly rub. I will blackmail you with belly rubs.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  I shouldn't have opened this can of worms. Okay.

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  The last point I want to bring up in this chapter is, is the idea of power within relationships. So there was a researcher in the sixties named Richard Emerson and he had this idea called power dependence theory. And he made a really interesting observation that power is not something that people bring to a relationship. I mean, although like certain, there are aspects of power that you can bring to a relationship, but he said that power is an inherent part of each relationship, that each person in any relationship has a certain amount of dependency on the other person, whether it's emotional, financial, professional, whatever it is, developmental, like it's, there's always mutual dependencies in any, any given relationship.

• 2:08:09Speaker 00

  There are always things that we rely on other people for. And then depending on the balance of those dependencies, you get a power dynamic within the relationship. And now what Emerson noted is that relationships with large power imbalances would produce more manipulative behavior within the relationship. And it makes sense because if you are a person who is without much power in a relationship, the way for you to get what you want is to actually kind of hide your own needs and then manipulate the person with more power to get things out of them. Whereas if you are the person with the power in the relationship, you don't really have a whole lot to lose. So you can kind of just state what you want and what you need plainly and the other person

• 2:08:54Speaker 00

  is probably going to fall, it's, it's their incentive to fall in line and give you what you want and need. So I actually think power dependence theory is the, is kind of the missing keystone that links the Machiavelli side of things with the Kantian side of things. Like what Kant missed is that, okay, yes, you should always be honest. Yes, you should not deceive people. Yes, you should always treat people as ends, not as means. What he missed is that there are inherent power dynamics in human relationships. And the problem with the murderer at the door is the murderer has all of the power and the person at the door has none. And so in that dynamic, you actually kind of have to manipulate the murderer. It's like, it is immoral to not manipulate them for the greater good.

• 2:09:41Speaker 00

  Whereas Machiavelli, he's all about power dynamics. Like, The Prince is just a primer and guidebook to power dynamics. How to manage them, how to maximize them, how to navigate them. I don't know if Machiavelli missed it, or if he just didn't really talk about it a whole lot. Is that if you are in a relationship where power dynamics are roughly equal, both people are kind of bringing the same amount to the relationship, it is in both persons' interests to be as honest and virtuous as possible. Because that maximizes trust, and that maximizes well-being and collaboration, and all the other good things that we've been talking about. Now, interestingly, some follow-up research has found that power dynamics within human relationships, they generally are equal.

• 2:10:26Speaker 00

  Like, one estimate had it at 70 to 75% of relationships are generally equally powered. And so, in most people's relationships, in most circumstances, it is in both people's interests to be honest, not deceitful, not manipulative, to not overtly try to take advantage of the other person. And coming back to what we talked about in Chapter 1, about kind of the necessity of transactional relationships at times, I think a lot of the relationships where there is a clear power dynamic, it is a very transactional relationship, right? It's like, you go to work, you have a boss. The boss is paying you money to do a thing, so you do a thing for the boss. So there's still, it's still largely above the board.

• 2:11:11Speaker 00

  Where people get in the trouble is when there is a very acute power dynamic between two people, and it is non-transactional, it's primarily emotional. And this can happen within romantic relationships, obviously. It can happen within family relationships. I think probably the most acute example of this is parents with children. And that's where you get a very different kind of moral duty on each person in that relationship. If there is an extreme power imbalance between two people, I would argue that it is morally incumbent on the person with the more power to behave in a virtuous way, to act in a way that protects the interests of the person with the less power. Whereas I don't think you have that same moral weight on the person with less power.

• 2:11:55Speaker 00

  I think it actually is rational for the person with less power to be a little bit manipulative and deceiving at times, simply for the fact of self-preservation. You know, we did an episode on toxic relationships six months back or so.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  I think we talked a lot about power dynamics in that episode, how almost the defining feature of a toxic relationship is a sense of a power struggle between the two people. What was really interesting in the power dependency line of research is that they found that in a lot of romantic relationships, both people felt like they were the person with less power. They even found in one study, when they talked to men who abused their partners, the men reported feeling powerless in the relationship, and that they felt driven, they felt justified in the violence, because they felt like nothing else could help them get what they needed, or get what they wanted.

• 2:12:54Speaker 00

  Comes back to, the most heinous shit is always justified through some sort of moral, like, I'm the victim. It's interesting in that, like, you can have a relationship where both people feel disempowered to the other. And like we talked about on that episode, I think in many ways, the defining trait of a toxic, unhealthy relationship is that both people feel uniquely disempowered in light of the other one.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Right. Whereas the opposite might be true too, where, because there is some, a lot of times there is a correlation, a direct correlation between the power each one feels, right? Like, what you're saying is, if I feel like I don't have a whole lot of power, my partner probably feels like they don't have a lot of power too. The converse is true too, though, right? If I feel like I have a lot of power sometimes, then your partner can feel like they have a lot of power. I don't know, can we have a relationship without a power struggle?

• 2:13:42Speaker 00

  This is kind of where we landed in the toxic relationships episode, is that the, almost the definition of healthy intimacy is a lack of power struggle.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:52Speaker 00

  Right? It's like, kind of just surrendering to your partner and trusting them to love you and treat you well.

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:59Speaker 00

  I mean, every relationship, there's some sort of imbalance or another.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:04Speaker 00

  Somewhere.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Speaker 00

  There's always somebody who makes a little bit more money, and somebody who's a little bit more emotionally intelligent, and somebody who is better at managing the household, and somebody who's better at managing the finances. Everybody's gonna be better or worse at something. And so, it is, you know, a healthy relationship is just trusting that those imbalances are gonna even out in the long run, and not hold those things, not keep a scorecard. I think where this really gets more problematic is with parenting and kids, right? Because in a parenting relationship, there is also a severe power imbalance. I would argue that it is rational and normal, and even healthy in many ways, for kids to try to deceive their parents.

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  It's almost a natural part of development, is for kids to kind of figure out how much they can get away with, and, you know, how many corners they can cut. And it's the parent's job to, like, set a boundary and say, no, no, no, no, you can't do it that way. With adult romantic relationships, there's always a little bit of a he-said, she-said element to it, right? We got into this with, like, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and like, kind of how you could look at both of their situations and see very, lots of trauma and lots of emotional dependency and power dynamics going in both directions. Whereas, like, with a parent and a child, it's, for the most part, the parent needs to be, they have all the power, so it is, the moral duty is on them to behave responsibly,

• 2:15:30Speaker 00

  and to wield that power in a responsible way, to not take advantage of the child, not manipulate the child, treat the child poorly, so on and so forth. The other thing I'll say about the power dynamics is that I think when there are power imbalances in human relationships, generally, the person with the more power kind of sets the precedent for the other person or for the other people. And I think this is largely what leadership is, right? Is like, good leadership is behaving in a way that the people who are following you trust and respect what you're doing. And I think Machiavelli talks about this, that it's like, he talks about

• 2:16:09Speaker 00

  being loved is not a good in and of itself, it's instrumental in just driving loyalty from people. But I think it's kind of in practical business advice and managing advice. One of the things that gets talked about a lot is the leader of an organization kind of sets

• 2:16:28Speaker 00

  how psychologically safe the group is for people to express ideas, to be themselves, to pitch an idea that maybe gets shot down, or that's wrong. You know, it's like, are people gonna get ridiculed for things? Are they going to get judged for things? Are they gonna be ostracized for not fitting in in a certain way? And a lot of that, hierarchical organizations, the leader sets the precedent because of that power imbalance. Whereas I think in personal relationships, it's a little bit more of a give and take type situation.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you are in those personal relationships, a lot of it is perception too, around power too, right? Because like, in an organization, it's pretty clear-cut, who has the power, who doesn't. When it gets into a relationship, it's a lot murkier, and we get these stories in our head, right? Like, oh, I'm the powerless one. And then, that's where the manipulative tactics can come into. Even if you have lower power, like you're talking about, it's actually more common for you to be manipulative in that situation.

• 2:17:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:17:31Speaker 01

  And so now you start saying, well, no, you have an obligation to make me feel better in this situation in some way, shape, or form. You're not that overt about it. Is there any value to just like, trying to just drop that story altogether? And be like, look, I have this imagined power imbalance that I'm operating from.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Does that get you very far?

• 2:17:50Speaker 00

  I think in personal relationships, you should go to great lengths to drop that.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:56Speaker 00

  This whole idea that there's a scorecard and that there's a tug-of-war happening. Like, I forget who said it, but I saw a quote that was, said, "The only way to win a status game is to quit playing."

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  God, that's so true.

• 2:18:08Speaker 00

  It's extremely true.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Think of all the power that status game has over you by playing.

• 2:18:13Speaker 00

  Right. And again, coming back to the parent-child thing, I think it's a natural part of a child's development to feel the power struggle, right? It's like, initially, when the child's very young, the parents have full power and control. The child is very dependent. The child, the child pretty much goes along with whatever the parent says or does. They get to adolescence, what do they do? They start testing the power dynamic, right? They start pushing back, they start manipulating, they start cutting corners, like, you know, deceiving a little bit. And a lot of that is a natural part of their psychological development, not only to develop their own identity, but also to like, push boundaries and see what they can get away with, and what they're capable of doing.

• 2:18:57Speaker 00

  And what often happens is that power struggle, you know, especially if there's kind of an unhealthy family dynamic, that power struggle perpetuates well into adulthood for the child. And so you get, I mean, I know I struggled with this for a long time. It's very, very common, like, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, they still have a lot of resentment and frustration and like, baggage and bullshit. You know, they go home for the holidays every year, and it's like, they're just butting heads with their mom, or their dad, or whatever it is. And a lot of it is, they're still in that power struggle. They're still seeing the relationship in terms of the respect they're not getting, or the approval that they never got, or the type of relationship they thought they should have always had, but they never, you know,

• 2:19:41Speaker 00

  the parent never showed up in the way that they wanted. And it's funny, because I've seen this both in my own life, I've seen it in my wife, with her parents, I've seen it with a lot of friends at this point. You hit a point in adulthood where you just let go. And you're like, mom and dad, they weren't perfect, they fucked some things up. Who cares? Like, you just stop caring. And it's funny, because as soon as you let it go, everything gets so much better. Everything gets better. And I think that parent-child relationship, it goes through a lot of different phases. That gets very complicated, whereas I think when you're talking about like,

• 2:20:20Speaker 00

  Friendships and romantic relationships, I think you should go to whatever length possible to just not introduce any sort of power dynamic whatsoever.

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because getting out of that power dynamic, that's gonna, yeah.

• 2:20:31Speaker 00

  It sucks. And it happens, I mean, in romantic relationships, it gets really ugly emotionally, but even friendships, like there are a lot of unhealthy friendships that are ultimately like two people kind of locked in a status game. And, uh, and yeah, it gets, it gets ugly and dramatic for, for people to remove themselves. And it's like, when you're in that status game, when you're in that power game, that's when you start justifying all the manipulation to yourself. You're like, well, I'm gonna lie to this person to get this thing because I deserve it because they haven't treated me right, right? You start, you create all those stories for yourself and that justifies your bad behavior.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  Crazy stories around how I'm not getting my needs met here, and so I'm gonna act out in some way to get those needs met. And

• 2:21:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  That's justified now.

• 2:21:16Speaker 00

  Which is Emerson's power dependence theory, right? And it's like, he said that it's when people feel out of power, that's when they start becoming manipulative. Whereas when people feel empowered in their relationship, and to bring Machiavelli back into it, and Kant, a very practical argument for treating people well is that if people feel empowered, they have no reason to manipulate you, right? Speaking as an employer, right? It's like, if I empower you guys, then hopefully you never feel a need to like, lie to me or bullshit me, right? Because you know, you can just come to me and tell me whatever you're thinking or whatever idea you have. Whereas if somebody is wielding their power over you and like

• 2:21:59Speaker 00

  weaponizing it against you, that's when you have to start justifying a lot of shitty behavior.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, I think that ties up all of this really well, actually. Yeah.

• 2:22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is why I give you tummy rubs.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  If only.

• 2:22:13Speaker 00

  So you'll keep showing up for podcasts. It's a very transactional relationship.

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it's consensual.

• 2:22:20Speaker 00

  It's consensual, very consensual. This is getting very weird.

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  Bring us home, Mark.

• 2:22:27Speaker 00

  Oh, God. All right. So, so in chapter one, we talked about how everybody manipulates. It's just a fundamental part of human social life. Manipulation is just, it is inherent in our communication and, and how we approach the world, for better or worse. Everybody's doing it all the time. We're terrible at detecting it. It's really just a question of how much are you doing it? And what is motivating why you're doing it? Chapter two, we've talked about the ethical concerns around manipulation. What makes it okay? What makes it not okay? What are, what are the different dynamics at play? Probably the, the two most important principles from this chapter is, is one is the publicity test, right? It's

• 2:23:12Speaker 00

  like, the way to know if manipulation is ethical is that if everybody became aware of it, they would probably approve of it. Um, we talked about, you know, the family secrets that after finding out, being like, okay, yeah, that should probably be a family secret.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:30Speaker 00

  Or telling a good friend, um, you know, supporting a good friend in a, in a relationship that you don't think is really working out. But, you know, if they found out that you were doing that, they would actually be happy that you were supporting their relationship despite believing that it's not really going to work out. The second key principle here is, is the power dependency theory of, of understanding how power dynamics partly dictate when manipulation can be ethical and when it can be unethical. We also talked about the traps and pitfalls of justifying terrible behavior by rendering oneself powerless or believing oneself to be powerless. Um, and how also disempowering people promotes

• 2:24:14Speaker 00

  manipulative behavior, um, which I think is, is just a lesson that seems to be needed to be learned over and over again throughout history, um, and by every parent around the world. So I think now that we've spent a couple hours kind of setting the table of explaining all of the evolutionary and sociological reasons why we manipulate, talking about the ethical concerns around manipulation, the organizational behavior around manipulation, some of the political concerns around manipulation. So in chapter three, we're getting into all of the nitty gritty tactics and principles of human persuasion and influence. And I

• 2:24:56Speaker 00

  think this is something that everybody should just know. It's funny because a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about in the next chapter, I learned when I studied sales and marketing. But after learning it, I'm like, this should just be taught in high school. Like, everybody should know these things. Also, most of what we've talked about up until now has been about individuals and individual manipulators. But what happens when a lot of these tools of manipulation are scaled across entire societies? What does that mean for us? Hold that thought. We will be right back after this. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Shopify. Now, I've talked to a lot of people over the years about their regrets, all the things that they wish they

• 2:25:36Speaker 00

  did, but they never did. And no one has ever told me, man, I wish I sat around and waited a few more years before I started that business idea. People do not regret starting. They regret the waiting. So while there's never a perfect time to launch an online store, right now is as good as there's ever gonna be. Black Friday is only a few weeks out, and that's when more people are already in the buying mood, which means that they could be buying things from you. But Mark, a few weeks isn't enough time, says who? Getting a store up takes less time than you would guess, and probably less time than you've spent daydreaming about it in the shower. Now with Shopify, you pick a pre-built theme or let the AI site builder put one together for you, and you've got a store that looks legit without touching a line of code. Now, once you're set up, Shopify's mobile app

• 2:26:18Speaker 00

  lets you run the store from your phone. Track inventory while wrapping presents, handle payments from the airport, or even answer customers while watching the football game. Now Shopify makes it so easy, there's no reason for that idea to die in your notes app. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/solved to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/solved. Go to Shopify.com/solved today to hear your first cha-ching.

• 2:26:47Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Purpose. It's funny, we spend so much time worrying about being manipulated by other people, when most of the time, we're actually manipulating ourselves. We twist that fight with a close friend so that we come out the hero. We tell ourselves that we'll write the book or start the new exercise routine when things finally calm down, as if things have ever been calm. And sure, after this episode, you'll probably notice yourself doing this more. But your brain is very invested in making you look good to yourself, which means catching it in the act is nearly impossible. Purpose is an AI mentor that will not let you get away with that crap. Chatbots like ChatGPT manipulate you into liking them. They fawn over you and agree with every passing thought. Purpose, on the other hand, is built to push back. So when your version of that fight

• 2:27:32Speaker 00

  starts to sound a little bit too flattering, it will call you out and then give you the next step to work on it so that it goes different next time. Over 98% of users have rated Purpose as either life-changing or helpful, and it has a 4.9 rating on the App Store because it's pretty fucking awesome. You can start for free today by going to mark.deals/purpose. That's mark.deals/purpose. And we're back. Let's get right back into it.

• 2:28:03Speaker 00

  So the year is 1917, it's April, and President Woodrow Wilson gets Congress to declare war to enter World War I in Europe. Now, this was highly unpopular at the time. The US public was largely against the war, and ironically, Woodrow Wilson ran on a campaign in 1916, bragging that he had kept the US out of the war in Europe. But he changed his mind. He declared war. Troops were going to be sent abroad. And his administration decided to organize something called the US Committee of Public Information, which at the time had the explicit aim of influencing public opinion to convince people to be more supportive

• 2:28:43Speaker 00

  of the war. Now, it's important to set some context here, that back in the early 1900s, marketing wasn't really a thing. Public relations wasn't really understood in the way that we understand it. If you ever go look back at the history of advertising, it's, it's actually quite amusing. If you look at advertisements from the early 1900s or late 1800s, it's all very factual and, and like, uh, technical, you know?

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  Functional, yeah.

• 2:29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, uh, use Crest toothpaste. It is, uh, 3.8% more likely to prevent cavities with your favorite dentist says. And it's just like, very bland. It's like reading an instruction manual explaining the features of whatever product, uh, is being shown to you. There was no concept or understanding of brand, mood affiliation, pairing two experiences with one another, tapping into people's concept of identity and class and political views and all of that. So at the time, A committee for public information. I mean, it was really, the initial goal was to basically just get lots of pamphlets and speeches out to convince people rationally

• 2:29:53Speaker 00

  that the war was a good idea. Now, there was a man on this committee named Edward Bernays, and Bernays was a little bit of a prodigy. He was incredibly insightful, had a deep understanding of human psychology, and was incredibly prolific during this period. And he was impressed with how well you could manipulate masses of people at scale through the use of information. Now, the other thing that was really interesting about Edward Bernays is that he was Sigmund Freud's nephew. He had grown up spending summers with Uncle Siggy, as he called him. And so, he was, at the time, Sigmund Freud, he was pretty well-renowned in Europe, but his ideas hadn't really permeated much in the United States, and they certainly

• 2:30:38Speaker 00

  had not been applied to any sort of commercial use by that point. But Bernays had the brilliant insight to connect the psychological principles of Freudian psychoanalysis with the dissemination of information to masses of people to influence opinion and to convince them to maybe buy something that they normally wouldn't buy. After the war ended, Bernays went off on his own and started what today we would call an advertising or a PR agency. Modern marketing and PR was very much invented by Bernays over the following 20 years. Bernays went on to apply these psychological principles of influence and manipulation to some of

• 2:31:20Speaker 00

  the most successful marketing campaigns that had ever existed in the world up until that point. So, one of his first big successes was American Tobacco came to him in 1929, and they complained that women were not smoking enough cigarettes, that men were smoking cigarettes, but women, it was still seen as unladylike for her to smoke. And they asked if he could change that. And so, through a series of brilliant publicity stunts, he attached smoking to the women's suffrage movement, which was a major political movement at the time, and made it politically fashionable and trendy for smart, educated women to be seen

• 2:32:02Speaker 00

  smoking cigarettes in public. He kind of associated it with a form of political resistance. This was the first time anything like this had ever been done, and it was massively successful. The other thing he did around that time is a bacon company came to him wanting to sell more bacon. And so, he did something that's really funny in hindsight, which is that he went out and surveyed 5,000 doctors. And guess what? 90% of those doctors agree that bacon is the best breakfast for your health. And so, he started running advertisements saying, 4,000 doctors have agreed that bacon is the best thing to have for breakfast. Guess what? Bacon became really popular for breakfast. Over the next two to three decades,

• 2:32:44Speaker 00

  he had some of the most wildly successful advertising and marketing campaigns in the world. He was the first person who came up with the idea to have celebrities endorse products. He was the first person to invent the idea of an advertorial. So, something that's sadly very common these days, which is that you basically go and pay a magazine to write an article about your product as if it's a piece of journalism, but really it's just kind of a very subtle form of advertising for that product. He innovated the product contest. So, Ivory Soap wanted to appeal to more of a family market. So, he created a contest where the kids who carved the best sculpture in their Ivory Soap

• 2:33:27Speaker 00

  bar would win a prize. And then, that winning soap could be publicized across the country again. So, he could almost actually double dip with that campaign. You get the initial campaign, which is the announcement of the contest, and then you choose the winner of the contest, and then that becomes another newsworthy item to get the product advertised in thousands and thousands of places, essentially for free a second time. In many ways, I actually think there's potentially an interesting debate of like, who actually is more influential? Freud or Bernays? Like, obviously intellectually and philosophically Freud is more influential, but I think if you look at the actual impact on society and the way day-to-day human life

• 2:34:12Speaker 00

  works, I think it'd be hard to argue that Bernays has not been more influential.

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Sigmund Freud's books, he brought them to the United States, had them translated and distributed.

• 2:34:21Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  Freud actually had to flee Europe and go to England because of Nazi Germany and everything. So, that was a big line of finances for Freud. It was actually the translation into English, and that's how a lot of the psychologists like knew about Freud.

• 2:34:35Speaker 00

  I completely forgot about that, because not only did he bring the books to the US, but then he publicized them and took excerpts of them, put them and placed them in magazines, and ran all of the advertising playbook to turn Freud into a brilliant thinker in the US market.

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  There's a fantastic documentary called The Century of the Self. It's on YouTube for free. It's a four-part series. It's like four hours long.

• 2:34:57Speaker 00

  So good.

• 2:34:58Speaker 01

  But it's so good. And I think it'll convince you that, yeah, Bernays is probably one of the most, if not the most influential people of the 20th century, for sure.

• 2:35:06Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  Even above Freud.

• 2:35:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And definitely in terms of like, people who are not a household name, I would say he's definitely the most influential person of the 20th century. It is crazy. I mean, even the stuff that we do today, we're going to talk about this in this chapter, like a lot of these sales tactics, marketing tactics, things that we run on our social media accounts, things that we do on this show, originated with Bernays.

• 2:35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:32Speaker 00

  And his insights into human psychology and how to market to people.

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. The ironic thing, he wasn't a personable guy.

• 2:35:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:35:39Speaker 01

  That's probably why we don't know. He wasn't very personal. He wasn't very good with the public himself, but he understood the public very well and was able to manipulate them in a lot of ways, too. So, yeah.

• 2:35:47Speaker 00

  He was not very likable.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  No, he wasn't. His own daughter will tell you that.

• 2:35:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Freud was also not very likable, but somehow he kind of survived, I guess, just the nature of his genius kind of survived a little bit more intact. Bernays was very unlikable. He was also kind of on the wrong side of history in a lot of ways. He did write a book in 1928 called Propaganda. At the time, all of this stuff that we're talking about, publicity, marketing, advertising, it was all called propaganda. And he was a huge proponent of it. Like, he actually believed it was a force for good in society. There's a quote from his book where he said, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a necessary part of democratic society." So, he actually believed that it was incumbent on the elites to manipulate the masses.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  Right. To shape public opinion.

• 2:36:36Speaker 00

  To get them to do what was best for themselves.

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:39Speaker 00

  He describes social engineering as a public service, and he called it the engineering of consent.

• 2:36:45Speaker 01

  He wrote a book earlier, too, called The Crystallization of Public Opinion, I think, as well. And that, it was very much, he was just like, no, this is a good thing. We have to use it for good. We have to shape this in a way that the elite can rule from a noble place, is the way he saw it. A lot of other people did not agree with that.

• 2:37:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  As we'll see.

• 2:37:03Speaker 00

  And unfortunately, some of the people that were paying attention and taking notes on Bernays and his methods were the Nazis. And Joseph Goebbels, in particular, was a huge fan of Bernays's work and applied a lot of these same principles to craft and promote Nazi propaganda across Germany, which was unbelievably effective when leveraged for political uses. A lot of governments have used a lot of this stuff to manufacture consent among the populations to justify pretty heinous and terrible belief systems and actions on behalf of the people. Bernays, I'm not going to say he was a Nazi supporter. Like, he didn't-

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  He was Jewish, first of all.

• 2:37:48Speaker 00

  He was Jewish, first of all. Like, he didn't, it's not like he was out there like waving a Nazi flag, but like, there was a lot of, let's just call it sympathy.

• 2:37:56Speaker 01

  He called it fascism light, right? Or something like that? He had a phrase, something like that.

• 2:38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, he did. He did call it fascism light.

• 2:38:02Speaker 01

  Or it was like, you apply this to market principles and call it fascism light in service of the greater good.

• 2:38:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:38:08Speaker 01

  But he was appalled when he found out that Goebbels was a fan of his, but at the same time, too, he was like-

• 2:38:15Speaker 00

  He was not, he was not a Nazi supporter, but it was also like, he didn't really have a problem with their propaganda. Now, I wanted to start with Bernays for this section because I think if we're actually going to study manipulation, I think the best place to study it is sales and marketing. Like when we went into this episode, it wasn't obvious to me that we were going to talk about a lot of sales and marketing concepts, but where human influence is practiced, optimized, mastered, it's, it's around sales and marketing because that's where it's most profitable. Salesmen and marketers have been crafting a lot of these manipulative techniques.

• 2:38:55Speaker 00

  It's often referred to as persuasion, influence, branding, publicity, but ultimately what everybody's doing is they are trying to manipulate you into perceiving a certain product or a certain person in a positive light to engender a certain demand for it, create curiosity, intrigue. And so in those fields, this literature is actually incredibly well-developed and there are techniques and practices that have been working for almost a century at this point. And I think it's the, actually the best place to start to understand, okay, if you want to be persuasive, or if you want to influence people, or if you want to manipulate people, this is what works. If I was

• 2:39:37Speaker 00

  to recommend a single book for people to read around this, it would be Robert Cialdini's Influence. Anybody who goes into any sorts of sales job, marketing job, advertising job, it is one of the first books that you have to read. And it's written by a professor named Robert Cialdini. The origin of how he got into this research is actually really funny, which is when he was a struggling college student and didn't have a whole lot of money, he kept finding himself buying a bunch of crap from door-to-door salesmen that he didn't actually want. And so he was like, barely had any money, somebody knock on his door, start offering to sell him a set of encyclopedias or something, and he'd say yes, and he'd like, write a check and hand over like, the little bit of money he had in his bank account. And it reached a point after a while

• 2:40:21Speaker 00

  that he was like, why do I keep doing this? Like, I don't want this stuff, but I keep saying yes to these salespeople. How does this keep happening? So, once he got to grad school, he started studying this question. Like, how do you get people to yes? How do you get people to agree to things that in many cases, they don't actually want to do? What is it about a great salesperson that convinces people to buy something, even if they initially didn't want to buy it? Cialdini identified six principles of human influence or persuasion. We're going to start with those six principles because they cover a lot of ground. And then we'll get into some other kind of tactical or psychological tricks and, and things that people use. You see

• 2:41:02Speaker 00

  a lot in sales tactics. As we go, we will see lots and lots and lots of examples and applications of how this affects our day-to-day life, and hopefully how we can be more aware of all the many ways that we are influenced and manipulated by others. So, so the first of Cialdini's six principles is reciprocity. And this is, this is the classic case that if you go up to somebody and ask them for a favor, chances are they might say no, but if you approach them with a gift and then ask them for a favor, they are far, far more likely to say yes to whatever you ask for. So, there are tons of experiments that did this. They did this with students with Coke bottles. So, they originally walked, walked up to students and asked them

• 2:41:45Speaker 00

  to buy raffle tickets. The majority of students said no, and then they started handing out free bottles of Coke, and then asked the, the students who'd received the Coke if they wanted to buy a raffle ticket. And overwhelmingly, the students started buying raffle tickets. You see this with waiters. There was a study that found that waiters who left a mint or a piece of candy for customers got slightly larger tips. You see this all the time at grocery stores with free samples in front of the aisles. They're not doing that just because they're really, really nice. They're doing that because you are actually much more likely to buy the product after you've tried the free sample. You see this everywhere. Like, this is-

• 2:42:21Speaker 01

  You're creating a debt. Like, they're creating a debt. That's what they're doing, a social debt, and they're taking advantage of that little urge you have inside of you to repay that debt.

• 2:42:29Speaker 00

  We talked last year on the friendship episode about the tit-for-tat evolutionary strategy. Basically, for people who don't recall that episode, we are very much evolutionarily predisposed to reciprocate to the people around us. So, if somebody is nice to us, we are more likely to be nice back. If somebody's mean to us, we're going to be mean back. This is kind of our, our default setting of how we just approach all social interactions. There's a very logical evolutionary explanation for it. If you want to nerd out really hard on that explanation, go check out that episode. But yes, this is essentially the tit-for-tat strategy, being weaponized to sell shit.

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. We, we watch out for this one. It was where the imbalance is. So, like, it's never a one-to-one reciprocity thing, usually when it comes to sales and marketing, right? I went on an all-inclusive trip one time, right, to a resort, and they gave, you've got a free massage, right? Oh, great. You get, here's a free massage. It turned into a six-hour pitch for basically like a timeshare, more or less. And I had to turn, it was like a $10,000 package or something like that for an hour-long massage. The imbalance there is obvious. That's where it becomes real manipulation, right?

• 2:43:35Speaker 00

  See, if they had offered you a belly rub-

• 2:43:38Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:43:38Speaker 00

  Then we would, we would be doing this in your timeshare in Florida at the moment.

• 2:43:42Speaker 01

  All they had to do was roll me over. That's right. That's right.

• 2:43:44Speaker 00

  That's what she said.

• 2:43:47Speaker 00

  So, there are ways to abuse this as well. You see in dating, people will, will just bombard women with gifts, right? Just start buying them tons and tons of stuff. And it, there's a really manipulative motive behind that, which is that the more stuff he buys you, the more you're going to feel indebted to him to spend time with him, get intimate with him, whatever it is.

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  Or even just, you know, buying a, somebody a drink at a bar. Like, now you're, now you have to talk to me.

• 2:44:18Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. Now you have to, now you have to sit there for five minutes, right? This is actually a way that cults recruit people. So, cults will send people out into the world, and they will actually just walk around and give people gifts. They'll give them flowers, they'll give them food, they'll give them all sorts of things, and then offer them to come to a free seminar to learn more about, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. When I was in university, we were right next to a Planned Parenthood clinic. And sometimes there were a lot of like angry religious protesters outside of the clinic. But other times, there would be missionaries, and they would stand out there, and they would actually hand out like free snacks, pamphlets, books, copies of the Bible. And they were really friendly. They would like, sit there and they'd be like, hey, man, you want, you want like a, you know, a free popsicle?

• 2:45:03Speaker 00

  It'd be like a really hot day, and I'd be like, yeah, sure. And then they'd be like, do you have a minute for Jesus? I'm like, oh, fuck.

• 2:45:11Speaker 01

  It's happened all the time in campus when I was going to college, too. Yeah, handing out free stuff. Come sign this petition, come to our church group, come, yeah. This happened all the time. Again, that imbalance is what I always look for, though. It's like, here's a little piece of candy. Now give me, you know, two hours a week for the rest of your life. Not going to happen.

• 2:45:28Speaker 00

  I ain't that cheap.

• 2:45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:29Speaker 00

  The second principle is commitment and consistency. So, this one is really interesting, and, and you see this happen a lot, especially around like political views. Basically, if people kind of publicly take a stance or a position on something, if they are publicly seen doing something or supporting something, they are going to be massively predisposed to continue to support or do that thing. Basically, psychologically, we talked about this in the ego episode, that like, there's a, there's a fundamental psychological need for us to have a consistent view of ourselves, to not view ourselves in contradictory ways, to, to kind of see ourselves as like, you know, fundamentally about A, B, C, and D. And of course, you can

• 2:46:14Speaker 00

  manipulate this. So, one experiment that they did in the 1960s is they went around to homeowners, and they asked them to put a small sticker in their window, asking people to be a safe driver. And a lot of people said yes to this. And then they went around, and they asked people if they would put these gigantic, gaudy, ugly signs in their yards, saying, please be a safe driver. Now, when they just went to random people, the vast majority of people said, no, I don't want that sign in my yard. But when they went to the people that they had already asked to put a sticker in the window- The majority of them said, yeah, sure, put the sign in the yard because they've already got the sticker. So why not? You see this a lot in sales is kind of like, like an escalation,

• 2:46:56Speaker 00

  right? So what a lot of savvy salesmen will do is they won't immediately show up and try to sell you the $10,000 package. They will show up and they will sell you the $100 package and make it really enticing and exciting. And then you agree to the $100 package. And then they're like, well, while you're here, we've got this other exciting add-on for just $900 more. You could have the $1,000 package and you can get this and this and this and the other thing. And it turns out you're way more likely to take it. And then, once you have the $1,000 package, you're like, but wait, there's more. We've got this super deluxe VIP package that is really only for exclusive customers that only you happen to qualify for, for $10,000. And sure enough, you're far more likely

• 2:47:38Speaker 00

  to take the package. In sales, this is often called upselling. It's a classic in the internet marketing space. We've done it in the past. Pretty much every online business does it in some shape or form. If you immediately try to pitch somebody a $150 product, the conversion rate, you know, it'll be so-so, kind of piss poor. But if you sell them a $20 product and then offer them the $150 product, the conversion rate is so much higher.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  Because you're trying to generate that consistency.

• 2:48:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:48:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you're the type of person, especially with information products, right?

• 2:48:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:48:10Speaker 01

  And like learning products. You're the type of person who wants to learn this and get better at this and upskill at this, right? Well, if you're that type of person, then here's one that's even better. And they just, yeah, you could ride the escalator all the way up. Another interesting example, I'm pretty sure this was in Chiellini's book. And he said, one time, I think it was like an attractive woman came, it was a door-to-door salesman, kind of attractive woman, started asking him questions, you know, like, oh, are you a, are you a fan of the arts? And he's like, well, of course I am, you know, I'm a very cultured man, all this.

• 2:48:35Speaker 00

  Very sophisticated guy.

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  Very sophisticated. And he was like a young, broke guy, you know, whatever. Well, she was selling packages, I think it was for like a orchestra or something like that, right? And so first get them to say, yeah, I'm somebody who is a fan of the arts and supports the arts. And now I'm going to say, oh, well, then you wouldn't mind buying this, this orchestra package that we have, you know, for a subscription to the orchestra. So again, it's just like finding a way to make you stay consistent in what you're saying and doing and thinking. Yeah.

• 2:49:01Speaker 00

  So this is weaponized a lot for political causes. So in California, we have a lot of referendums, which is basically policies that are kind of pitched to the population, the state population. And then we all vote in November, whether we want that to become a law or not. In theory, it's great, right? More democracy is great. But in practice, it gets abused and just misrepresented and manipulated all the time. And so what I've noticed is like, starting around this time of year, we're recording this in October, we're about a month out from, from the election. Right now, almost every single day, I'm getting something in the mail saying like, do you support affordable housing? And I'm like, well, of course. Who fucking doesn't?

• 2:49:41Speaker 01

  That's classic, yeah.

• 2:49:42Speaker 00

  And then you open up and it's like, vote for proposition, whatever, whatever. And then you actually, you know, you actually go to Google and Google the proposition. And there's all this shit in there that has nothing to do with affordable housing. They take something that is like very obviously likeable and agreeable. And then they like staple on whatever, you know, whatever thing they actually want you to do off the back of that. And so you kind of get, you know, just strong-armed into doing it. Next principle, this is a big one. This is my favorite. Social proof.

• 2:50:12Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 2:50:13Speaker 00

  People tend to value and pay attention to whatever other people value and pay attention to. It's such a simple principle, but it applies to so many things in life. It's basically, if you can make something appear popular in any way, shape or form, people are more likely to want it. They're more likely to listen to, to a person. This works on like even a miniscule scale, like hotels have found that sometimes when you go into a hotel, a hotel room and in the bathroom, they'll have like a little card and it says like, please reuse your towel or whatever. What they found is that if they change the copy on that card to say, most guests reuse their towel, people are actually much more likely

• 2:50:56Speaker 00

  to reuse their towel because it says, most other guests are reusing their towels as well. So we tend to default to doing what the other people are doing around us or what we see other people doing. There was another fun experiment where they just had people go stand outside beneath a skyscraper and stare up at the building. And then they just stopped and watched to see how many other people would stop and stare up at the building and for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And it turns out, a lot of people did.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  Or nightclubs, they'll have a line going up the door, right?

• 2:51:26Speaker 00

  Oh, dude.

• 2:51:27Speaker 01

  And that's all engineered.

• 2:51:28Speaker 00

  I got stories, man.

• 2:51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:30Speaker 00

  First of all, to everybody, PSA, never spend a dollar in a nightclub.

• 2:51:34Speaker 01

  Okay, I was just gonna say, Mark has, Mark has plenty of experience about.

• 2:51:38Speaker 00

  I, let me get my soapbox out. Take it from me, kids. As a guy who spent way too much fucking time and money in nightclubs, for God's sake, do not buy a VIP table. It is the biggest scam in the history of scams.

• 2:51:51Speaker 01

  You cross a rope and prices go up by, yeah, four or five times. Yeah.

• 2:51:55Speaker 00

  One of my best friends in Boston was a nightclub promoter and man, he had such fucked up stories. Just as an experiment, he was kind of curious. It was, it was kind of a slower night and then the club wasn't full. And so what he did is he took one of the tables, he moved it, he pulled it out from the VIP section and kind of put it like right next to the dance floor. And then just put four velvet ropes in a square around that table and put a reserve sign on it. It wasn't reserved. There was nobody on it. And he said, immediately guys started coming up to him and asking if they could reserve it. Cause it was like, the prominence and the social proof and this like manufactured demand for this non-existent thing just started driving people crazy and they, they wanted to pay tons and tons of money for it. I mean, obviously you see this with product

• 2:52:40Speaker 00

  reviews, you see this with social media likes and follows, like the peer pressure of trying to get, get somebody to do something maybe they don't want to do. You say like, everybody's doing it, man. This is like the coolest thing. It's really hip right now. It's really trendy. We all just feel this kind of natural pull of like, okay, well, I guess I should probably do that.

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  Bernays was the first one to kind of use the celebrity endorsement too. So like the social proof around the status of the person. We'll get into authority here in a second, but one area that I think is maybe problematic these days, maybe I want to get your take a little bit on this. Gambling sites, you know, it's like, especially in the US, they've like gone nuts since the Supreme Court ruling, like opened it all up to states, right? And now you're seeing like LeBron James promoting sports betting.

• 2:53:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:53:25Speaker 01

  Apps. These business models are built on you losing money. That's how they make money.

• 2:53:31Speaker 00

  Predatory, yeah.

• 2:53:31Speaker 01

  It's, it is predatory, right? And yet you have somebody like a LeBron James or, you know, Kevin Hart was big on those for a long time too. What the hell? Some of these contracts are bigger than like LeBron James's contract.

• 2:53:43Speaker 00

  So I've got a crazy story around this. So the, the World Cup this past year, the way World Cup TV rights work is that every, every four years FIFA goes to each country and allows the TV networks in that country to bid on the contract for the World Cup. So something crazy happened in Brazil this last year. The biggest Twitch and YouTube streamer in Brazil won the contract for the World Cup. I think he had 40% of the games. He had rights to broadcast them.

• 2:54:14Speaker 01

  He, he, he outbid all the major broadcasters in Brazil.

• 2:54:18Speaker 00

  He, but he outbid like, yes, all, all the network, all of them, except for one. There was a, the main one down there is called Globo. I think they, they, they kept the finals and the semifinals and everything and, and like a lot of the games. But I think he ended up with like 35, 40% of the games. He was the only place you could go to watch it. Tens of millions of people started watching this random Brazilian streamer to watch the World Cup games. And all of my friends down there, they said it was awful because the whole time, all he did was promote sports betting and prop bets. So, so through the whole game, it was just him and his friends betting live on stream about who was going to score the next goal or like who was going to get the next penalty or whatever. And they had QR

• 2:55:01Speaker 00

  codes up on the screen. It's very clear that what happened is that the sports betting sites went to him and they're like, we will fund your bid for the World Cup games. And, and then he actually won. Like, I can't even imagine how much money it required for him to get it. It's really fucked up. And what's, what was even more fucked up, this drove me crazy because, you know, I follow a lot of in kind of industry news sites in our industry, you know, like the creator industries, like podcasters, YouTubers, whatnot. All of these news websites here in the US started running these big stories about this guy, about how like he had, you know, 15 million concurrent viewers, Brazilian streamer, largest streamer in the world and like celebrating him. And I'm like, dude, this is fucking corruption.

• 2:55:43Speaker 00

  Like it's just a sports betting corruption. This is especially true online. Some crazy post goes viral. It has tens of millions of views and there's this illusion of importance, even though it may not actually be important. This is all social proof kind of being leveraged and manipulated against us.

• 2:56:01Speaker 01

  And then you bring it down to a smaller scale too, like reviews, like Amazon reviews and stuff like that, how much those have been manipulated or fabricated or people get paid to do them, you know, and they try to have checks around it and stuff like that. But, you know, just reviews in general on any site.

• 2:56:14Speaker 00

  You used to be able to buy followers, right? Like you don't really see it as much nowadays because I think they've gotten really good at cracking down on it. And I think also just people are a little bit smarter and less gullible around stuff like that. I can't tell you how many, how many messages and DMs I've gotten from people with 10 million followers, but like zero engagement on their account, asking me to like come on their show or, you know, do a collaboration with them or something. And I'm like, eh. Pretty sure that-

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  They're trying to leverage that social proof. Look how many followers they have.

• 2:56:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a bunch of bots. So next one, very similar to social proof is authority. So we instinctually defer to people that we perceive as experts or people who have status, people who have titles, uniforms, credentials. There's a set of famous studies from the 1970s called the Milgram experiments that tested this to some kind of horrifying results where they brought people in and had them sit across through, through a one sided window, looking at another person. The person on the other side was supposed to answer questions. And each time the person on the other side got a question wrong, the person administering the experiment would tell the subject to press a button, which would electrocute them. And everything was staged. It was all set up.

• 2:57:30Speaker 00

  The person sitting on the other side of the window was like just another researcher. They were kind of a decoy. But the test was to see how often and to what extent each subject was willing to electrocute another person, simply because like a scientist with a clipboard was telling them to. And it turns out a lot more than you would like.

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, like a vast majority of them either too.

• 2:57:52Speaker 00

  A vast majority of them did it. And a lot of them did it to an extent that like is morally concerning.

• 2:57:58Speaker 01

  Right. A lot of scams these days operate on this too. You know, they're calling from like the IRS if in the US or social security or something like that. And you're automatically like, oh no, it's this big scary bureaucracy that's going to come down on me and take all my money if they want to, or anything like that. Scam artists will take advantage of that. I've had people in my family actually fall for this. Yeah, happens in our industry a lot too. Won't name names, but there's, you know, there's a lot of people who have, you know, credentials behind their names where I've went and fact checked some of them. And that's not, no, that isn't quite what's happening here. What are you doing?

• 2:58:31Speaker 00

  I mean, we do it to a certain, I mean, obviously we try to stick to the data and actually dig into the research and everything. But I mean, there are times where we're just like, like, oh, this really smart guy said this thing and you know, and we just kind of-

• 2:58:41Speaker 01

  You go with it.

• 2:58:42Speaker 00

  You go with it. And I think one way to look at all these things that these, these are heuristics for us to manage large quantities of information and make decisions that are usually going to be correct, but not always correct. Right? So like social proof, it makes sense that we evolved a mechanism to be influenced by, by the crowd, right? Because it's generally, not always, but generally if a bunch of people are running in one direction, you probably shouldn't ask questions. You should probably run with them.

• 2:59:10Speaker 01

  More often than not.

• 2:59:11Speaker 00

  More often than not. Similarly, it's like if somebody has spent their life working on something, developing mastery over something or developing expertise over something, and they have the credentials to back it up, nine times out of 10, like, yeah, you should probably just listen to them. Like they probably do know what they're talking about. Obviously they don't always know what they're talking about. And there are very notable exceptions where they abuse their authority or abuse the, the trust that people put in them. But the whole system of credentials that we built society upon, it exists for a reason. It is so that we can make these quick judgments without having to actually like go fact check every single thing every person says.

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  I like Nassim Taleb's kind of rule of thumb on this though, too. The Skin in the Game, that book he wrote about that, where it's like, I'm going to pay more attention to an expert who actually has some skin in the game, like a plumber, okay? Who's been around for a while, I'm going to trust him. His expert opinion on something where it's like, you know, an economist or something like that has some crazy theory. I don't care if he's at Harvard or anything like that. Does his paycheck depend on him being right or wrong? Or is he just throwing out ideas? Right? That I think is a good heuristic around authority where it's like, okay, yes, this person's a person of authority. Do I blindly trust them? Well, if they have a lot of skin in the game, more likely that you can trust them.

• 3:00:27Speaker 00

  Are they just a guy in an ivory tower, you know, who's never-

• 3:00:31Speaker 01

  Not, not to say that those people don't have something to say. Like I said, you know, they, there are genuinely academic experts who, you know, do have something to contribute. I'm just saying the closer they are to, to where the rubber hits the road on, on their own theories or, or job.

• 3:00:44Speaker 00

  The more dependable they-

• 3:00:45Speaker 01

  More dependable, you can probably rely on them, yeah.

• 3:00:48Speaker 00

  A thought I just had, kind of going through this.

• 3:00:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:00:50Speaker 00

  I would argue that the internet is very much undermining or disrupting our usual associations with authority.

• 3:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:58Speaker 00

  Right? Today, at least in our lifetime today, and probably definitely in the, like, at least the last hundred years, I think people are more skeptical of experts and authorities today than any other time before. At least in, in recent history. And similarly, I think people are more skeptical of social proof today. Like if you think back to the 1950s or 1960s, it was very much like you go, go with the crowd. I mean, a lot of the problems in the 20th century emerged because everybody kind of just blindly went with the crowd. Whereas I think today we almost have the opposite problem, which is that people are instinctually skeptical of the crowd all the time. And they're constantly questioning the prevailing ethos or, or belief system is.

• 3:01:43Speaker 00

  And they're constantly questioning like what the authorities are saying. And it's understandable because I think we are more aware than ever before of like the flaws and mistakes of experts and authorities and different organizations and social institutions and whatnot. But at the same time, like you can't just fact check everything all the time. Like we, at some point, we have to trust some people and just go with it. And then I would say on the flip side, I would say the internet has amplified commitment and consistency because everything everybody does now is so potentially public. I think people have gotten a lot more rigid and, and like the stances that they take.

• 3:02:20Speaker 01

  You said this 15 years ago, you know?

• 3:02:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:02:23Speaker 01

  What, are you going to go back on that now?

• 3:02:25Speaker 00

  I mean, how, how many people at this point have been canceled for like, something they tweeted in high school? Like it's, it's getting ridiculous. And then I would say reciprocity, I think, is also gaining an influence and strength with the internet. You're just seeing, seeing that with, with stuff like this podcast, right? Like if you just give value to people freely, they will, they will trust you and they will, they will follow you. Right? Whereas if, if you just kind of stand up and wave your degree around, your PhD around, they're probably going to be a little bit more skeptical right off the bat. Principle number five is really basic, liking. Are you likable? Are you charming? Are you interesting? Are you engaging? Do they find you friendly?

• 3:03:08Speaker 00

  I actually think a lot of liking comes down to relatability. Cialdini, like he did a, he did another book, maybe about 10 years ago called Pre-Suasion. And then he tried to argue that there's a seventh principle called unity, which I think strikes me as very much kind of captured by the moment of just how tribal people are being and how in-group versus out-group people are.

• 3:03:31Speaker 01

  Identity based, yeah.

• 3:03:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just think people tend to like people that are like them. There's tons and tons of research that backs this up. We tend to like people who look like us, people who came from the same place we came from, people who do the same things that we do, people who like the same things that we like. We are just predisposed to like those people because we relate to them. It's easy for us to empathize with them. This is a little bit of the counterweight to Machiavelli. If there isn't a severe power imbalance, like if you're, if you don't wield a bunch of authority over people, you're probably better off influencing with the carrot and not the stick, appearing generous and magnanimous and supportive. Right? And like you, again, coming back to the reciprocity.

• 3:04:14Speaker 00

  And then the last one, and this one is huge in sales and marketing, is scarcity. We tend to value things that seem rare or seem to be disappearing. I could spend the rest of the podcast giving examples of manufactured scarcity. You know, every countdown timer on every sales page is manufactured scarcity.

• 3:04:36Speaker 01

  Refresh the page, see what happens.

• 3:04:38Speaker 00

  Limited time only, you know, only while supplies last. Like there's just so, scarcity is such a powerful lever in, in sales.

• 3:04:48Speaker 01

  And it's pretty easy to manufacture. It is play a little countdown timer, you know, 10 minutes to do this.

• 3:04:53Speaker 00

  You can make anything up.

• 3:04:54Speaker 01

  And you, I feel it's not, I'll be on a website, I'm like, oh my God, I gotta hurry up and I gotta book this.

• 3:04:58Speaker 00

  And it's, and I will say this as somebody who, again, I consider myself somewhat of a Kantian and I, I try to be as like honest and upfront with my audiences as much as possible. And I try to sell in a way that feels like very ethical and, and, and aligned with my values. It is so fucking upsetting how well manufactured scarcity works. So like it is, it is like literally if you just go on the same webpage and like add one line that says, offer expires in three days. It's like your sales double and it's really upsetting.

• 3:05:32Speaker 01

  I remember, we actually did this for the subtle art a little bit, but it was actually, I would say pretty ethical, the way you did it, because there was an actual scarcity around it where I think it was like, you know, the first 100 people to preorder the book or something like that. Right? We had certain levels that we did. You wrote haikus for some people and like, I can only write so many haikus. So we're going to limit this to a hundred people or whatever it was.

• 3:05:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:05:52Speaker 01

  Right? Or, you know, I can only give out so much of this one thing that we have. You know, it's going to cost me too much if we have more. So there was like, but we were generating scarcity around it. I mean, it was actual scarcity though, that we, that we were generating for the most.

• 3:06:04Speaker 00

  I forgot about the haikus.

• 3:06:05Speaker 01

  Remember the haikus?

• 3:06:06Speaker 00

  So for people listening, there was like, I, we ran this, this offer when subtle art came out that I think if you pre-ordered, I think it was like 10 or 20 copies, I would write a personal haiku for you.

• 3:06:16Speaker 01

  That's what it was.

• 3:06:16Speaker 00

  And so I ended up writing probably around like 20, 25 haikus. And some of them, like especially once I like got, you know, 15 deep, they started getting really weird. Like I just started kind of just going with whatever my first impulse was. And so there was some really fucked up stuff. And I think some of the people I sent the haiku to, like they were actually really disappointed. Cause some of them were so weird and, and just like awkward. Shout out, if anybody's got one of those haikus.

• 3:06:42Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, that would be good.

• 3:06:43Speaker 00

  Send them in. I would love to see them again. That'd be a ton of fun. So scarcity is also something that, that I think gets weaponized in human relationships as well. One of the most common ways to manipulate somebody is like, well, I'm only going to be around for another day. So you better do it while I'm still here or-

• 3:07:02Speaker 01

  Just playing hard to get.

• 3:07:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, I'm so busy this weekend. So, you know, unless you reply by tomorrow, like I don't know when I'm going to see you again. It's kind of this game playing that, that happens a lot. You could even argue that no showing or ghosting people is kind of like a, a form of manufactured scarcity or constantly canceling on people. Like it is that playing hard to get or like pulling away at the precise time that like the, the person is going to like, you know, want you to come back even more. I also think there's an inverse of scarcity that's really interesting, which is the abundance of something makes it feel less meaningful. And I mean, we've had a lot of episodes where we talked about how it's the abundance of opportunities and options in modern life is part of our problem.

• 3:07:47Speaker 00

  Sometimes I think part of the reason people don't take news nearly as seriously these days as they used to, is there's just so much of it. Right? It's like you have so many stations that are trying to fill 24 hours news cycles. They're posting constantly, all day, every day, online. And so it's inevitable that the average value of each story that they are broadcasting is is going to decline drastically. And so if the average value of the average story is extremely low, at some point, people just start tuning out. And they're like, well, most of this shit doesn't matter. So like, why am I listening or paying attention in the first place? It's almost like news media became too plentiful. And so it started to kind of become absurd.

• 3:08:32Speaker 00

  And and I also think that's when it started to become like very politically motivated. If there's only so many useful things to cover, but you need to fill 24 hours a day, you might as well fill it with propaganda.

• 3:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was when the cost of distributing information went down so quickly and easily. So now it's like, it's just cheaper to have some pundit on there giving his opinion, you know, 24 hours a day, instead of somebody doing deep investigative journalism. And so when that gets flooded with just the the opinion pieces, right? That drives a cost or the price of everything else down with it. And it becomes cheap and everybody wants it.

• 3:09:10Speaker 00

  I thought about this with this podcast too, like, you know, we've experimented with doing two, two episodes a month, three episodes a month. And it's funny because like, I do think there is something special about making people wait a month.

• 3:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:21Speaker 00

  For a new episode. I mean, first of all, these are long as fuck and it takes people a long time to get through them. But I just feel like if we are blasting people like three times a week, it all just starts to feel interchangeable and it doesn't feel like an event. It doesn't feel special or unique, you know, like I, what I hope for for this, for the audience is that the first week of every month, like, you know, solve dropping is kind of an event. Like you, you see it pop up in your feed and you're just like, oh, hell yeah, it's that time of the month again.

• 3:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've stopped listening to podcasts or watch TV shows or whatever that, you know, went from once a week to three times a week or every single day.

• 3:09:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you

• 3:09:58Speaker 01

  And it's just like

• 3:09:58Speaker 00

  You get kind of desensitized to it, to a certain extent.

• 3:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:01Speaker 00

  So I have a few, few more concepts here that are not, they're not Cialdini's, but these are common concepts. Some of these come from cognitive biases, some of these come from, uh, sales tactics. Some of them are just kind of fundamental psychological principles. But I think they're interesting because you do see them show up a lot when people are kind of manipulating each other, trying to get something out of each other. So the first one is anchoring. This is a sales tactic, but I think it also applies to daily life. Actually, Cialdini talks about this in Influence as well. In sales negotiations, you know, anchoring is really simple. It's like if I am willing to sell you something for a thousand dollars, I might initially ask for $3,000. And you're like, 3,000, that's absurd. Oh, my God.

• 3:10:44Speaker 00

  When we settle on a thousand, that's going to feel like a very reasonable compromise to you. Whereas if I just showed up and asked for a thousand, it might feel like a lot. So anchoring, it's generally like whatever number is said first kind of sets the frame for the rest of the negotiation. So you can be very tactical in terms of like what you lead with to make where you land seem more appealing than maybe it actually is. This can work the other way around as well, uh, in, in other ways. Like, so we talked earlier about the consistency thing, like if you get somebody to commit to something small, they're much large, like more likely to commit to something large.

• 3:11:19Speaker 01

  Why do you think there's three tiers for every single, you know, thing online? It's because they're anchoring you.

• 3:11:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:11:24Speaker 01

  Right? Like, oh, they've got this real expensive option over here. You've got this real cheap one over here. This one in the middle looks just about right though, doesn't it?

• 3:11:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So those three options are, they are designed in a very specific way so that the expensive one looks a little bit overpriced. The cheap one looks like you're not getting a whole lot. So the middle one looks perfect. And you're like, wow, that's a lot of value for a reasonable price, you know? And it's like, they've studied these things, they've tested it a million times and they're absolutely locked in on what price that should be. You can do this with, with people as well, right? Like it's, it's if you want somebody to do a favor for you, you can show up and ask for a huge favor and then kind of back down and ask for something simple. Cialdini did this himself in the 1970s. He, he had an experiment where he asked students of his if they would chaperone some, uh, delinquents to the zoo for a day. And the majority of them turned it down.

• 3:12:13Speaker 00

  And so then he came back, he asked students to volunteer two hours a week for the next two years. Everybody turned it down, but, but then when he followed it up with, well, would, would, would you take some of these, some of these kids to the zoo for a day? Way more people agreed to do it because it seems so, so less by comparison than than the initial ask.

• 3:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, your brain is a comparison machine.

• 3:12:36Speaker 00

  It is.

• 3:12:37Speaker 01

  The framing sets that there's an anchoring to the framing.

• 3:12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:12:39Speaker 01

  That can be set very easily.

• 3:12:41Speaker 00

  This kind of leads into another tactic in general, which is just the concept of framing itself, right? Like you can frame a problem or a story in so many different ways to kind of dictate what the narrative is around it. It actually took me a while to, to figure this out when I was younger. But, you know, so there were so many criticisms about news media being dishonest. But then it's like, I would actually go like read an article or like watch a segment. And I'm like, well, that is like factually correct. But then what I didn't realize is that they're framing the facts in a certain narrative. They start with a bunch of assumptions that are actually questionable, but they, they take them to be true and then they present a bunch of facts in the context of those assumptions.

• 3:13:24Speaker 00

  So I remember in the 2000s, like when the Iraq war started, you know, you would see a news story that would say, you know, weapons of mass destruction were like a existential threat to the United States. And they would walk through like all sorts of data about how awful Saddam Hussein was and how he gassed his own people. And like all the stores of weapons that he had and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like if this got into the hands of terrorists, that all these horrors, and like, it all seems very rational and reasonable. Until you realize that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, right? Like they never found anything. It was never there. It turns out that the intelligence that everything was based on was made up by a guy for political purposes. You wouldn't notice that if, like, if you just saw that news story in a vacuum,

• 3:14:08Speaker 00

  you would just assume like, oh yeah, this is a terrible thing, like we should probably go invade Iraq. But the framing of it led the viewer, the reader into a certain conclusion. You see this happen on both sides of the spectrum. You can see the exact same story. There's actually some really cool news services now these days that will actually go find the same news story on both the right and the left and present them side by side.

• 3:14:30Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 3:14:31Speaker 00

  So that you can actually evaluate the framing that they are doing, um, in real time and, and kind of make a judgment for yourself.

• 3:14:38Speaker 01

  Some of the stories you'll see too, and this, I'm making this up, but like, you know, say there were 500 people in a building and, you know, it got bombed or something like that. And like a hundred people died. One side might say, oh, you know, a hundred people killed from this. And then the other side might say 400 people saved from this, right? Factually true on both sides, right? But it just depends on who, who sent the bomb.

• 3:14:57Speaker 00

  Another thing that you see in news and politics all the time, and this kind of comes back to, to Bernays and, and kind of manufacturing consent, is a concept known as the exposure effect. So in psychology, what they find is that whether true or not, the more you're exposed to a piece of information, the more likely you are to believe it. And so if something is repeated over and over and over and over again, you unconsciously just start assuming that it's true. And you, you just kind of take it as a plain assumption. I think this is particularly problematic in the social media age because it is so easy to repeat very incorrect things over and over and over again. There, there's a lot of evidence that, you know, Russia and China have

• 3:15:37Speaker 00

  broadcasts a lot of kind of politically contentious ideas on US social networks, repeated them tens of thousands of times. Um, and I think it's, they're taking advantage of the exposure effect where it's like, even if you don't agree with something, if you hear it enough times, you just kind of start assuming that, okay, well, that's what everybody thinks. And it's almost like working the same way social proof works. But instead of seeing a crowd of people, you, it's almost like you're seeing the same message a crowd of times over a period of time, if that makes sense.

• 3:16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if, I mean, if you hear it so many times and you don't hear any counter argument to it, then of course it must be true. You see this in nutrition all the time too, right? Like, you know, butter's bad one week or it's not the next, you know, because it gets repeated for so long.

• 3:16:21Speaker 00

  It's interesting you bring up nutrition because it's nutrition is a classic example of, of just rife manipulation, public manipulation at the hands of, of different food companies, even various academics.

• 3:16:36Speaker 01

  Governments too.

• 3:16:37Speaker 00

  Governments, probably 10 or 20 years ago. So there was like a single researcher at the University of Minnesota who, um, he was kind of behind all the quote unquote research that fat was bad for you. It came out after he passed away and then it came out later that like he had taken all this funding from like, um, all the different cereal companies and grain companies and had, uh, like basically bullshitted a lot of his research and a lot of, a lot of the dietary guidelines that you and I grew up with and the schools that you and I went to when we were kids based their, their school meals on were based on this guy's bullshit research because, you know, company paid him a bunch of money. So, so there's another one here called projection, which is basically accusing somebody of doing the bad thing that you're doing, right?

• 3:17:22Speaker 00

  It's like, I'm not lying, you're lying. I'm not selfish, you're selfish, right? And it's, it's kind of this verbal maneuver to put the accuser on the defensive and make it seem like actually they're the problem. It's a form of gaslighting, right? It's like taking somebody who's like upset about something that maybe is legitimate and then trying to convince them that actually they're the problem in the first place. So if you can kind of like twist things around and make it seem like they're actually the problem and you're the one who's being victimized. This comes back to just, you know, Be wary of people who leverage victimization as a weapon because it can be used as a weapon and it can be used to justify a lot of terrible shit. Not to compare everything to Hitler, but Hitler, very famously, I mean, they called it, I think, I believe even internally, they called it the big lie, which is that basically all of the

• 3:18:07Speaker 00

  stuff that they were doing, they accused the Jews of doing, and they used it as a justification to do all the awful shit that they were doing to the Jews, right? So it's like, they weren't rounding up and putting Jews into pogroms. It's like, well, the Jews have been stealing our businesses and pushing us into, into poor neighborhoods for the last century. So we're just doing it back to them, right? And it's like, everything you want to do, you accuse your opponent of doing first because then that justifies and opens up the way for you to do it. A couple of other little things, there's a thing called the because effect. I love this example from Influence. One of the things that Chiel Deedee found was, that's really funny, is that if you ask somebody for something and you give them a reason, it doesn't even matter if the reason

• 3:18:51Speaker 00

  makes sense, they're more likely to give it to you. And so I remember in the experiment that he did, there was a photocopier line at the library with a bunch of people in it. And he, as an experiment, he had students walk up and ask if they could cut in line. And of course, majority of the time, people were like, no, go to the back. But if students walked up and asked to cut in line and gave a reason, no matter what the reason was, people were very likely to say yes. And in some cases, the students gave completely nonsensical reasons. Initially, they would walk up and say like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm really in a hurry. Can I get in front of you in line? And people would be like, yeah, sure, no problem. But then later, students would walk up and they'd be like, I've got to send this to my dad. Can I get in front of you in line? And people would be like, yeah, sure. Right?

• 3:19:34Speaker 00

  Like, it just makes no sense, but it just kind of short circuits our brain a little bit. Another thing that's really fun is that they found that if you ask somebody for something and then you say, but feel free not to do it, they're more likely to do it because you're like acknowledging their agency. And then a last thing I want to touch on, which is kind of a tactic that relates to consistency piece, is that if, if you want to get somebody to do something, if you label them as the type of person that does that, they're more likely to do it. Let's say, I want you to come over and, and make dinner for me. You know, I'll be like, you know, Drew, you're such a good cook and a really good friend. Like, why don't you come over and make dinner tonight? Like, you're way more likely to say yes, if I, if I kind of preempt it with something like that, or like, you know, you're always helping me out, man. Can I get a ride home?

• 3:20:18Speaker 00

  You're, you're kind of setting the expectation in the person's mind and creating that desire for consistency within them.

• 3:20:26Speaker 01

  I was getting some quotes for some work down at my house, had some people come, and they were using this tactic, big time. So, so it was going to be some exterior work I was going to have them do, I was just trying to get quotes for it. Of course, they come in, they got this long pitch, and they just start pointing out, oh, I love this about your house, the interior of your house, it's got to match the, the implication was, it's got to match the exterior too. Look, the interior is so great. And they were real specific with their compliments, too. I had two or three people, two or three different companies come in, and they all did this. Every single one of them did it.

• 3:20:54Speaker 00

  I've seen this with designers over the years, is like, yeah, they'll come in and they're like, every single one of them says the same thing. They're like, wow, I love your taste.

• 3:21:01Speaker 01

  Your taste, yeah.

• 3:21:02Speaker 00

  You have such good taste, right? Which was like, the implication is, if they can see that I have good taste, then they must have good taste too. And then, of course, they're, they're likable, it's reciprocity, it's all sorts of things. So it is really funny, you know, when I was younger, I thought, sales tactics were a little bit sleazy and scummy. Again, as I get older and I just kind of recognize that a lot of the world is transactional and that's just kind of unavoidable, I almost, I almost have this like, sick appreciation for like, a really good sales tactic. You know, like, sometimes if I walk into a store or something, or I talk to a contractor or something, and like, they're just a great salesperson, I actually really admire it. I'm like, it's like pleasant for me, you know, to be sold.

• 3:21:41Speaker 01

  A good sales letter, too. Oh, man.

• 3:21:43Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:21:43Speaker 01

  I know exactly what they're doing sometimes, I'm like, that's fantastic, and sign me up.

• 3:21:46Speaker 00

  Get me all hot and bothered.

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  For real.

• 3:21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. We could keep going and going and go, I mean, there's, there's still so many manipulation tactics and influence tactics. There's intermittent reinforcement, love bombing, trauma bonding, Darvo. There's so many levers that you can pull. If people want to get access to more of them, you can check out the guide, go to solve podcast.com slash manipulation. There's a lot more detail there, but for now, we're going to move on to chapter four, because at this point, now that we've established how manipulation happens, what are the kind of the psychological levers that we're pulling in each other to get what we want out of each other? The next question is logically, how do we defend ourselves? Can we defend ourselves, right?

• 3:22:31Speaker 00

  We just talked about how we both kind of admire a really good salesperson, even though we really know what they're doing, and we like completely understand how we're being manipulated. And it's interesting, because a lot of the research around this stuff, it shows that being aware of it doesn't really change the effect a whole lot. Like, you're still, you're still just as likely to do a lot of these things, even if you're aware that they're being wielded against you. So, in the next section, we're going to talk about how you can arm yourself, become more aware of the ways that you're being influenced and manipulated, how you can defend yourself when necessary, or at least be on an even playing field with your manipulators. So stick around, we'll be right back.

• 3:23:18Speaker 00

  I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you trust nobody, then you are the easiest person to manipulate in the room. After everything that we've described in this episode, you would think that it would be logical to distrust everything. Don't trust an authority, always pay attention to the motive behind everything people are saying to you, question everything you see, walk the opposite direction of every crowd. But it turns out, that doesn't really work. And in fact, it actually just makes the problem even worse. The simple reason for this is that if you don't trust anything, then you don't have anything to fall back on when somebody tries to take advantage of you. Like, if you believe every institution is lying, then you are just going to be more

• 3:23:58Speaker 00

  susceptible when a charming, engaging person comes along and says, oh, trust me, they're all lying to you, but I'm the one who's going to tell the truth. So instead of trusting no one, the challenge is to trust better, to have a higher threshold or a better filter for what you go along with and what you reject. It's a healthy sense of skepticism that keeps you connected to multiple people and multiple groups without ever allowing yourself to be completely isolated. So after three chapters of this, one response feels tempting, but it actually backfires, which is to trust nothing. The ads are engineered, the news is pre-selected, the science is bent, your own introspection

• 3:24:42Speaker 00

  is just other people's messaging, so why believe anybody? Why follow anything? Why, why trust in anyone? Not only does this make you more susceptible to manipulation, but it actually just makes you miserable, because trust is the bedrock of any relationship. To have any healthy intimacy or connection to anybody else or to any group, you have to trust and believe in that person or in that group. And so if you trust and believe in nobody, then you will feel profoundly alone. And when you're profoundly alone, you actually become more gullible and more susceptible to people trying to take advantage of you. On top of this, chronically distrusting everything and everyone is fucking exhausting. It's tiring.

• 3:25:27Speaker 00

  If you have to look into every claim, check every popular notion, look for the conspiracy theory behind every major political movement or every social cause, you're going to be spending all day for the rest of your life, looking into the nooks and crannies of the internet, assuming the worst about everyone. And so the first thing to understand is that while it is good to be skeptical, and it is good to understand that you are inevitably going to be manipulated and influenced by all sorts of different people and groups, it's okay. Like, this is just part of life. The key is not to get rid of all manipulation in your life, the key is to simply protect yourself from the most damaging manipulation in your life.

• 3:26:12Speaker 00

  What I'm saying is that if you try to get rid of all manipulation in your life, you are ironically making yourself more susceptible to the most damaging kind.

• 3:26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, it's not just about being smarter too, right? It's not about being skeptical, it's not about being even smarter. We already alluded to this once before, but smarter people are usually better at convincing themselves of their own bullshit, and therefore can be just as easily manipulated, if not more so.

• 3:26:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:26:37Speaker 01

  Right? Yes, educating yourself through stuff like this, sure, that helps to some degree, but it's not going to completely protect you, nor is it necessarily always going to be all that effective, right? Just one example I came across, this guy, Dan Kahane, he has this motivated numeracy experiments that he ran. Basically, people who are like, really good with math and numbers and running statistics and all of this, he would give them situations, first he would figure out their politics, basically, then give them situations like, okay, whatever they were about, some politically motivated campaign or whatever, give them the numbers around it. They were really bad if it was a, an argument that ran counter to their politics, but they were really good if it ran in line with their politics.

• 3:27:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:27:20Speaker 01

  So there's just some motivated reasoning going around there. Even with experts who are really good with numbers and everything like that, being smarter does not help you with this necessarily, right? Being smarter in a specific way that we'll talk about here in a second, does. So it's not about being purely skeptical.

• 3:27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:27:35Speaker 01

  Or purely smart and having just all the information and knowing all the facts about all of this, and being able to protect yourself against every single little manipulation that happens, like you're saying. That's not what it's about at all, right? Because in fact, the more skeptical and the smarter you are, sometimes the easier you are to con, actually. It's because you're more sure that no con is happening. You're like, no, I'm a very skeptical person, I'm a very smart person, this could never happen to me, right?

• 3:28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:28:00Speaker 01

  And then that's exactly when it can happen to you. And actually,

• 3:28:05Speaker 01

  You could just end up constructing better justifications for why this isn't a con, because obviously I would be able to see it if I couldn't.

• 3:28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting. There's, if you look at the, the, the literature on fraud, there are certain classes of fraud, particularly like investment fraud, that the victims skew much more educated. So basically, it's like the smarter and more educated the, the people are, the more likely they are to buy into certain schemes. And part of it is, I think, because if the scheme is complex, then the smart person feels like because they can understand the complexity, it must be true. Whereas like a dumb person might look at it and be like, well, that's really complicated. I'm not going to invest in that. Right. But I look at crypto, right? Like this is one thing, I sadly was involved with crypto for a number of years. And it was funny because this is one of the things that kind of sold me on it is everybody I ran into

• 3:28:55Speaker 00

  in the crypto world was so smart. Like they had such a strong understanding of technology, finance, markets, cryptography, lots of like very interesting perspectives on government and privacy and industry and how AI is going to evolve and all these things. Like some of the conversations I would have with crypto people were just so fucking intelligent. I mean, a very large percentage of that space is just gigantic pump and dump scheme. Yeah. It's like, it's, a lot of it has turned out to be either fraudulent or just kind of fancy form of gambling, or just a, you know, bunch of shit coins. There is a certain flavor of bullshit that involves a certain amount of

• 3:29:38Speaker 00

  technical complexity and instrumentation that I think especially appeals to smart people.

• 3:29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. The 2008 financial crisis was full of this. Bernie Madoff, his, the victims, those were very smart, educated, very rich people that he, that he ripped off.

• 3:29:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:29:54Speaker 00

  So the goal is don't necessarily become skeptical of everything. Don't try to be smarter or more informed about everything. Both of those things are kind of unrealistic proposals. So it raises the question, how do you inoculate yourself to the worst forms of manipulation? How do you make sure you're not being just completely bamboozled and then making terrible decisions or going along with horrible causes? So the answer actually comes from a really interesting place. So back in the 1950s, when the Korean War ended, a bunch of prisoners were exchanged and they came home. And so it was the first time ever that American soldiers had been captured and stayed within a communist country or a communist prison.

• 3:30:39Speaker 00

  And interestingly, a lot of the prisoners came back communist. They'd come back kind of suddenly believing all the political beliefs of China and North Korea. And at the time, this kind of freaked out. I mean, this was during the Red Scare. It freaked out Congress. It freaked out the whole public. And especially freaked out the CIA. This idea of brainwashing became very popular and prevalent for a period of time. And there are all sorts of controversial experiments that took place over this period that looked at how do you brainwash somebody and then also do, how do you inoculate people from being brainwashed? Now, during this line of research, there was a psychologist named William McGuire, who took a slightly different approach to the same question.

• 3:31:24Speaker 00

  While the CIA and most psychologists were asking, how is it that these soldiers were overwhelmed and overpowered and brainwashed with this ideology? McGuire looked at it and said, well, why were these soldiers kind of so susceptible in the first place? Like instead of looking at what, at what the North Korean army did or the Chinese army did, like, why don't we look at these soldiers' background? And what made, maybe, maybe there's a commonality that made them more susceptible to these beliefs than the, the many, many prisoners who came home not being brainwashed? And so he started looking into this. And his initial hypothesis was that it was medical, that there was some sort of like neurological trait or, you know, mental trait

• 3:32:07Speaker 00

  that these soldiers had in common. But it turned out it wasn't. It turned out that the commonality that he found was that all of the brainwashed soldiers were raised in what he called an aseptic ideological environment, which is basically like they were really coddled. They had never been exposed to anything ever before. They were very naive. They had never come into contact with opposing viewpoints, different ideologies. They didn't know anything about history or geopolitics or the world order or, or anything like that. They were just kind of these like naive 18-year-olds who had never done anything or never been anywhere. And this actually implies something really important, which is that you don't protect your beliefs by reinforcing your beliefs.

• 3:32:49Speaker 00

  You protect your beliefs by actively challenging them. Good beliefs are anti-fragile. They get stronger the more contact they have with reality. And they get stronger the more contact they have with disagreement or people who might challenge them. And so in a sense, McGuire found that you inoculate people to brainwashing the same way you inoculate them to a pathogen, right? You give them a very small dose of the thing that you're trying to protect them against. So before sending soldiers to war with a bunch of communists, you actually expose them to communism and let them think about it and show them the arguments for and against it and let them, you know, arrive at their conclusions about their ideological beliefs

• 3:33:32Speaker 00

  in a way that's healthy and normal. So that way, once they're, they're captured by the enemy, they're not just completely naive and susceptible to whatever the enemy like tortures into them. But McGuire went further because he wanted to show that this principle held just across the population in general. And so what he did is he went specifically looking for beliefs that nobody had ever thought to question before. That seems so obvious that nobody had ever asked themselves like, huh, actually never thought about that before. And the thing he settled on, the thing that he wanted to challenge that nobody had ever really challenged before, the thing that he wanted to see if he could convince people was not true, was that you should brush your teeth.

• 3:34:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:34:18Speaker 00

  Which were, you laugh because you would never even consider to challenge that.

• 3:34:23Speaker 01

  I've heard it. It's one of those things that has been repeated so many times that I've never questioned.

• 3:34:26Speaker 00

  Like, why would you ever, well, you've been told since you were three years old that you should brush your teeth every single day. You should brush your teeth after every meal. You've never even considered a counterargument. And so McGuire's thesis is that people would actually be more susceptible to change their mind about brushing their teeth than something else that they had been exposed to a lot of competing arguments before.

• 3:34:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:34:47Speaker 00

  So what he did is he wrote three essays. Each essay was a strong, apparently factual argument about why tooth brushing was bad and why people had been misled by the toothbrush industry and the brushing their teeth every day. And this was all a hoax and this was all bullshit. It was very well reasoned, well-written, very convincing. And he sat people down and exposed them to these essays, essentially tried to change their mind about tooth brushing. And sure enough, within a single session, within a single day, he was able to collapse people's confidence in the value of brushing their teeth by over 50%. Which is crazy.

• 3:35:29Speaker 00

  Like, when was the last time you ever changed your mind 50% on anything?

• 3:35:33Speaker 01

  Right. It's something as basic as tooth brushing too. Like, if I were to predict this, I'd be like, no, you couldn't change my mind on that.

• 3:35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:35:38Speaker 01

  And he did it in one session with these people. Yeah.

• 3:35:40Speaker 00

  And so the conclusion he came to is that beliefs that have never been attacked are not strong. They're actually incredibly fragile. And that's because they haven't been stress tested. People have not identified their weaknesses and reinforced those weaknesses or found explanations for those weaknesses. And so McGuire's recommendation was to pre-expose people, anybody that you would worry might be brainwashed or, you know, susceptible to terrible beliefs. You need to pre-expose them to weakened counterarguments with refutations so that they can be inoculated when they are presented with kind of the full-scale argument for the first time. And interestingly, when he did this in experiments, it turned out that

• 3:36:25Speaker 00

  this actually did improve people's abilities to hold their beliefs. Whereas just reinforcing people's initial beliefs barely did anything. Barely improved their ability to handle contradiction or counterargument. The way to protect yourself from being massively manipulated is to expose yourself to counterarguments, is to expose yourself to crazy ideas that maybe seem reasonable on the surface. But after you think about them for a while, you're like, wait, no, that's fucking crazy.

• 3:36:55Speaker 01

  I'm always reminded of this, you know, like somebody goes up maybe really religious, like in a small town or something, and they're sent off to university, you know, somewhere else. And all of a sudden, they've, they've never been challenged because of their belief system that they've held all their lives. And then they're sent off to somewhere where all these other counter beliefs are presented to them and they don't know what to do with that. It's always been a weird thing to me where people are like, if your whole worldview depends on you not encountering other ideas, that's a pretty flimsy worldview.

• 3:37:26Speaker 00

  Yes. But I think the problem is, is people who haven't encountered other worldviews don't realize that they haven't encountered other worldviews.

• 3:37:33Speaker 01

  Right, right. And then they, they, yeah. And then you see people getting sent off to these places. Oh, they're getting brainwashed. Well, not getting brainwashed. They've just never been challenged in any way, shape or form, just like this. Yeah.

• 3:37:41Speaker 00

  It raises a lot of questions and concerns. I mean, I know here in the US, there's, there's been a lot of controversies around like books being banned, certain points of view not being allowed on campus, teachers not being allowed to teach, you know, certain parts of history or certain perspectives on history. And I think just by and large, like that is self-defeating, right? Like it's the best way to preserve the most valuable points of view is to challenge those points of view. Show the counterargument, show the different perspectives, and then let the best idea win on its own merit.

• 3:38:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the reasons that this isn't a really widely known

• 3:38:22Speaker 01

  Tactic or method that people use. I mean, this was back in the sixties, I think, when Maguire was doing this, right?

• 3:38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:38:26Speaker 01

  Early sixties where he did a lot of this research. They kind of sat dormant for a very long time, actually.

• 3:38:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:38:31Speaker 01

  That research did for up until like the 2010s. And the argument kind of is, is that, you know, corporations, businesses,

• 3:38:40Speaker 01

  governments too, they didn't really have a need to play defense.

• 3:38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:38:44Speaker 01

  With a lot of things, they, you know, people were buying stuff. It was kind of like the second half of the 20th century was kind of a one big party, right?

• 3:38:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:38:51Speaker 01

  For a lot of Western civilization anyway. So we didn't really need a whole lot of inoculation going on. It was just, yeah, you could be persuaded to buy this product or even vote this way, you know, to some extent, and it was okay. Then the 2010s came though, and we saw.

• 3:39:07Speaker 00

  Everything went to shit.

• 3:39:08Speaker 01

  Everything went to shit. There was manipulation at scale with, you know, social media and information technology.

• 3:39:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:39:13Speaker 01

  Just like the likes of which the world had never seen before, right? And so there was a little bit of a revival of this. There was a couple of researchers in the 2010s at the University of Cambridge, who started looking a little bit more closely and getting very systematic about this again. Revived some of Maguire's research, but then started doing their own. The problem that they ran up against though, was that there was so much information now. So back in the sixties, yeah, there was, there was a lot of information being produced, sure. But nothing compared to like, we had seen with the explosion of the internet and information technology, right? So the problem was, is that you couldn't inoculate everybody against every little thing.

• 3:39:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:39:50Speaker 01

  Every little claim that was being made, right? That was a, that was its own problem again. And what we started this chapter with too, was you can't just be skeptical of everything anyway.

• 3:39:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:40:00Speaker 01

  And you can't just inoculate yourself against every little, single piece of information, misinformation that comes out anyway too, right?

• 3:40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:40:06Speaker 01

  So they had to go through several different experiments and iterations of this to figure out what you actually have to do is inoculate at the level of the, uh, the technique, the manipulative attack that's going on. The principles from Cialdini that we went over.

• 3:40:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:40:24Speaker 01

  Like, it's more like targeting those and showing people where those are happening.

• 3:40:28Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 3:40:29Speaker 01

  That's what you inoculate against, not necessarily just information itself, you know? We could still do big frameworks, you know, capitalism or communism or whatever you want to inoculate against. But they're saying, no, no, no, what you, what we really need to do is inoculate people against the specific manipulative techniques, where they're being manipulated when they don't know it.

• 3:40:46Speaker 00

  That makes a lot of sense to me, as you know, I, I've been writing about since the early 2010s, right? And I remember I did a piece in, I think, 2013, and it was called, "In the Future, Your Attention Will Be Sold." It's funny because looking back now, it just seems so quaint and, you know, like, like, aww.

• 3:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41:02Speaker 00

  If only you knew.

• 3:41:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:41:04Speaker 00

  It's been interesting because I remember a lot of newsletters and articles that I wrote in the 2010s. I, I talked about this. I was like, I don't think, uh, I know we just talked about toothpaste, but like, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Like, the technology's out there. The, the content machines are running, the propaganda machines are running. We're not going to turn them off magically. So the only thing to do is to educate the population on like, how the game is being played, so that they can at least be aware of the buttons that are being pressed and like, how they're being nudged into, into different views and, and others. And, and I do think by and large, the population is becoming more sophisticated at understanding this sort of stuff.

• 3:41:50Speaker 00

  As time goes on, like, I, I think there, there are things that are just obvious to us today. Like, we talked earlier about bot accounts or fake follower accounts, or fake authority credential, you know, uh, phishing emails from somebody pretending to be at the IRS. Like, that's the sort of stuff that you, you know, 15 years ago, you actually had to sit down and explain to people what was going on. Whereas I think now everybody's just like, oh yeah, that shit happens all the time. Like, I've seen it, it's happened to everybody so many times. So in, in a way, it's almost like, um, it's like an arms race. Like, I, I think it's, as we innovate new technological ways to influence people,

• 3:42:31Speaker 00

  kind of the population's knowledge and understanding of how they're being influenced has to catch up. And I think largely we catch up by being influenced in terrible ways.

• 3:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:42:40Speaker 00

  Like, buying into really stupid fucking beliefs and assumptions that, you know, five, 10 years later, we look back and we're like, oh my God, I can't believe everybody thought that, right? It's very weird. And I think that, I think the, the lived experience of that is that we all just kind of perpetually live in this state of uncertainty and, you know, feeling a little bit untethered to everything.

• 3:43:04Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I don't know about you, but I remember, I, I think we have caught up quite a bit. I remember when like fake things really started showing up on social media back in like late 2000s, early 2010s.

• 3:43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:43:15Speaker 01

  I remember specifically this one incident where it was obviously a video that had been edited. It was like a newscast thing, and it wasn't really consequential, it wasn't political even too, it was just kind of dumb. But somebody had posted it as, and obviously they thought it was real. And I like replied, I'm like, you know, this is fake, right?

• 3:43:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:43:31Speaker 01

  Like, it's like, this is probably 2010 somewhere in there. And it was somebody my age too. So I was very surprised by this. I was like, oh wow, that's wild. Little did I know what was gonna come after that. Oh my God.

• 3:43:41Speaker 00

  All the time, yeah.

• 3:43:42Speaker 01

  All the time for years and years. But I think you're right. I think now we're catching up to that. I think that same person would not fall for something like that anymore.

• 3:43:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 3:43:49Speaker 01

  Obviously. And now we're kind of, especially with AI, everybody's like, well, is this real or not? I don't know.

• 3:43:53Speaker 00

  I mean, I've noticed this with myself, like, my threshold to start believing something is, has gotten quite a bit higher. E- even things that like, I'm kind of predisposed to believe in, you know, if I see it pop up on my feed, I'm like, okay, well, let's give it a week or two.

• 3:44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is that dog really riding a bicycle? Really?

• 3:44:11Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 3:44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:44:13Speaker 00

  Which I guess this kind of gets into, you know, I, I want to talk about like, some of the actual techniques and tools people can implement into their own lives to, to help inoculate themselves. So like, we've kind of given everybody the principle now, right? Which is that you do need to, uh, challenge your own beliefs and viewpoints in small doses. But it's, it's like, okay, well, how do you actually do that? Like, how do you manage to do that without getting swept away, without falling victim to a lot of these, a lot of these persuasion principles or like psychological tactics that we talked about in the last chapter? Like, what is, what is a practical thing that you can do today

• 3:44:52Speaker 00

  to safeguard yourself from just being, you know, whiplashed into, into some, some crazy group think, uh, that's, that you're, that's going to embarrass you a few years from now. So the first one is, I already mentioned it briefly, but is slow down. And this is something that you'll notice, especially in, in like news and politics these days. Everything is framed as an immediate crisis, like something that has to be acted on today, that if you don't do something today or this week, all hell's gonna break loose, the world's gonna end, like, everything's gonna be absolutely terrible. And the truth is, is that that is almost never the case.

• 3:45:35Speaker 00

  But things are framed in that way because when things feel urgent, they leverage that artificial scarcity, right? It's like, oh my God, if we don't do this, uh, by tomorrow, like, Trump's gonna like, do this thing and that thing, and it's gonna be horrible. And like, all these people are gonna suffer. You know, it short-circuits your, your ability to reason because of that sense of urgency. It's the same reason why a countdown timer on a sales page makes you buy things quicker. It, it, it makes you just buy into that narrative with, like, with thinking less. So the first thing is, is just slow the fuck down, back up the truck. Ask yourself, you're like, okay, if I wait a week, is it gonna, is it gonna matter? 99 times out of 100, it's not, right? Is there anything I can do about this?

• 3:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I was saying, it's, it's so easy to create that sense of urgency or scarcity.

• 3:46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:46:24Speaker 01

  Like, if you slow down, you'll recognize that, like, very easily manufactured, and I very easily fell for it.

• 3:46:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:46:29Speaker 01

  I do this all the time. I say, I say this all the time too.

• 3:46:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, it's like, I, I kind of started to mention it earlier, but like, one of my rules for myself is that, like, if I see something that is upsetting or really interesting to me, but it seems like it could potentially be bullshit, I always wait, make myself wait a week, right? Like, it's like, okay, I saw it once. Might be true. Let's see, let's see, let's wait three, four days, see if I, see if stories keep coming up about it. Let's see if there's like, other sources start talking about the same thing. And then I just give it time. I like, I basically don't really believe something until I've seen like, at least three or four people that I. Relatively trust, talk about it. And then I'm like, okay, this must be a thing.

• 3:47:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:47:14Speaker 00

  This must be a thing. Now, let me think. And by slowing down and giving yourself that time, you like, you give yourself time to think about it, too. Right? Like, to actually get a sense of, does this matter? Does this have any effect on my life? Is this actually likely significant in the world? Or is this just a bunch of people freaking out and panicking over something, like catastrophizing something? Because there is a lot of catastrophizing that is going on. The other thing that is good about slowing down is if you look at like aggressive sales tactics, different kind of fraud tactics, scams, almost all of them rely on speed and urgency. Right? Like, if somebody is trying to cheat you out of a bunch of money, they likely aren't telling you,

• 3:48:00Speaker 00

  go home and think about it for a week and get back to me. Right? No, they're like, no, you have to do this today. You have to do this now. You can't hang up the phone until you do this.

• 3:48:08Speaker 01

  For as good for the next 10 minutes.

• 3:48:09Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like, they are trying to put as much time pressure on you as possible. Because if you do sit and think about it, you're probably gonna, you're gonna realize that like, wait, this doesn't, this doesn't actually make sense. Like, once the emotions go away, the clarity, you'll be able to see it more clearly. I think this is actually really important, too, in relationships. Like, if you're having a fight with your partner, simply letting a certain amount of time pass. I, sometimes, I don't see it that often, but sometimes I see relationship advice, which is like, you know, never go to bed angry, or like, always resolve. It's like, no, you actually can't resolve every fight every time it happens. Some fights, some fights drag out for years. You will reach a point with your partner where it's like, okay, you know what?

• 3:48:53Speaker 00

  The best thing we can do is probably just go sit on this for a couple of days, and then come back and talk about it again, because we're both emotional. Like, we haven't had time to sit with it. We haven't had time to think through it. So like, let's, let's take a pause, take a time out, and we'll come back to this in a day or two. So another tactic that's very similar to the slowing down, and something that can help you slow down, is by writing things out. This is another benefit of journaling, is that it actually takes a long time to kind of write your thoughts out. Into the practice of writing your thoughts out actually forces you to formulate a lot of what you're feeling into a rational thought. So yeah, if you're really worked up about something, sit down, journal it out.

• 3:49:38Speaker 00

  Not only is it therapeutic to kind of work through the emotions, but the process of writing something out, it will force you to think really hard about the beliefs that you're developing around it, and will probably expose some flaws in your thinking, if it's not completely based on rationality.

• 3:49:54Speaker 01

  I think a next level skill these days is slowing down.

• 3:49:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:49:58Speaker 01

  And writing, like we've already said, slow down, but also writing things down that forces you to slow down a little bit. That's a next level skill these days, I think. There's so much pressure to hurry up.

• 3:50:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:50:06Speaker 01

  And that, I think, go the opposite way with that one.

• 3:50:08Speaker 00

  And I think we're all kind of losing that muscle to like, stop, take a beat, think about things like, huh, what if I'm wrong? You know, it's just, it's getting harder and harder.

• 3:50:19Speaker 01

  No, for sure. Another one, too, though, diversifying your relationships. Okay? This is, so there's this really cool study, this classic study, back in the 50s. They were doing all this obedience study, studies and manipulation studies after World War II, right? And there's this classic study where some people go into a room, you sit down in a chair. There's two lines on a board in front of you. One is longer than the other one. And you just have to say which one's longer than the other one. Little do you know that there's a whole bunch of, all the other people in there are in on the experiment. They pick the shorter line as the longer one. And most of the time, most people will go ahead and agree and say, okay, yeah, I guess that's the longer one.

• 3:50:58Speaker 00

  The Ash Conformity.

• 3:51:00Speaker 01

  The Ash Conformity Experiment, right?

• 3:51:01Speaker 00

  Very famous.

• 3:51:01Speaker 01

  Right, very famous study. What they found, though, is that, so say there's five people in there, you're one of five people. All the other four are, they pick the shorter line, saying it's the longer one. A lot of times, you're gonna go with them, like 80% of the time or something like that, you end up going with them. If there's only one other person in that lineup with you, so there's two of the five people who aren't in on it, and they pick the other one, even if everybody else has picked the short line, saying it's the long one, but no, no, they're like, no, I'm gonna pick the long one. You're way more likely to pick that other one, too, to pick the longer line, the actual longer line. So it's almost like an inoculation with your, your group. It's just having a diversity of relationships of people who think a little bit differently.

• 3:51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:51:40Speaker 01

  And might call you out on a few things or question a few things. Yeah, can like lead into conspiracy theorist friends or something like that, too.

• 3:51:46Speaker 00

  I hate that this is kind of controversial these days.

• 3:51:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:51:50Speaker 00

  Right? Like, it's

• 3:51:50Speaker 01

  Oh, to have a diverse set of friends and opinions in your social group.

• 3:51:54Speaker 00

  People are ending friendships and cutting off family members because of their, some of their beliefs. And it's, I think that is the single most unhealthy thing you can do.

• 3:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:52:05Speaker 00

  One of the things I worry about a lot, and one of my big criticisms of California in particular, not to get on my California soapbox, but like, there's so much emphasis put on racial, ethnic and gender diversity, and there's no emphasis put on diversity of thought and opinion.

• 3:52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:52:23Speaker 00

  And so it's funny, like, living in LA, it is a very diverse place. There's people, all sorts of walks of life, different ethnicities, backgrounds, races. They all think the same fucking thing. They all have the same opinions. They all do this, like, they have the same political beliefs. It drives me crazy. I'm like, this is not diversity. I mean, I grew up in a very, I grew up in fucking white-on-white Texas.

• 3:52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:52:46Speaker 00

  And, I don't know, there's more political diversity where I grew up than, than I think there is where I live in LA.

• 3:52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:52:53Speaker 00

  Which is kind of fucked up.

• 3:52:55Speaker 01

  I think it does, though, if you, if you do have people you care about in your life and they have different, like, you're much more charitable and you can try to see the humanity in their way of thinking, even if you completely disagree with them. I can see how you came to that conclusion, at least. I vehemently disagree with you.

• 3:53:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:53:11Speaker 01

  But I respect your opinion.

• 3:53:13Speaker 00

  And I see that you're not a bad person.

• 3:53:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:53:16Speaker 00

  And you're not evil, and you're not trying to like, destroy

• 3:53:18Speaker 01

  No matter what the narrative is, saying you are evil and you are being manipulated or whatever.

• 3:53:23Speaker 00

  This is how our minds get changed, is when somebody we respect and cares about, care about, has a different opinion than us, and we actually sit there and listen to it with good faith, with some compassion, and actually consider like, oh, maybe they realize something I don't. When you're just surrounded by everybody who agrees with you, again, back to McGuire, your ideas never challenge, which makes you much more fragile and susceptible to being manipulated and brainwashed. Okay, I've got another one here that I wrote down as use base rates, not vibes. Which I actually really like this one. I use this a lot in my, my daily life. So what most people do, you know, if they meet somebody who is pissing them off, or, you know, is maybe a little bit shady or whatever,

• 3:54:07Speaker 00

  they try to guess, you know, how trustworthy is this person? And like, you talked about earlier, how they start zeroing in on body language, like, how's their eye contact? Like, are they shifting on their feet? Are they covering their mouth? You know, what's the, what's the feeling I'm getting from them? And it turns out, as we've established, our feelings, our vibe check on like, how trustworthy a person is, is completely inaccurate. We're, we're really bad at it. I think what's more useful to do in situations is to remove yourself from the situation and just ask yourself, what is the base rate of this being bullshit? You know, if I was to meet 100 people like this, how many of them would be honest and how many of them would be liars?

• 3:54:53Speaker 00

  Right? So it's like a sales guy comes to my door and he's being a little shifty or whatever. But he like, works for a really large company and he's like, he's like, seems to have all the credentials and he seems really, you know, like he's got the fucking logo on his truck, you know? He might be shifty, but if I ask myself, okay, out of 100 people who come to my door like this, how many of them are gonna be scam artists? You know, probably one out of 100. Even though this guy's a little bit weird, like, is he the one out of 100? Probably not. I probably don't know. So whatever, you know, I can hire him to like, fucking fix my, my faucet or whatever. So you can do this with suspicious emails, right?

• 3:55:33Speaker 00

  So, you know, one thing that happens periodically is I get somebody emailing me or messaging me extremely angry because they thought that I emailed them with some incredible offer, or that I wanted to set up a call with them, or I wanted to hang out with them. Obviously, it was a scam.

• 3:55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:55:52Speaker 00

  And they were just using my name and, you know, a fake email address and everything. But then they email me mad that I, they feel cheated or, you know, whatever. And I just kind of look at it, I'm like, look, I don't, I don't want to like, big shot people here, but I'm like, what's the chance that I randomly picked, you know, Jane Smith from Missouri, you know, retired schoolteacher to hop on a Zoom call and talk about her, her finances? Like, what are the fucking chances that that would happen? It blows my mind that people, people are like susceptible to this, but, you know. It's a special world, with special people.

• 3:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:56:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. This also ties into kind of that, that old maxim that if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is, right? And it's like, really what that's saying is that, what are the chances that this thing is true? Like, if you removed yourself from the situation and you were just looking at a spreadsheet, like, in what percentage of the situations would this actually be a real opportunity? If the answer is like, less than 1%? Then you're probably being cheated. This is similar to the asymmetric gut policy and what we're calling that is so if something feels off, that's probably worth investigating. That's probably worth taking a pause and actually digging into. That's usually a pretty good signal that something actually is off, or it's at least worth digging into, right? Yeah.

• 3:57:17Speaker 00

  Whereas if you're like really excited and something is just so amazing, that's probably, you're probably getting conned in some way, right? Like if it feels too good to be true, like what you said. Hmm. So there's like this asymmetry that you need to be aware of. And it's, I mean, it is kind of a negativity bias, right? Yes. Be biased against the downside more than the upside, right? And it's contrary to our kind of our default instincts, right? Cause it's like generally when we feel uneasy about something, we try to suppress that and ignore it. We're like, you know, just go along with it. Don't, don't cause any problems. Whereas when we're really enthusiastic and super excited about something, that is when we're defenseless. And it's funny, I think it is a good habit to question things that you are, it doesn't mean you can't be excited about it. It just means take a moment and

• 3:58:01Speaker 00

  question it. Kind of the last one that I'll say is, is that I think usually when we are reading people, I think most of the time when we, when we are watching somebody and kind of making judgments about their intentions, I think in a lot of cases, we're really just projecting our own emotional state onto them. So if we feel uneasy about a situation, we will convince ourselves that the person in front of us is untrustworthy. If we're really, really enthusiastic about a situation, we will convince ourselves that the person is amazing and perfect and like gonna change our lives. So I think kind of the underlying principle here is just be wary of your own emotions. Like don't buy into them wholeheartedly. This is, I think, a practice that just applies to so many other things that we talk about

• 3:58:46Speaker 00

  on this podcast of developing a kind of a metacognition around your feelings and like understanding, okay, I'm really excited right now. Am I excited for a good reason? Okay, cool. Just checking, right? Or yeah, I'm feeling really guilty, or I'm feeling really sad, or I'm feeling really distrustful or angry. Is that just my insecurity? Or is there actually something weird in my environment here? And I think having those conversations with yourself, it's just very fundamental to like navigating the world at this point. Final thing I'll say too, is holding your opinions lightly. I, I think that is probably

• 3:59:28Speaker 00

  more important than ever today. It's fine to be opinionated. It's fine to be passionate about something, but the world is changing so quickly. Information is disseminated so widely and so quickly. Like it just, the, the facts and knowledge that we have is changing so fast from year to year, that I think it is incumbent on everybody, develop a certain amount of flexibility around their own beliefs and their own convictions. Not only is it easier to be manipulated than ever before, but I also think the downside of being manipulated or buying into bad beliefs wholeheartedly these days is the cost is higher than ever before.

• 4:00:13Speaker 00

  And we could do a whole episode on that and maybe we will. Maybe we will. Maybe we'll come back for beliefs solved. So to wrap things up, you know, in chapter one, we talked about how manipulation is just the water we all swim in. It is a fundamental part of human interaction and there's kind of no escaping it. That doesn't mean we're all bad people and it doesn't mean that all manipulation is even bad. It just means that it is always going on. And this idea that there are certain evil people out there who are manipulating and using us and the rest of us are good and innocent and well intentioned, that's kind of bullshit. There's just a spectrum of manipulation that we all participate on and we all move up and down that spectrum

• 4:00:58Speaker 00

  based on the context, where we are in our lives, our personalities, our, our value system and how we're feeling that day. In chapter two, we talked about the ethics of manipulation. On the one end, we have kind of Kantian idealism and how we should treat everybody as a, as an ends and not a means, and how we should always be upfront and transparent and virtuous in every, in every action, respecting our own agency and the agency of others. And while that's beautiful and there's fluffy clouds and rainbows and unicorns, the reality is, is that life is largely a power struggle. And as Machiavelli pointed out, whether you want to or not, you have to play that power struggle to a certain extent. And, and what

• 4:01:43Speaker 00

  we discovered is that depending on where you are in the power hierarchy, often determines how justified you feel manipulating others and also how ethical it can feel to manipulate others. There are two key principles from that chapter. One was the publicity test, which is that if you manipulate somebody and they become aware of it, they would approve of it, then that would be an ethical manipulation. And then the other principle from that chapter was power dependency, which is that every relationship has certain power imbalances and those power imbalances are going to affect basically the person who feels more disempowered is generally going to be more manipulative. They're gonna have more incentive to be manipulative. And also I would argue that the person with more power in any dynamic has more moral

• 4:02:28Speaker 00

  responsibility to not be manipulative when at all possible. In chapter three, we talked about how we manipulate each other, all the marketing and sales tactics and, and persuasion tactics. There are so many of them that we actually didn't even get through all of them. So obviously you can go check out the guide if you wanna, if you wanna learn more, but Is the water we swim in, it is all around us all the time. It's just the ads in this podcast is the intro of this podcast. It is absolutely everything. It is everywhere all the time. The more aware you are of it, the more you could navigate the world, maintain your sanity without be straw armed into buying a set of encyclopedias that you never asked

• 4:03:11Speaker 00

  for. And then finally, in the last chapter, we thought about how to inoculate ourselves from egregious manipulation. It's impossible to defend ourselves from all manipulation. We're all very influenceable and we all benefit from being influenced. The mini seraphs, dances and the geese. But the question is, how do we protect ourselves from just getting brainwashed into the fucking nuptal dragon idiot, you know, one of those trolls online that is just spouting stupid shit. And the truth is, is that the way you protect yourself is by challenging your own beliefs, second guessing your immediate assumptions, not buy into your immediate emotional reactions, slowing down, riding it out, diversifying your relationships,

• 4:03:53Speaker 00

  surrounding yourself by wider variety of perspectives and views. And then of course, zooming now, asking yourself on the grand scale of things, how likely is this to be true? How likely is this to matter? How much does this happen before? Am I really that special? Is the world really ending? Because chances are, it's probably not. You're just being a self indulgent asshole, like we all are from time to time. As always, thank you guys for tuning in. The solved guide is available at solve podcast.com slash manipulation and has all of our citations, references, research, and a more thorough guide for everything that we've talked about in this episode. So please go check it out. It is completely

• 4:04:34Speaker 00

  free. And as always, if you love this show, please, the best thing you could do for us is to leave a review. And a five star rating. See, it helps the platforms get the show out to more people. I mean, think about all the things Drew and I have done for you, all the help we've given you over the years. Leaving a review, like how hard is that? Like that doesn't take very long. It's just eat quick on the five star thing. Like it's quite easy. I'm not manipulating you. I'm just completely being honest and upfront that this is something that Drew and I worked very hard on. I know we care deeply about. And there's a whole team of people here with their livelihood depends on you leaving a five star rating and leaving a positive review

• 4:05:14Speaker 00

  for this show. All right. We will be back next month. Thank you all again. Appreciate you. Say goodbye Drew. Goodbye.